Rating:

JamPlay is an online guitar lesson site featuring 40 instructors and over 436 hours of instruction. It includes professionally shot video and plenty of lessons for beginners and advanced guitarist alike.  There are many community features and tools geared toward getting any guitarist started and playing songs in no time at all. Here’s a rundown of everything that JamPlay offers.
Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.

Instructors

Just like with Guitar Tricks there are plenty of instructors to choose from with JamPlay.  There are 4o instructors, each with their own teaching styles.  If one instructor isn’t working out for you then you can always check out some of the other instructors.  You are sure to find a few that you really enjoy learning from and even communicating with through the JamPlay forums.  The instructors are carefully interviewed and matched with the teaching needs of JamPlay.

The Lessons

The lessons are made up of a series of high definition videos. The videos are professionally shot and include several camera angles so that you can see what the instructor is playing on the fretboard.  There are also additional resources included below the lessons showing the music and the tab for each song/exercise being taught.  The video player has a feature that allows you to replay the specific part of the video that you are working on in a loop so that you can practice it until you get it down.  I have included a sample series of lessons below from the JamPlay website.  There are also plenty of free sample lessons to be found on the site.

What They Teach

The JamPlay site teaches just about every guitar style and level of playing imaginable. They teach songs from popular artists and techniques that lay a foundation that will allow you to play more difficult songs.  Their teaching curriculum consists of 3 different phases.  Phase I includes basic guitar instruction that is aimed toward the beginner guitarist. In this phase you will learn how to hold the guitar, your first chords, basic finger picking techniques, barre chords, and basic lead scales.  Phase 2 lessons focus on individual genres and help guitarists further their knowledge and playing skills in a specific style of music.  Phase 3 is all about learning your favorite songs.  They have a difficulty rating to help you determine if you are ready to learn a specific song or not.  Overall, I found the structure of the lessons at JamPlay to be a little less organized than Guitar Tricks.

Community

So, just like a lot of the other programs and sites out there, JamPlay makes several bonus features available to their subscribers to assist them while learning the guitar.  One of these tools is their question and answer section. This area is set up so that subscribers can post a question to their instructors and get a video response.  I found this to be a helpful tool but also noticed that they do not seem to be posting responses very often.

They also have webcam sessions with their instructors every day.  They almost always have a session going but the problem I found with this was that there was rarely an instructor teaching a technique or style that I was interested in actually in a webcam teaching session when I was online.  This means if there is only one acoustic guitar instruction session during the day and I can’t be online during that time then I’m out of luck when it comes to live sessions and being able to actually ask questions.  However, this is still a very valuable resource.

The site has many social features such as searching for other guitarists and messaging them, chat, and JamPlay forums.  Their user forums did seem a little less active than some of the other communities I have seen but I did notice that the instructors are in there answering questions on a constant basis. Their chat rooms were almost always active every time that I logged into the site.

Tools

There are also several other common guitar tools for your use. One of these is the interactive guitar tuner that plays the tones for several common tunings so that you can listen and tune your guitar by ear. Another of these tools is a basic online metronome that helps you keep time while you are practicing your guitar lessons. The third and my favorite is the chord library. It contains almost every chord that you could ever need to form. It shows you multiple voicing of each chord and even has pictures of someone playing the chord properly.

The Bottom Line

JamPlay is an excellent resource for beginner and advanced guitarists alike.  However, as you can see, their price point is a little higher. In my opinion they don’t add enough extra value to the site to be worth the extra 5 dollars a month or $60/year. They do offer a couple of other payment options that charge a little bit less for paying for more time in advance. I found the webcam learning sessions to be a valuable feature but there isn’t always a applicable session going on and it seems to take longer to learn the concepts this way.  All in all their members will tell you in the testimonials section, and I agree, that the JamPlay site is a great way to learn guitar online.