Learning The Guitar With Guitar Tricks
Last Updated on Monday, 15 June 2009 18:40 Monday, 01 June 2009 18:01
This is an assessment of the online learning guitar resource Guitar Tricks. Before I signed up for the paid membership, I checked out the free online guitar lessons. I was impressed.
At time of writing there are 28 free video lessons in a variety of areas like:
- beginners
- blues
- country
- rock
- technique
The videos are well produced, very clear and the presenters have amiable personalities. As well as the guitar lesson videos that you can play in your browser, Guitar Tricks also sell a host of guitar tuition DVDs. I won't be looking at these. I'm only interested in their online offerings.
Another port of call I made before paying up was the Guitar Tricks forum. There are two main areas of the forums: one that is open to non paying members and that covers all areas of guitar playing (open discussion, guitar basics, technique and style, music theory etc), and another that is restricted to those members who have paid for a subscription.
I'm about to get my credit card out now - woo hoo! Monthly membership comes in at $12.95 whereas yearly membership is $129.00. To pay for a full year saves me $26.40, but I don't know whether I'll like what I see (although I suspect I will), so I'll pay for a month now and then re-assess when the month is up.
Video Controls
Tutorials are presented in the form of video, but the video controls are a little hard to master. Apparently you can drag A and B buttons onto the video's timeline and the video will start looping between those two points but it's not clear where those A and B buttons are! Ah - I found the buttons! There at the bottom of the video player, as shown below.
One thing I liked about the videos is that they provide an easy way for you to download them onto your hard drive.
The Guitar Tricks Lessons
The lessons are very comprehensive and take the guitar player from beginner level (how do I hold the plectrum) all the way to advanced level. There is a Newest Tutorials section, but because I've only just joined I don't know how often tutorials are added. I'll monitor this section over the coming month to find out. The last one added was Connecting Pentatonic Patterns.
Each lesson is categorised according to the style of music it teaches. After the beginners courses there are categories such as blues, country and rock. I'm particularly interested in the blues section and I can see coutses titled Blues Course 1, Blues Primer 2 and Blues Primer3. These must comprise a series of videos, and I'll tell you more when I've completed the beginner's course. Interestingly, there are some artist studies that analyse such guitarists as A.C. Jobim, Al Di Meola and Albert King. I can barely contain myself!
Guitar Fundamentals
I would guess that most of the people coming to this site are beginners. If that is true, then the guitar fundamentals course is especially important. I've sampled a few of the videos and this course seems to be comprehensive, with 33 videos covering the following areas:
- posture and technique
- basic knowledge
- chords
- melodies
- full chords
Guitar Tricks Extras
A lot is included in the paid membershipentitlement:
- jam station - provides backing music for you to jam along to. Invaluable!
- metronome - provides the rhythm function of a standard metronome, but has a "speed drill" feature that automatically accelerates until yu can't keep up.
- online guitar tuner - as I have a couple of guitar tuners already, this feature is redundant for me. If you don't have a tuner, then it's ideal!
Guitar Tricks Newsletter
Like all successful membership sites, the Guitar Tricks team send out regular email newsletters. These newsletters keep you up to date with developments on the site, but they also give Guitar Tricks the opportunity to sell you stuff. For example, on Friday I received a 'teaser' about an offer Guitar Tricks was going to run on some software called "Song Surgeon" that slows down songs for you to analyse and pick apart so you can learn it more easily. The offer came today (Monday). I'm not saying that upseling newsletters are a bad thing, only that you should expect to receive them from a membership site like this. Of course, you can unsubscribe from their newsletter at any time.
The Song Surgeon seems like a nifty piece of software, actually, but I'm going to search for some freeware software that does the same thing. No point in paying for something I can get for free.OK, I've done a bit of searching and it seems that there is plenty of free software that slows music down for you to analyse it. I've collated a list free software to slow music down.