It's not hard to learn where to put your fingers to form guitar chords. You can find plenty of charts and tabs both in books and online. Its usually learning how to play the chords that presents the learner guitarist with a few challenges. We have reviewed several popular guitar programs and our personal recommendations are as follows:
Jamorama
Jamorama's "Learn to play the guitar" is a collection of ebooks, games and video/audio files that comes in downloadable form with membership and a required fee. The ebooks include detailed exercises and pictures, with icons that show you if there is an audio or video recording that goes along with that particular lesson. The well-designed games cover pitch recognition, chord identification and sight-reading.
The things that Jamorama doesn't have are an animated fretboard, the ability to be able to record your performance, repetition looping, performance feedback and music tracking. Jamorama only offers email support for customer enquiries, but they are helpful and quick to answer One drawback is that you can't access any material from the members area until you download some of the content to your computer.
The Jamorama material includes entertaining and amusing lessons and games for the beginner, but lacks in advanced features for those who may want to record there own arrangements.
Pure Pitch Method
It’s common knowledge among musicians that you can only sing and play as well as you hear. There are two basic types of ear training: perfect pitch ear training & relative pitch ear training. Pure Pitch Method will help you learn both of these. The effect of this will be to make you a much better songwriter, singer, and all-round musician , and it doesn't matter which instrument you play.
The Pure Pitch Method is guaranteed 100%, and there is a full money back refund period of 8 weeks, so there’s no risk in buying it. If you are dissatisfied with it for any reason you can easily get a complete refund. There’s nothing to lose, and a whole lot to gain!
The website exhibits many customer testimonials, so you know that this product has worked for many people. If it’s worked for them then the chances are confidently high that it will work for you too.
There’s a well-known myth that only certain people have the perfect pitch ability and that most people can never develop it. Pure Pitch Method proves that untrue! Anyone can attain perfect pitch through this incredible program.
Guitar Scale Mastery
Guitar Scale Mastery is a system for helping intermediate guitarists learn and use scales to improve their musical knowledge. Many guitarists find it difficult to master this side of the guitar, and this system promises a tried and tested method to learning the scales needed to become an accomplished guitarist.
The Guitar Scale Mastery course is accessed through a members’ website, and you are given immediate access online. It has been developed by an experienced, degree-qualified guitarist who teaches and plays a variety of styles. Before you sign up to the membership, you can receive a free e-book on learning scales, which gives you a taste of things to come.
The course consists of 5 different sections which build on each other to help you learn many different scales. Essentially the first 3 sections teach you scales on 1, 2 and 3 strings respectively, the fourth helps you to train your ear and the fifth teaches you to apply what you have learned in order to make music. Each section comes with tablature, diagrams and tips on mastering different aspects of learning scales. You are also provided with a number of practice exercises in each section to help reinforce what you have learned.
Also included with the course are two extra bonus e-books. The first is a book on mastering the pentatonic scales. This provides some music theory to help understand the scales. There are also a lot of different exercises to help you practise them. The second is a book which teaches you about scale degrees and methods for visualizing them.
