How JamPlay.com works:

You have to subscribe (monthly or longer, it’s currently $19.95 per month and cheaper when you subscribe for longer) and you will get about 300 hours of video lessons from over 20 different instructors. I found it very cool that there are lessons from so many different teachers as everybody has his or her own style, strength and knowledge. This means a huge variety and different ways of looking at things.

You will never run out of guitar learning video lessons on JamPlay because new lessons are added all the time! However, it is also very easy to get distracted and socialize and chat more than you practice…

Each lesson is filmed from multiple camera angles you can focus on the teacher’s picking and fretting hands – very helpful! Each of the lessons ranges from 15 minutes to an hour and comes complete with a downloadable lesson manual (sometimes you need to see it in writing). You have also access to content like tablature, chord charts, guitar learning exercises and much more.

The online chat and forum are a lot of fun: you create your own profile and can search and find other guitar players based on their profil by location, level of playing, favorite bands, and many other search criteria.

What I liked most

• Over 20 different teachers which each their own expertise and style
• Hundreds of video lessons for any style and kind of music, acoustic, electric, jazz, blues, rock, metal, etc.
• They have a huge chord library
• They have songs from famous bands to play along
• You meet people from all levels from beginners to advanced
• Like Facebook you can connect with other members via chat and forum and make like-minded friends (if you can trust their numbers, about 1,000 members are online every day plus many guests) Making friends who are also learning guitar is a great way to stick with guitar learning!

What I didn’t find so great…

I really liked being a member for a while. There were a couple things that made me cancel my membership after a couple months:

• It’s kind of hard to stay focused, you are tempted to jump around and try out things you didn’t learn properly yet and get frustrated – SELF DISCIPLINE is definitely needed on JamPlay!!! You can spend hours on their website and have fun, but you don’t progress in your playing! (This is why I prefer the ‘Learn and Master Guitar‘ program as my primary course which I worked through religiously step by step!)
• The monthly fee
• This is not JamPlay’s fault, but for every online program you need to be able to sit with your guitar next to your computer screen to watch the sample lesson, and this is in my case not as convenient as to sit in front of my widescreen TV and pop in a guitar lesson DVD.

Here is a link to free Sample lessons on the JamPlay.com website: