Guitar Tricks Review

Our Rating Overall: Beginners: Intermediate: Advanced:

Overview

Guitar Tricks is a well established membership site, where you can find literally thousands of video guitar lessons from a range of experienced instructors, covering all major genres, such as rock, blues, metal, jazz, and classical. The site has been up and running for over 10 years now, so there's already a large set of lessons to choose from, and new lessons are added every month.

What Can I Learn From It?

In my opinion, Guitar Tricks has something to offer all guitarists, whatever their current ability, or musical style, which is why I gave it a high 'suitability' rating for all skill levels here.

What you could learn from it depends on where you currently are with playing the guitar. Tick the boxes below which apply to your current level:

For example, I've been playing for a number of years, so would probably put myself around the 'advanced intermediate' level. Just browsing through the lessons, I quickly came across lessons from 2 different instructors, one which showed a twist on playing a blues rhythm that sounded pretty cool, and another on rock improvisation that I thought would really help with building up solos.

Sometimes you can get stuck in a bit of a rut, playing the same chords & licks, so for me, one of the best features of the Guitar Tricks site is being able to get inspiration from hearing some top class instructors play things that are new to me, or at least sound very different from what I'm used to.

OK, on to the rest of the review!

Course Author / Instructor

Guitar Tricks was founded by San Francisco based guitarist Jon Broderick around the late '90s. Since then, more instructors have joined up, and now there are over 45 different instructors who provide lessons on the Guitar Tricks site. All seem to be experienced guitarists and teachers, many have college music educations.

With such a wide range of instructors, each with different backgrounds, you can try a sample of lessons from a a few of them, you should be able to find ones whose teaching style suits what you're looking to learn.

Course Contents - What You Get

The main content of the Guitar Tricks site are video lessons, but there are several different types of lesson, and also other tools. The site content can be summarized as:

• Guitar Fundamentals 1 & 2: If you're a complete guitar novice, this series of lessons starts completely from scratch, from how to hold the guitar, basic right hand technique, then moves on to simple chords and some basic music theory, ending up with an intro to barre chords.
• Guitar Courses: These are whole sequences of lessons in a particular style, which are designed to give you a full 'curriculum' of topics to follow over the course of  a few weeks. For example, in the Rock Level 1 course, there are 37 different lessons covering topics such as power chords and creating rock riffs, to setting up your guitar and effects to get the best 'rock' sound. The Rock Level 2 course focuses mainly on lead guitar techniques. There are also similar courses in blues and country guitar styles.
  
• Genre Lessons: you can view the lessons by genre, there are 12 main genres such as rock, blues, metal & jazz that the lessons are split into. As you click on each genre, the lessons are arranged into broad sections - 'courses' are full sets of lessons, 'tutorials' are single lessons on a specific topic, and 'tips & tricks' are brief lessons designed to help you pick something new up quickly. For example, there's a tutorial lesson entitled 'Connecting Pentatonic Patterns', which specifically helps you learn to link up the different pentatonic scale shapes easily.
  
• Jam Tracks: Many lessons have associated jam tracks that you can play along with, there's a useful tool called the 'Jam Station', which lets you browse the different jam tracks and find the lessons they're linked to easily.
• Full Control Video Player: as well as viewing the video lessons online, while connected to the internet, you can also download any particular video lesson, and play it offline, using this video player tool, which you can download from their site. This is extremely useful for building up a set of lessons you want to watch over and over again, and don't want to wait for them to download.
• Progress Tracking: There's a feature for seeing your lesson history, and also for bookmarking your favourite lessons, which will help you track your progress through the courses.
• Community Forums: There are a whole range of different forums, including ones accessible by members only - in these ones, you get the chance to ask questions to the lesson instructors directly.

Course Description -  What's in the Lessons?

Given that there are over 45 different instructors on the Guitar Tricks site, each with their own unique teaching style, it's hard to describe a 'typical' Guitar Tricks lesson. You can browse the lessons by instructor, genre or difficulty level though, which makes it easier to find lessons that are right for you.

The home page is usually a good place to start, as it lists the most recent and popular lessons, as well as showing your own bookmarks and lesson history.

Clicking into one of the genre lesson sections gives you a list of lessons specific to that style of music. There are 3 main styles of lesson, these are:

• Courses: these are complete sets of lessons, designed to help you study a particular topic over the course of a few weeks. Examples are the Guitar Fundamentals courses, or the Rock Style Level 1 & 2 courses.
  
• Tutorials: these lessons focus on one single topic, and can be used to help you expand on your knowledge of that area. For example, there's a whole tutorial on The Jimi Hendrix Style of guitar, which focuses entirely on his unique style and techniques.
  
• Tips & Tricks: these are much shorter lessons, usually less than 30 minutes in length, which you can use if you have a short amount of time, but still want to learn something new. For example, there are lessons in this category that give examples of using the Mixolydian scale in context.
  

Each lesson has a difficulty level rating, from 1 - 5, so that you can make sure the lesson is right for your level of ability. You can also filter the lessons on a certain difficulty level, as well as the lesson category (Exercises, Jam, Theory, Scales, Tricks, etc), to further focus on specific lessons.

This screenshot shows a summary of these different lesson styles, after clicking through on the Rock genre on the main lesson screen:

Most of the lessons are video lessons, and usually feature a description of the lesson content, along with the tab / notation for the lesson itself, and links to any jam tracks / MP3 tracks associated with the lesson. Here's a sample video lesson screenshot, from the 'Rock Style Level 1' course:

The video player itself has some good features, firstly, you can choose the resolution of the video clip, either low or high resolution, depending on your connection speed. The really great feature though, is the ability to loop any section of the video, using the 'A' & 'B' buttons. This is invaluable when there's a particular section of the lesson that you want to view over & over again, and having this loop feature means that you can keep your hands on your guitar, rather than fiddling around with the video controls all the time.

The 'Tabs & Notation' section has the full tab / music notation for the lesson content, which is good to be able to print off and use to practise offline.

The 'Guitar Fundamentals' courses mentioned above are comprehensive 'getting started' courses, great for if you're a total beginner. For more advanced levels, the best thing is to browse the site to find a genre or topic that catches your eye, and try out those lessons.

As well as the lessons, there are a couple of other useful tools on the site:, one is the Jam Station, which lets you browse through the different backing jam tracks:

The Jam Station lets you browse through the different backing jam tracks. You can browse through the tracks by genre. The 'view lesson' is a useful facility, which pops open the lesson associated with that jam track in another window. I've found that this is an alternative way to find lessons you might like, by finding jam tracks that sound good, then seeing what the lesson is about.

The other tool is a metronome with a difference. Rather than having just a basic click sound on each beat, you can set to use a different percussion sound on the first beat of the bar, which really helps you keep track of the rhythm. The best feature of this tool though, is the speed drill mechanism, which is great for practising those difficult licks or scale exercises. You can start off really slowly, and have it nudge up the BPM speed every few bars, while you concentrate on playing along. This is a very useful practice tool.

Support

You can get support for the Guitar Tricks site via an email contact facility, they will respond to your query within 1 business day, there is also a phone contact number.

The Guitar Tricks forum is also a good way to get support from other users on the site.

Overall - Our Verdict

I found the Guitar Tricks site overall to be an excellent resource for learning guitar. The overall feel of the site when you log in is intuitive and uncluttered, and you can quickly select lessons that are of interest to you.

The quality of the video lessons is very good, even on the lower resolution setting (which I found perfectly acceptable to watch).

The only thing I found a touch frustrating was that it could take a little while for the whole video in a lesson to be ready to play. However, that's more a reflection on the amount of content in each video clip. One of the best features to help you get around this is the fact that you can download the video lessons, and play them offline, using their special video player.

That way, you can build up a set of lessons you're currently working through on your local hard drive, and not have to wait for anything to download.

For beginners, I've mentioned the Guitar Fundamentals 1 & 2 courses on the site. These are sets of lessons that really will take you step-by-step through the basic steps, but as well as being very practical, you'll also learn some useful aspects of basic music theory, and that's a great foundation to build on.

For intermediate/advanced players, it's the variety of lessons and different instructors that makes it so useful, you can either pick one of the courses in a specific genre, or just browse the tutorial style lessons.

The lessons are clearly marked with a difficulty rating, and you can use this to filter on, so you only view lessons that are right for your level.

Some of the lessons have MP3 jam track files which are also downloadable, so you can store these locally along with the video lessons for practising.

So overall, Guitar Tricks is well worth a look, for the sheer number and variety of lessons available (I think they have something like 3000 lessons, from 45 instructors). Most of the lessons are available only to members, but you can get access to 24 free Guitar Tricks lessons straight away, so I would recommend having a look at those to get a good feel of what the site's lessons are like.

Price and Guarantees

Guitar Tricks membership is currently priced at US$14.95 per month. There is also an option to pay annually for US$129 (US$10.75 monthly equivalent).

They also offer a 60-day money back guarantee.

More Info

To find out more, visit the Guitar Tricks site, or go and try out their 24 free sample video lessons.