Entries Tagged 'Beginner' ↓

Jared Crebs has been a professional guitar player and mentor for 12 years and claims to have developed an 8-step plan that will help anyone improve their guitar playing. The Beginner’s Guide to Unlocking the Guitar contains that plan along with what Crebs describes as “the new and revolutionary Muscle Memory Techniques.” Muscle memory is the process by which the brain learns new skills through practice. Essentially, you repeat something over and over again, strengthening the neural links until your brain ‘memorises’ it permanently.

The Beginner’s Guide to Unlocking the Guitar package also includes access to streaming audio files, chord charts and 150 images.

Rating: 4

Price: $39.95

Returns policy: 60 days money back guarantee

Author: Jared Crebs

Publisher: Universal Marketing Media, Inc.

Bonus Material:
The Perfect Chord Chart for Beginner
Beginning Singing Techniques
150 Popular Songs with 4 Chords or Less
Beginner Chord Sound Files

Feedback: The concept behind The Beginner’s Guide to Unlocking the Guitar is sound, as are Crebs’ credentials. There’s plenty of bonus material too, making the £39.95 price tag very reasonable.

‘At $29.95, which is a steal compared to the price of real lessons, this course will help propel you on your way to being your own guitar player’

Website: Beginner’s Guide to Unlocking the Guitar

Music Master Pro is different from the other products here in that it is a membership site that provides video tutorials for guitar, bass, and drums. A one-time fee provides access to all the lessons for all three instruments. You can choose one instrument and then, if it’s not working, try one of the other instruments.

There are jam tracks for each instrument In 10 different genres, and each jam track is around three and a half minutes long. Tracks are encoded as 192kbps MP3 files. All the tracks are aimed at beginners and no prior knowledge is assumed.

Rating: 2

Price: $29.95

Return Policy: Unspecified

Author: J Dynasty/ Greg Evans

Publisher: MusicMasterPro.com

Feedback: Even at the relatively low price of $29.95, Music Master Pro would seem to be poor value. It seems to be little ore than a collection of tutorial material for a vairety of instruments lumped together in a membership website, with little structure to the lessons. As it is delivered as a website, there is always the possibility that it could be improved relatively quickly, but for now there are better options out there.

Unless Music Master Pro goes through a serious overhaul, we’ve got to say to look elsewhere for a good guitar course. One exception to this would be if you wanted to learn a whole bunch of instruments at one time. In that case you may find Music Master Pro’s conglomerated lesson deposit helpful. If you want a real guitar course at a similar price, take a look at a couple of our top picks, Jamplay and Jamorama.

OnlineGuitarCourses.com

‘I purchased Music Master Pro’s course because I was interested in their lessons for the bass guitar. After purchasing, I found it was virtually useless.’

Philip on Yahoo Answers

Website: Music Master Pro

The Pure Pitch Method differs slightly from most of the tools here in that it’s not strictly aimed at guitar players. It’s designed to teach pitch recognition – an important part of learning to play any musical instrument. Key to the course is the difference between absolute pitch and relative pitch. Absolute pitch, also know as perfect pitch is the ability to identify notes and name them after hearing them. It is widely thought to be something you’re either born with or not, but Ryan Cameron, creator of The Pure Pitch Method, claims it can be taught and that he learned it as a teenager.

Relative pitch is the ability to hear and comprehend the relationship between notes in a piece of music.

As it’s name suggests, The Pure Pitch Method is designed to teach you the same ‘secret’ method the author used to develop his own perfect pitch.

Rating: 4

Price: $97

Return Policy: 60-day risk free guarantee

Author: Ryan Cameron

Publisher: PurePitchMethod.com

Feedback: The Pure Pitch Method is more expensive than most online music courses, and it won’t improve your guitar playing directly. However, having a good ear for music is essential to help you learn new material and there are few online courses that teach that as well as The Pure Pitch Method.

‘The Pure Pitch Method, while very useful, may be a bit overpriced. However, the truth is, there are not very many courses out there that can teach the material covered in the Pure Pitch Method.’
SingingLessonsGuide.com

‘The Pure Pitch Method was a blessing around our house because it sure made music night that much more fun.‘
Guitar4idiots.com

Website: The Pure Pitch Method

If you’ve read the details of Jamorama or Jamorama Acoustic, you’ll know what to expect from Jamorama Lead. Why changing a winning formula, after all? Jamorama Lead Guitar comprises 43 video guitar lessons that aim to take you all the way from being a complete beginner to being able to play lead guitar like a pro.

Specialist lessons for lead guitar include techniques like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, whole bends, half bends, ghost bends, runs, motifs, vibrato, legato and more. Included with the course are 29 jam tracks which cover a number styles including 12-bar blues, country, metal, punk, and jazz.

Like the other versions of Jamorama, it also comes with a sizeable bonus package (see below), including free online consultation.

Rating: 4

Price: $29.95

Return Policy: 60-day risk free guarantee

Author: Ben Edwards

Publisher: Rock Star Recipes

Bonus Material:
JaydeMusica Pro
GuitEarIt!
GuitarTuner Pro and How to Tune Your guitar
The Jamorama Metronome
Advanced Learning Techniques for Guitar
Free online consultation and access to Jamorama forum

Feedback: Uness you play acoustic guitar, or think you might want to in the future, Jamorama Lead guitar is an excellent choice. Cheaper than the main Jamorama package, it has everything you need to improve your lead guitar skills.

‘Jamorama Lead Guitar is a complete learning system and the easiest to follow guitar learning method available.’
Guitarplayingsecrets.com

‘As long as you have some basic guitar playing skills, Jamorama Lead is a great way to learn lead guitar. It is a high quality, well-thought out package.’
Guitarplayerstoolbox.com

Website: Jamorama Lead

Jamorama Acoustic is a spin-off of the popular Jamorama training program. It comes with two eBooks, Beginner and Advanced, which aim to take a prospective guitar player from having no guitar skills to being able to play and read tab like a professional. Included in the kit, which is specifically aimed at acoustic guitar players, are 148 video examples and exercises and 26 jam tracks for students to play along with.

Among the bonuses (see below) is free online consultation to help you address any specific problems you may have.

Rating: 3

Price: $39.95

Return Policy: 60-day risk free guarantee

Author: Ben Edwards

Publisher: Rock Star Recipes

Bonus Content:

JaydeMusica Pro
GuitEarIt!
GuitarTuner Pro and How to Tune Your guitar
The Jamorama Metronome
Advanced Learning Techniques for Guitar
Free online consultation and access to Jamorama forum

Feedback: If you only ever play acoustic guitar and can envisage only ever wanting to play acoustic, then Jamorama Acoustic has some good content, the best of which are the videos. However, if you play electric guitar or think you may in the future, the original Jamorama is the best deal for you.

‘The Jamorama Acoustic download is a pretty cool download for the most part. I am a pretty casual student and I have learned quite a bit from this course. The videos are probably the best part of the course as a lot of the other material can be found online on the dozens of guitar lessons sites on the web. I would recommend it to someone that is completely new to playing guitar and wants a complete package all in one download.’
Shelly H on reviewguitarlessons.com

‘The Acoustic package covers the basics, but it won’t give you the broad range of techniques that the original Jamorama package will give you.’
InfinityTimes82 on Squidoo

Website: Jamorama Acoustic

Jamorama is described by it’s publisher as ‘the ultimate guitar learning kit’ and when you look at what’s inside, it’s easy to see why they’re so confident. Jamorama includes 148 video examples and exercises, five computer games to help learn both how to play guitar and how to read write, and transcribe music.

The Jamorama course has proved itself as one of the leading online guitar lessons courses, partly because it makes the learning process simple and fun. Professionally designed games and learning exercises help students develop an ear for transcribing their favourite songs. And the company claims that the training techniques included in the kit cut training time in half.

Rating: 4

Price: $39.95

Return Policy: 60-day risk free guarantee

Author: Ben Edwards

Publisher: Rock Star Recipes

Bonus Material:

JaydeMusica Pro
GuitEarIt!
GuitarTuner Pro and How to Tune Your guitar
The Jamorama Metronome
Advanced Learning Techniques for Guitar
Free online consultation and access to Jamorama forum

System Requirements: Windows 2000, Pentium III, 128MB RAM; Windows XP, Pentium III, 128MB RAM;  PowerPC G3 running OS X 10.1.5, 10.2.6, 10.3, 10.4, 128MB RAM. (Note: also works with Intel Macs, though this is unsupported)

Feedback: Jamorama is probably the most well-known online guitar course and has had some very good reviews and feedback. Like all these courses, it’s not perfect and you’ll have invest time in following the tutorials and doing the exercises. If you do, you’ll see a definite improvement in your playing, as you can see from the reviews quoted below.

‘You’re not going to be playing like Eric Clapton in a few weeks like the site claims but I guess that’s just a sales pitch. Having said that you can tell a lot of time has been put into Jamorama by the people that make it. There are a ton of videos and sound files that come with it and that part of the download alone was worth the money to me simply because since I bought it I have learned so much.’
Sara on reviewguitarlessons.com

‘This is an excellent introduction to learning to play the guitar. Perfect for a beginner, and also useful for the intermediate level. The key finding of the Jamorama review is that it is a well thought out program that really hangs together in a systematic way, and it’s easy to follow’
Pete Bussey, owner of guitar-players-toolbox.com

Website: Jamorama