Guitar Tricks Review

Rating:

Summary: Guitar Tricks offers a wealth of top-quality guitar instruction for an excellent price. Recommended.

Format: Guitar Tricks, like Jam Play, is a members-only online guitar community whose instruction centers around the delivery of video-based guitar lessons. The number of lessons they advertise is "more than 3000"; suffice it to say, there are a lot. In additional to the lessons themselves, Guitar Tricks also provides a member forum, and some online applications including a metronome and a "Jam Station" that can be used for practicing improvisation, applying scales over chord progressions, etc.

Instructors: Guitar Tricks has 45 professional instructors. All common musical styles (and some not-so common) are well represented. You can learn more about the instructors here.

Click Here to Visit Guitar Tricks

Membership: Guitar Tricks is a member of NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants). They are also accredited with the Better Business Bureau, their rating is an A+.

Strengths: One of the primary strengths of Guitar Tricks is price. At $12.95, a month of membership at Guitar Tricks is the least expensive investment available among the recommended products.

The instructional value of the lessons is also very high. I went through some of the three-notes per string lessons along with the In-The-Style of Hendrix lessons. The instructors know what they're talking about and they know how to communicate the material. Additionally, each lesson comes with tablature so you can easily follow what's being discussed.

Could Be Better: The non-lesson parts of Guitar Tricks are not as good as Jam Play. For example, the metronome at Jam Play is slightly better. Also, Guitar Tricks does not have anything like the live video Jam Chat sessions that JamPlay has.

Those issues are relatively minor. It used to be that Guitar Tricks had a more significant shortcoming in that it did not teach exact songs (due to licensing issues). Happily, they've worked through whatever legal problems were standing in the way and, starting in November of 2009, they began to offer lessons based actual songs. It will probably take Guitar Tricks a bit of time to build up a library of song lessons (they've been adding them at about a rate of three per week). Nonetheless, this is a great improvement since most people learning the guitar ultimately want to be able to play recognizable songs. You can see the songs offered by Guitar Tricks here. Additionally, the also have a lot of lessons that are "In the Style of..." particular artists, e.g. Zakk Wylde, but not based on a specific song of the artist.

Targeted Audience: Guitar Tricks is recommended for all guitarists, from complete beginners through advanced. All styles of guitar are well represented at Guitar Tricks: rock, pop, country, metal, jazz, etc. You name it, they've got it.

Guarantee: Unlike the other instructional products reviewed on this site, Guitar Tricks does not offer anything in the way of a Guarantee. In their defense, however, they are the least expensive product if you consider the cost of a single month. You can try it out and if you don't like it - for whatever reason - your loss is just $14.95.

Also, Guitar Tricks has a free membership with which you can access 24 lessons in order to test drive their product. This is a great opportunity and I would encourage you to sign up and try it out. What have you got to lose?

Click Here to Sign Up at Guitar Tricks