Artistworks.com is a great resource for music students, offering hundreds of lessons for various instruments, including guitars. Self-taught guitar players have never been more successful, thanks to the abundance of applications, software, and websites available. Bryan Powell, founding co-editor of the Journal of Popular Music Education and President-elect of the National Association for Music Education, emphasizes the importance of keeping our goals in mind when researching resources. Exercises are what make Artistworks unique.
As a backing track plays and tab-style notation moves on a fingerboard, students must play notes with precision and rhythm to score points and pass the exercise. The best part is that you don't need anything more than a guitar and a microphone that works on your device or computer. The program processes the sound of your guitar and can tell if you're playing the notes correctly, even when the music becomes faster and more complex. With this audio signal processing technology, you'll gain valuable feedback on rhythmic and note accuracy.
Yousician teaches through songs and structures the course according to your skill level. You can't proceed to the next lesson until you have completed the previous one. If you're in a hurry, you can enter the amount of time you have to practice, and the program will offer you a lesson that fits. The program also comes with a musical toolkit, which includes exercises for learning and practicing chords, standard notation, scales and arpeggios, as well as song collections for practicing finger selection styles, bar chords, and songs that belong to certain genres.
Rocksmith is another immersive software system for learning to play the guitar. It's essentially like playing Guitar Hero on a real guitar, available on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. Compared to Yousician, Rocksmith doesn't offer as much educational value or rudimentary exercises. However, it can act as a fun practice tool for intermediate to advanced players.
Acoustic Guitar Plus is an online subscription-based learning platform from Stringletter Media that publishes Acoustic Guitar magazine. It offers hundreds of instructional videos from teachers at AG, Hal Leonard, Homespun and others, catering to acoustic and electric musicians of all levels and styles. Subscribers also receive a 10 percent discount on Fender instruments, making Fender Play one of the best online guitar lesson services. Guitar Tricks has been around since 1998 and has largely set the model for online guitar classes.
With such an advantage, Guitar Tricks has managed to accumulate an impressive range of resources including 11,000 lessons, artist and genre studies, tone tips and more than 900 song tutorials - more than all its counterparts at this time. It has also developed an extensive catalog of content aimed at intermediate and advanced players - making it much more suitable for established players than some of the newcomers to this scene who are still developing many of their advanced features (we would include Fender Play in this category). However, Guitar Tricks is showing its age compared to many other sites. While it's one thing to look a little simple, Guitar Tricks won't win any prizes in UX either.
Whether it's because they have so much content available that they just can't find a nice way to present it all or simply because they're behind on a major redesign - the interface is definitely the biggest setback here. That doesn't mean it's not viable or that it has serious problems - content alone is worth the entry price - but there are certainly cleaner and clearer user experiences available. JamPlay offers a dizzying amount of content and apps to help you learn while you're on the go. There are more than 100 teachers available with artists such as Lita Ford and Steve Stevens on the electric guitar faculty and Mark Kroos and Kaki King on the acoustic side.
Orange Amplification was ahead of brands like Fender when it launched its own online course and now works with Online Music Exams to offer recognized accreditations covering grades 1-8 for rock guitar. Only you can tell what kind of online lessons you need but if you're thinking about taking the plunge - think carefully about the areas where you want to improve and see what options are available. Finding time to practice can also be a problem so providers like Fender Play offer short lessons through an easy-to-navigate app so you can learn a song or riff one day and do it again when you have free time.You may have heard that JamPlay offers paid classes but not many people know about JamPlay's free YouTube channel. JamPlay covers all levels of guitar lessons including guides for beginners as well as challenge lessons for expert guitar players mixed with song tutorials and broken down playing styles to change things up.One thing many guitar players like about JamPlay's YouTube channel is that just as JamPlay offers a wide variety of videos for musicians of all skill levels - JamPlay also uses a decent variety of different performers and teachers to direct the lessons - meaning if you find it difficult to follow one teacher or player there are other people available who may be better suited to your pace.The biggest complaint about JamPlay's YouTube channel is that free lessons aren't structured - they aren't presented in such a way that topics are introduced at the beginning of the lesson then worked on as it progresses.JamPlay's YouTube channel is more than just a preview of their lessons.
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