★ For the adult player who's been stuck for years:
My cohort got here in 90 days — and you can hear it in their playing. That's exactly how long you've got until the holidays. Same path, self-paced: the right thing to practice, in the right order, starting tonight.
You've been playing on and off for years. You know some chords, maybe a scale or two. And you've quietly accepted that this is just where you are — circling the same plateau, never quite getting to the playing you hear in your head.
It was never about talent or time. It was about the order. Hand a player the right thing to practice, in the right sequence, and 90 days is enough to change everything. That's not a promise — it's what my cohort is proving right now.
Rotem is an internationally-touring jazz guitarist based in New York City. After 20 years on stages from Blue Note to North Sea, and five albums praised by The New York Times and DownBeat, he's spent the last few years building one thing: a 26-week curriculum for the adult guitarist who has been playing on and off for years and is finally ready to do it the right way. Half of his last cohort were doctors. The other half were career professionals giving themselves permission to take this seriously.
Dear plateau-stuck player,
I'm about to tell you something that might surprise you, coming from someone who has sold out venues across three continents and released five albums praised by The New York Times and DownBeat.
I still remember spending hours in the practice room, frustrated, drilling scales and patterns, thinking “if I just learn more licks, it'll click.”
It didn't.
I remember the embarrassment of sitting in with more experienced players and realizing my solos sounded… generic. Lifeless. Like I was playing at the music instead of playing withit. I remember not understanding why some lines worked and others didn't, why my timing felt off, why I'd get lost in the form.
What I eventually figured out — and what took me years longer than it should have — was that the problem wasn't that I needed to practice more. It was that I was practicing the wrong things, in the wrong way, without understanding the actual systems that connect what you hear to what your hands do.
After 20 years teaching adult guitarists — from weekend hobbyists, to working session players, to retired neurosurgeons picking the guitar back up — I've noticed three patterns that explain why most of you are still stuck.
Chances are at least one of these will hit close to home.
You hear the line in your head. You know what scale to play. You can name the chord. But when it's time to actually put it on the guitar — your fingers don't follow. The translation never happens. You're not slow. You're not untalented. You've never built the bridge between hearing and saying.
You learn theory from one course. Technique from a different YouTuber. Ear training from an app. Your scale book lives in one room of your brain and your chord book lives in another. You know every piece. You can't put them together. So in the moment of playing, every part of your musicianship pulls in a different direction.
You make progress for 6 weeks. Life gets busy. You drop off. You come back three months later and you've forgotten half of it — so you go back to the basics. Then life gets busy again. After five or ten years of this, you're still somewhere around "I know some chords and a scale or two." It's not that you can't learn. It's that you've never had a six-month container where finishing is the default.
If any of those just hit — you're not broken. You're practicing in pieces.
The 90-Day Transformation is built to fix exactly that. Not by adding more theory. Not by piling on more YouTube tutorials. By connecting what you already know to what you can actually play — and giving you 90 days of structure where finishing is the default, not the exception.
You bring the 20 minutes a day. I'll bring the path — the exact 90 days, in the exact order — so finishing is the default, not the exception. It's the same sequence my cohort is walking right now, and you walk it at your own pace. If you ever want my eyes on your playing, the cohort's there when you're ready.
Hope to see you inside.
— Rotem
Rotem Sivan · NYC · 2026
Find yourself on the left. The same 90-day path takes you to the right — the difference is only where you begin.
You can strum through a few songs and you know some chord shapes — but the fretboard isn't yours, and scales are just shapes you memorized.
The major scale and pentatonic are yours in all five positions, you're taking your first real solos over backing tracks, and you can comp and solo over a 12-bar blues.
You've got the positions and enough theory to be frustrated by it. Your solos come out technically correct and emotionally flat.
Your lines have color and intention — 6ths, the 6/9, double stops, blues phrasing — and you're acknowledging the chord changes instead of praying through them.
The technique is there and the theory is there — but there's a wall between the music in your head and what your hands actually do.
You're singing a line and playing it back, shaping short lines you can repeat and build on instead of noodling, and turning a song from your own world into your own arrangement.
Right now, a room of adults — a PhD student, a returning player after years away, career professionals — is exactly 90 days into this same path. Not six months. Not a year. Ninety days. Here's where their heads are at.
“At first I bristled at such simple assignments for week 1. But he knows what he's doing — timing, touch, precision. And they weren't as simple as they seemed.”
“Rereading my diagnostic: “many players feel a little worse in the first three or four weeks, because they're starting to hear things they weren't hearing before.” Sooo true.”
“Practicing the open triads let me fall in love with guitar again with every change. It makes me feel like I didn't waste all those years.”
“I came in wanting to finally express myself through improvisation. Now I'm writing my own lines — hearing them first, then playing them back.”
You've probably watched my videos for a while now. Maybe years. You've picked up bits — a voicing here, a phrasing idea there. A few even clicked. Good. That's what they're for.
But here's the thing about free videos, mine included: they're pieces. A scale in one, a lick in another, a theory idea in a third — filmed two years apart, in no order, for no particular player. You've got a thousand of them saved. What you've never had is the order to watch them in.
That's the whole reason you're circling the same plateau even though you know more than you ever have. It was never an information problem — you're drowning in information. It's an order problem.
The path is the product. Ninety days, twelve weeks, each one built on the last — the exact sequence I'd put you on if you walked into my studio. That's the thing the free videos can't give you. And it's the thing that actually moves you.
Build the physical control that lets you play exactly what you hear — picking, fretting, dynamics, tone. The foundation everything else sits on.
Stop memorizing shapes. Understand why music works so you can play any song in any key, write your own, and improvise with intention.
Know every note, every chord, every scale, anywhere on the neck. The fretboard becomes a map you can navigate without thinking.
Learn to play with feel, groove, and presence — the difference between a guitarist who's correct and one who moves a room.
Not a vault of videos for you to sort through on your own — you've tried that, it's how you got here.
The moment you join, all 12 weeks unlock and your first week's plan is waiting — starting with the mindset module. No start date, no cohort to wait for. You begin tonight.
Each week is one focused theme — a short video, a practice routine, and the next step already chosen for you. Twenty to sixty minutes a day, at whatever pace fits your life.
The path is sequenced so the breakthroughs land in order — the same order the cohort is living right now. Put in the 90 days that stand between today and the holidays, and hear the difference for yourself.
Eight students. Different ages, different goals, different starting points. One thing in common.
“Now I'm no longer stuck in the pentatonic box — I can play around the fretboard. I tried YouTube, books, other courses. This one was more extensive. He's a world-class player, a very good teacher, and very patient. Definitely worth the money.”
“I started as a guitarist who could play but lacked some of the basics. Within three months I got really deep into improvisation and jazz. I never thought I'd love improvisation so much, but I fell in love with it. Later I went to study at music school for jazz. Studying with Rotem changed my life.”
“I've been playing guitar for some decades but my ability to improvise wasn't really good. Now I've got a much better understanding of the harmonic structure — and the importance of listening has become clear to me again.”
“Every time we met, he had thought about how to help me become a better player. He was really invested in my growth and creativity. He helped with timing, harmony, understanding the fretboard, and how to think creatively within changes. He enhanced my musicianship quite a bit.”
This is the exact sequence my cohort is walking right now. The only difference here is you set the pace.
Starts with the mindset module that keeps you from quitting — then the picking hand, one-string drills, and subdivisions. By Friday you can play 8th notes, triplets, and 16ths without losing the click.
The finger gym and the legato framework — finger independence, control, and both hands locked in time. Your weak ring and pinky stop being weak.
The theory you actually need — the major scale, triads, 7th chords, basic rhythm, reading a little tab — and the sound exercise where you sing the scale instead of just fingering it.
All five pentatonic positions, then the connective work that gets you out of the box — 8th notes, your first five lines, and a jam solo that's actually in time.
“The Painful Line” and the pentatonic line — broken down, related to the key, sung, then played in time. You learn the hot notes and the double-stop framework that make a line sing.
The blue-note line, and the one secret soloing tool most players wish they'd learned years earlier. Short, repeatable lines you can actually keep.
The 12-bar blues from the ground up — 7th chords, color chords, moving between shapes, transposing to any key — plus the blues solo framework and your first real solo lines.
Lead guitar with more color — the major 6th sound, the 6/9, double stops, and playing the inside of the line so every chord change is acknowledged. This is where it starts sounding like music.
Double stops and intervals — 3rds, 4ths, 5ths across the neck, with jam solos to put them straight to work.
Interval permutations — 6ths, 7ths, octaves, 10ths — plus the practice tips that make them stick, and a jam solo to try them live.
Inversions and closed-position triads — why they matter, how to find the right one, and how to play them all over the neck. Hybrid picking makes them ring.
C major open-chord ideas and voice leading, then your project: pick a song you love, work out the chords and a line, and play the whole thing. Your first real artifact as the new player.
12 weeks · 90 days · every lesson in sequence, so you never sit down wondering what to practice.
I know what you're thinking, because half my emails say it: “I've bought courses before. They're sitting in an account somewhere, three lessons deep, never touched again.” So let me say the true thing about that.
The reason the last one is unfinished isn't that you lack discipline. It's that it handed you a heap of videos and left you to build the staircase yourself. Nobody finishes a heap. You stall on “what now?”, and “what now?” becomes “not tonight,” and “not tonight” becomes the bottom of your downloads folder.
This is 90 days, not 26 weeks — a finish line close enough to see. It asks one thing of you at a time. Twenty minutes. One step. The next step is always chosen for you, so there's never a night you sit down and don't know where to start. That's the difference between a pile you abandon and a path you walk to the end.
Saying this out loud so neither of us wastes the other's time.
This isn't a beginner-from-zero program. Start with Justin Guitar's free beginner course first — you'll get far more out of this once you can play a song.
This is real, structured work — 20 to 30 minutes a day, at your own pace, for 90 days. The shortcut is the order, not the practice.
If you need eyes on your playing and a coach pushing you, that's the cohort — and it's worth it. The 90-Day assumes you'll drive. That's the whole point of it.
In 90 days you'll be a genuinely different player. Not the finished player. Anyone who promises that on any timeline is selling you something.
That's it. You're more than ready to start.
The plateau you've been stuck on isn't because you're not “good enough.” It's because no one has handed you the order. That's what the 90 days is for.
That's your window — and 90 days like these is all it took the cohort. Start tonight and you'll be a different player by the time it hits zero.
The full 90-day path, lifetime access, at your own pace. A single private lesson with me runs $250/hr — your entire first month here is $77, less than a third of that.
Then 2 payments of $160, billed 30 days apart ($397 total). Cancel before your next payment and the $77 is all you pay. The $77 to start is non-refundable.
Want to keep going after 90 days? The full The 26-Week Path picks up exactly where this leaves off, and the cohort is there whenever you want my eyes on your playing.
Start for $77, walk the first two weeks, and if you don't see real progress in your playing, email me at [email protected] before your next payment and I'll cancel the rest, no forms, no hoops. The $77 to start is non-refundable, but it's the only thing you'll have paid.
You already know how to put in the work. You've just never had the path to put it into. Here it is — in order, at your pace, starting tonight. The 90 days are going to pass either way. So will the holidays.
If you can hear it, you can play it. You don't need me standing over your shoulder to get there — you just need the order. And 90 days. Now you've got both.
— Rotem Sivan
NYC · 2026
P.S. Count it out. Start tonight and your 90 days land right as everyone comes home for the holidays. Wait until January and you're having this exact same thought next August. The guitar in the corner has been waiting a while — the only thing that changes it is starting.
P.P.S. Not sure if the 90-Day, the full 26 weeks, or the cohort is your fit? Email me at [email protected]. I'll tell you straight which one you actually need.