What you get with the JamPlay.com Guitar course

I was member of JamPlay.com for 6 months. JamPlay.com is a website with online guitar lessons and a huge Facebook like community where beginners and advanced guitar players hang out. You learn absolutely everything you need to know about learning and playing guitar there. If you like Social Networking, JamPlay is definitely for you.

How JamPlay.com works:

The subscription is currently $19.95 per month and cheaper when you subscribe for longer. 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 few months. Then I decided to cancel my membership because:

• If you are like me, you are tempted to jump around and try out things. You can spend hours on their website and have fun, but you don’t progress in your playing! (This is why I preferred the ‘Learn and Master Guitar‘ course, because I liked it better to follow a course step by step!)
• Like for every online program you need to be able to sit with your guitar next to your computer to watch the sample lesson, and this was in my case not as convenient as to sit in front of my widescreen TV and pop in a guitar lesson on DVD.

Getting Started

I hope this review was helpful to you. Click here to try some free JamPlay sample lessons at JamPlay.com

What you get with the Gibson’s Learn And Master Guitar course

I learned guitar with the DVD course from Learn & Master and here is my review:

When you order Learn & Master Guitar, you get 20 DVDs. Each of the two sessions per DVD is between 30 and 60 minutes long. All DVDs have an on-screen menu, so you can go right to a lesson with your remote. In addition to the DVDs you get 5 audio CDs (each has appr. 12-18 jam-along tracks of about a minute length), plus a 100 page Lesson Book (and a bonus book, if you order the expanded version).

These bonus lessons cover the same material as the regular lessons, but in more depth and give you additional information.

For example, when lesson #1 teaches you the basics of a guitar and finger exercises, you will in bonus lesson #1 find some neat tips and tricks beyond the basics, like whether you should consider purchasing an electronic tuner, string winder, or metronome. I got a lot of great information from the bonus material.

All lessons are both on DVD and in the lesson book so you can watch the videos, and follow the written lessons at the same time, or just flip through the book as a quick reference to refresh your memory later, which is also very handy.

The Learn & Master Guitar course has received some educational awards. The guitar teacher guiding you through the course is Steve Krenz. You can read more about the rewards and Steve on the Learn & Master website.

I like most that when you watch the videos, you feel you have a real guitar teacher sitting next to you and talking to you.

First Steve explains something to you, then he gives you a training assignment as your ‘home work’, and at the end of each session you have to answer a couple questions to test whether you are ready to go to the next lesson. If that sounds too much like ‘school’ to you, let me tell you that it’s not – after all, you set your own schedule and pick what you want to learn.

With the course you also get access to the online member section of the website which is kind of neat as you can upload videos (e.g. you playing a song) and ask other members for their input, and you find a handful additional resources there. However, Learn and Master is not meant to be an online course, so don’t expect there to find constantly updated new learning material or thousands of members online.

Learn And Master Guitar Is For Beginners And Advanced Players

Learn And Master Guitar Lessons For Beginners

Lessons 1 Through 8

• Getting acquainted with your guitar, how to hold and tune it
• Learn music, read notes and tablatur
• Finger exercises
• Chords

On the Learn And Master DVD videos and in the printed lessons book Steve will show you hands-on all you need to know to learn guitar. And as nothing beats the joy of jamming with other musicians, five Jam Along CDs provide you that very experience.

Learn And Master Guitar For Advanced Players

Chances are you have already learned how to play guitar by picking things up here and there, taking a few lessons, reading a book or watching some videos. You are able to play the basics, and now you’re ready to move beyond that.

The Advanced Lessons 9 Through 20

• Make smooth chord transitions
• Advanced chords, barre chords
• Develop “muscle memory”
• Work on your strum and develop your rhythm
• Train your ear
• Techniques such as tapping, bending, sliding
• Isolate the difficulties you have with a particular song so you can focus on that part in particular
• Why it is so important that your equipment fits you and how to make a good choice in selecting your guitar (action, strings, neck, etc)
• and much more

I think many people become frustrated because they are trying to learn the chords, changing chords, and keeping time, all at once. As long as your brain and chording hand are working in terms of “finger 1 goes on the ‘e’ string at the third fret, finger 3 goes on the ‘A’ string at the second fret, and finger four goes on the ‘E’ string”, you’re going to take way too long. Once your muscles have learned the correct positioning, all of a sudden you will find yourself being able to put your fingers in the correct positions automatically.

In the advanced lessons Steve will give you an insider scoop on how to improve your chord transitions, a lot of great tips for ear training, how to best develop your rhythm sense and much more, so things should start clicking for you at some point. I also didn’t know that it makes such a difference to have your guitar set up correctly. Plus you can always contact Steve in the Learn And Master Guitar discussion board if you have a particular question.

How the Learn And Master DVD course works:

• At the begin of each lesson you see the estimated time it takes to learn that lesson
• You learn watching Steve explaining on video (and/or referring to the book)
• You do your ‘assignments’ after each lesson so you have a plan what and how you need to practice
• You answer 2 or 3 questions at the end of the lesson to find out whether you are ready to move on to the next lesson

What I liked most about the Learn & Master Guitar DVD Course

I like most that Steve Krenz, the instructor, is making the lessons very personal, you feel like you are sitting with a real guitar teacher, and he explains very well.

I like the assignments you get after learning each lesson, you know exactly what you should practice and how.

It was also very helpful to me that at the end of each lesson, when I was already eager to go to the next one, that there are 2 or 3 ‘are you ready to move on questions’ which sometimes showed me that I was in fact not ready

to move on but needed to practice the current lesson some more.

The course covers almost every style of music and guitar you can think of, acoustic, electric, classic, blues, etc.

Also I liked that the JamAlong audios at the beginning of the course play slow, but get up to ‘real’ playing speed gradually in advanced lessons. I thought I could play along a ‘real’ song right from the beginning, but was I wrong…

What Are The Downsides Of  Learn And Master Guitar?

• You have to order it and wait until they ship it, no instant download available (but I remember that I got mine within a couple days)
• There online community is nice, but there are not as many people online as e.g. at JamPlay
• It looks expensive at first sight (actually I think it’s not, because of the great material you get with the course, and compared to what other websites and courses charge)

How Much Is It?