Rating:

Guitar Tricks is dedicated to helping it’s students learn guitar online through the power of the internet.  It’s excellent curriculum, thousands of lessons, dozens of expert instructors and easy to navigate site design have earned it my number one rating for online guitar courses just slightly above Jam Play.  So why choose Guitar Tricks? Read on my friend…

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The Guitar Tricks Instructors

Without at least one good instructor, you might as well forget about learning anything.  So how does 46 instructors sound?  That’s right, there are 46 instructors currently posting video lessons on the Guitar Tricks site.  These aren’t just people that can play guitar.  They are passionate musicians with a special knack for teaching.  As I browsed the site and began going through lesson after lesson, I quickly realized how big of a deal this is.  Having many instructors means having many perspectives, styles of teaching, and styles of music being taught.  I really enjoyed having that many instructors to choose from and quickly found several instructors that were teaching the styles and methods I wanted to work on.  Visit their featured instructors page to learn more about them.

The Videos

I think the quality of the videos is an important deciding factor to consider in any video lessons regardless of whether they are online or offline.  Guitar Tricks lessons are all presented in high definition, professionally shot videos.  Instead of having the tablature or music on the video screen like most DVD courses do, it is presented directly below the video.  The actual video is full of close ups and their video player even has a feature where you can have it repeat just the part of the video that you are working on.  I found this to be a valuable feature when I was trying to practice along with the videos.  Check out the sample lesson below to get an idea of how the lessons work.  You can also see a few more free lessons with the lesson notes included.

The Core Learning System

So, the curriculum (that’s a big fancy word for how the lessons are organized) at Guitar Tricks is called the Core Learning System.  It is such a great system that it was probably the deciding factor in choosing Guitar Tricks over Jam Play for the highest ranked Guitar course.  What I especially like about it is that you can start where you need to start and then choose the playing style that you want to master first.  So if you are a complete beginner then you start with the Level 1 Guitar Fundamentals and then move on to level 2 followed by the level 1 intermediate course of your choosing.  Each level is comprised of a series of tutorials that teach you everything you need to know to learn guitar online the right way.  As you progress you will probably want to also move away from the core learning system some and do some of the individual song lessons.  There is a difficulty scale in place to help you determine if the song lessons are too difficult or not.  There are lots of fully licensed songs for you to learn in just about every playing style imaginable.  There are also Artist Studies, lessons based on guitar styles or genres, and  The Top 20 Techniques Reference Lessons.

Learning Tools

Guitar Tricks also comes with a suite of software tools to help you learn guitar online.  You can use all of these tools online and most of them can be downloaded to your computer for use even when you are not connected to the internet.  The tools available include The Ultimate Chord Finder, The Ultimate Metronome, and a Reference Tuner.

They also have a downloadable video player.  The video player allows you to play downloaded video lessons from the site.  You can set it to repeat a portion of the video that you are working on in a loop so that you can practice.  You can also queue up multiple videos to play one after the other.  Most of the videos on the site can be downloaded unless they are one of the licensed songs that is copyrighted by the original artist.

The last tool is the one that I found the most useful on the Guitar Tricks site.  The Jam Station is a tool that plays backing tracks in just about every music style. It is meant for you to play along with and learn to improvise with a full band playing behind you.  I have found this to be a very valuable tool when learning guitar online and I think it is the next best thing to actually playing with a band.

The Community

The Guitar Tricks Community of students and instructors is part of what makes it work so well.  The community is based in the very active Guitar Tricks Forum.

There are always discussions going on regarding every guitar related topic imaginable.  Each instructor has their own Q&A section of the forum and there are also general discussion areas about gear, famous bands, recording, song writing, playing techniques, music theory and more. There is even a place for you to show off what you have learned.

The Bottom Line

Guitar Tricks gets my highest rating in the online guitar lessons category because of it’s very affordable price, it’s thousands of online lessons, the ability to download lessons for offline viewing, and all the extra’s they throw in. I especially like the way they organize their thousands of lessons to make everything easy to find.  I did notice that a few of the lessons did not have a high quality version but most of them do and it didn’t really affect my ability to go through or learn the material.  I also noticed that they did not have any webcam sessions with their instructors like Jam Play does.  However, they still come out on top  in terms of value for the money and quality of videos.  You can sign up or learn more about Guitar Tricks below.

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