FOUNDER • GUITARIST • EDUCATOR

About Rob Lobasso

Helping guitarists move from learning the instrument to expressing themselves through it

I'm Rob Lobasso, guitarist, educator and founder of Alien Guitar Secrets.

Like many guitarists, I spent years learning shapes, patterns, techniques and other players' ideas. But somewhere inside, I had doubts. And when you carry doubts long enough, the evidence can become very convincing. It can start to feel as though the whole world is telling you to give up.

Then someone told me, in no uncertain terms, that I wasn't good enough. I believed it completely. Looking back, I can see that it simply wasn't true — but at the time it felt like confirmation of everything I already feared.

I stopped playing immediately. I put the guitar under my bed, and I turned away from the very thing I loved most because it hurt the most. For around ten years, guitar was completely out of my life.

Then came the most difficult time in my life. I remember waking one morning dreading the day ahead, and I drove to the Nan Tien Buddhist Temple in Wollongong simply needing somewhere to go.

I dismissed it at first. More than once, actually. But I realised that although I hadn't played for ten years, I had never stopped loving music — and I had never stopped loving the sound of the guitar. That was when I began to understand how much of a hole its absence had left in my life.

So I picked it up again. This time I wasn't trying to prove whether I was good enough. I needed the instrument for something deeper. Music gave me somewhere to put things I didn't necessarily know how to put into words.

And that changed everything.

As I began playing again, I started listening differently too. Steve Vai in particular hit me in a way he hadn't before. Of course I could hear the technique, but that wasn't what affected me most. It was the emotion behind it — the sense that the guitar could carry something deeply personal that words couldn't.

That changed the way I practised and eventually the way I taught. Technique, theory, fretboard knowledge and ear training still mattered enormously, but I stopped seeing them as the destination. They became the tools that gave me enough control and awareness to get closer to what I was actually trying to express.

I still believe strongly in technical and theoretical mastery. Notes, intervals, scales, chords, rhythm, picking mechanics, tapping, sweeping and string skipping all have value. But skill becomes meaningful when it stops being the point and starts serving the music you hear, feel and want to communicate.

That's what I'm trying to help other guitarists discover: not a shortcut, not somebody else's voice, but enough understanding and control to find out what they actually want to say through the instrument.