Pulling Back The Curtain

Are you struggling with Math? I know how you feel – the same frustration I felt until I found the secret of elite mathematicians. I wrestled with math problems for years until I discovered one secret that unlocked a treasure chest of calculating power for me. Now I and my clients are among the elite mathematicians of all time, and I am willing to share with you this secret that you can have immediate access to through my program – Special Forces Mathematics for the Elite. As an incredibly valuable Free Bonus, I am including a copy of a video of my Master Math Class – How To Attract Women With Mad Math Skilz. After completing my program you will no longer have to fear being humiliated before your friends by your lack of mathematical prowess. No more calculators, no more running out of fingers to count on, no more fear, shame, frustration, and embarrassment! The principles I teach are time-tested and proven to unlock the enormous power of math to improve your finances and enhance your love life.

How much could we say that this would be worth to you? Hundreds of dollars? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Well, maybe so! Many people across all fields of human endeavor have used the principles I teach to great effect and substantial financial reward in everything from medicine to chemistry to physics. Now you can share in the same secret, at a fraction of the price of attending the most prestigious universities! 

Underneath all that absurd hype, what I am really offering (on a non-refundable basis) is an expensive copy of the multiplication tables. Knowing the multiplication tables will in fact spare anyone a great deal of lost time, frustration, and embarrassment, and also empower one to employ math effectively across a wide range of applications, from balancing the checkbook to designing the power distribution system for an industrial complex. Everything I stated is technically true.

What I have done above is communicate implications that are not true, while the actual statements at face value are in fact true, or at least plausibly defensible as true. This is an age-old marketing trick that anyone who is not troubled by math would recognize immediately as a sham. However, for anyone who is short on math skills and struggling, such an advertisement might have a strong enough emotional appeal to overpower innate skepticisms and provoke an impassioned purchase. Informed marketers know that once a purchase is made, then some percentage of folks will have a tendency to justify the decision rather than admit having been deceived. So then the underhanded marketer can continue to prey upon this self-justifying tendency literally for years and for many thousands of dollars.

This is exactly how unscrupulous network marketers and religious scammers are able to thrive in their respective markets often indefinitely, despite widespread and obviously indisputable refutations of their outrageous claims. They only need a few thousand adherents to clear seven figures annually, so they don’t care that most of those outside the few thousand do not believe their claims. Once folks are taken in by one of these scams, these “gurus” can not only milk them for a lot of money, but also even manipulate and control them to the point of abuse.

My Experience With Tom Hess Music Corporation

Some years ago I took some online guitar and guitar teaching classes from Chicago-based Tom Hess Music Corporation, as well as attending a couple of training & social events in Chicago. My receipts show that I was a customer of THMC between 2006 and 2011. When I initially got involved it was a professional organization serving professional musicians. They had some good lessons for guitar that were somewhat unique at the time, and a noteworthy community that had sprung up around the lessons. In the last year of my association, they made significant changes to the character of their marketing and customer relations that I was not comfortable with. Consequently, I decided to disassociate with their organization. It has since gone on to evolve into something along the lines of a quasi-religious club for presumably “elite” musicians and teachers – as defined by themselves.

I provided an endorsement early in my association with THMC. My endorsement is still on their web site.  I no longer endorse this organization. I have made this known publicly and in private communications with the staff.  They have refused to remove my photo and endorsement on the basis of a release I signed at one of their events. This release form was presented to me without warning as a condition of entrance at the door of the event, and a couple of years AFTER the endorsement I had provided. It was an event which I had paid for in advance, reserved a hotel room in advance, and then traveled to Chicago to attend. The form was presented as a permission for THMC to use images from the event for marketing purposes. At the time I had no reservations about signing it, as I thought better of the organization than to think they would use it against me in an underhanded way in the future. The extortion involved in getting everyone to sign these releases would prove a harbinger of other changes to come.

My Review Of THMC

They have numerous web sites with various themes seeking to draw in guitarists and those seeking help with a music career or a career in teaching music. Among the sites I know of at the time of this writing are Tom Hess Music Corporation, Music Theory for Guitar, Acoustic Guitar Lessons Online, Practice Guitar Now, Guitar Lessons for Beginners Online, GuitarSpeed.net, Best Blues Guitar Lessons Online, Ear Training For Guitar, and American Academy of Guitar Mastery. There are probably by now some others that I am not aware of. You can often identify their sites by the similar look as well as the name Guitar Mastery Solutions, Inc. somewhere in the site’s back pages. 

All of the sites work the same way … draw you in with a catchy article, tip, or lesson addressing some challenge common to musicians, offer deeper insight in exchange for your email address, and then draw you down their “marketing funnel” into increasingly costly levels of “elite” or “insider” or “secret” insights, culminating in seminars costing thousands of dollars where they reveal the big secrets – a combination of common music theory/guitar technique and business/marketing ideas along with self-help philosophy in the vein of Tony Robbins and similar “gurus”.  

Most of what I know of this organization I am not able to discuss because it is either commingled with proprietary information I received through their various programs, or else information I received through private and therefore confidential communications from members. Suffice to say, if I knew at the outset what that organization would become, I would never have gotten involved there. Here are some of the things I can point out:

(1) THMC claims to be consistently churning out great guitarists. While their community does include some capable guitarists, as a former insider I assert that their guitar lessons do not offer anything beyond the standard fare of music theory and modern technique practices. It is not that the information is bad. It is just not nearly as powerful nor unique as the advertising implies. At the time of this writing there are claims on their guitar lessons page of consistently producing world-class virtuoso guitarists, although you will never have heard of any of these supposed virtuosos, because they define virtuoso by their own self-serving standards. I have been to a couple of their events and I can assure anyone that their claims of consistently producing world-class virtuoso guitarists needs close scrutiny by anyone considering their lessons.

(2) THMC claims to offer guidance in securing a lucrative music career. The underlying bit of technical truth here is that the term “music career” can be interpreted in many ways. The obvious implication to any ambitious young person who reads this type of claim is that this program will deliver a career of playing guitar with a wildly popular band in major arenas. In the years I have been aware of THMC, Tom Hess has been in two commercial bands I would never have heard of had I not been involved with THMC, and he has parted ways with both after a brief tenure. I am aware of only one other player mentored by THMC (no longer involved with THMC) who has seen notable success in a band of mid-scale significance, and again in that case it was as a second guitarist to a moderately well-known figure in the niche of “shred”, which fell out of mainstream favor in the U.S. around 1990. Compare to any guitar hero you wish to name from T-Bone Walker up to Taylor Swift and all in between, there has not been one single figure of great, “household name” type of significance to come out of any of THMC’s programs. This is not to say that they haven’t helped some people find a way to make a living with music, but rather to point out that the implications of their advertising are grossly inflated. For comparisons, look at the long lists of household-name-level guitarists who have come out of schools like Berklee College of Music and similar.

(3) THMC claims to be able to make any who so desires into a guitar teacher earning in excess of six figures per year. Despite my reservations over the hokey name, I tried their Elite Guitar Teacher Inner Circle program for one year. In my experience in implementing their recommendations, most of them were outdated and/or simply just did not work at all, and a lot of the stuff that was more credible was simple stuff that would be obvious to anyone with a year or two of experience teaching guitar.

(4) THMC demands uncompromising and permanent “loyalty” to their company after enrolling in any of their programs. What they mean by this is that you may not ever thereafter be even remotely involved with selling music related lessons or information of any kind via the Internet. There is a fair case that THMC does not wish to train competitors to use their own proprietary ideas against them. However, they take it to an absurd extreme, and at least in my case failed to bring up this policy until a number of years AFTER I had been involved there. It is unique in my experience to have a service provider demand loyalty to their interests in exchange for purchasing their products. This was one sticking point over which I parted ways with THMC. This policy has a lot more to do with control of people and ongoing revenues for THMC than it does fair play between THMC and clients. If you have any ideas whatsoever that involve potentially selling music information products or services via the Internet, even if it is something that would not be competitive with THMC products, then do not get involved with THMC.

(5) THMC hosts a community via a web board and annual conferences. The social aspects of this community  kept me involved long after I stopped receiving any additional value from the programs, but it has evolved into a vehicle by which THMC draws clients into a web of peer pressure by which they herd participants to fall in line with community standards serving the interests of THMC. I made many friendly acquaintances there who I retained connections with via social media for a number of years, until they suddenly started shunning me along with other former THMC clients. I had not done a single thing publicly or privately up to that point to provoke this kind of behavior, and in fact went to some lengths over the years after my departure to support THMC and many of these individuals’ various musical endeavors, yet all of a sudden they all disconnected on social media platforms and would not communicate with me any further – even privately. Such is life in the THMC community … you either swear uncompromising allegiance or else become an enemy. If they can get you to go that far then you also get told who your friends can be. It has evolved into something that is sinister.

Concluding Recommendation

I recommend to anyone who is curious about THMC to visit Ultimate Guitar and search for Tom Hess. Also, type the terms “Tom Hess” and “Tom Hess Reviews” into Google and look through several pages.  For my part, my original endorsement reflected my sentiments at the time. The subsequent problems are the delivery system that THMC has put between the customers and the programs, and that the community has taken on a disturbing, dark character. As long as web searches for my name are bringing up links to THMC, I feel duty-bound to state publicly that I no longer endorse this organization. My last payment to their organization was at the end of 2011. I have not been involved with them since, and I do not employ any of their proprietary ideas or marketing methods. I strongly encourage anyone to look elsewhere for instruction in music, self-improvement, or music business coaching.