Guitar Tricks Review

Guitar Tricks

Founded in the late 1990’s by Jon Broderick, Guitar Tricks is one of the oldest and largest guitar learning sites on the internet. They currently have a library of over 3000 video guitar lessons (with more coming out every week) from 45 guitar teachers with experience in all the major genres and styles of guitar.

GuitarTricks.com also allows you to sign up for a free basic membership account which allows you to view 24 free guitar lessons to see how you like them. If you do, all you have to do is upgrade your membership.

GuitarTricks.com membership is a good option for beginners (though not for children), but many of the lessons are for intermediate to advanced guitarists as well. Regarldess of your skill level, you're sure to find plenty of lessons to keep you occupied.

Features

How the Course is Organized:

Guitar Tricks’ lessons are grouped together to form many different learning paths.

For instance, if you are new to guitar, you’ll want to go through their “Fundamentals” courses. If you are interested in learning a particular genre (Blues, Rock, Jazz…) or a particular technique (Fingerpicking, Hammer-Ons, Sweep-picking ...) you can do that as well. These “mini-courses” are often taught by several different instructors, not just one. The lessons tend to be on the shorter side, but there are quite a few of them!

Many of the lessons include supplemental material like lesson transcripts and tablature which are accessible without leaving the lesson area, a great feature. We really appreciated not having to open multiple windows to view all relevant lesson information.

Guitar Tricks’ online video lessons are in flash format, which means that you can watch them from any computer as long as you have the latest version of Adobe ® Flash player installed on your computer. (A free download by the way) One of the coolest things about Guitar Tricks is that they not only allow you to watch the lessons online from anywhere you want, but you can also download them to your computer at no additional cost. To do this, you just download their free Guitar Tricks FLV player to your PC, and click on the download link for whatever video lesson you wish to download. This unique feature to GuitarTricks.com allows you to take the lessons with you, say, on your laptop even when you don’t have internet access.

Guitar Tricks recently underwent a site redesign, which resulted in a cleaner member’s area and made the site easier to navigate. The video guitar lessons are available in both low and high resolutions. Tip: If you lack a moderately fast internet service, we probably recommend that you avoid online video-streaming guitar sites in general, as we’re pretty sure you don’t want to spend all of your practice time waiting for your lessons to download. If you find yourself without high-speed internet, your absolute best bet would be to pick up Learn and Master Guitar, which is our #1 pick for DVD guitar lessons.

Audio and video quality varies by instructor to instructor but is generally pretty good. One minor issue we had when going through the lessons were that the majority of the lessons on Guitar Tricks don’t have dual-camera views available which would have been a really nice feature. It’s also worth nothing that while the newer lessons that Guitar Tricks has produced have great audio and video quality, some of the older content isn’t quite as polished.

Extras:

Guitar Tricks provides some useful online and downloadable tools to help you play guitar better. They have an online JamStation (High-quality jam-tracks to play along with), a guitar tuner, and an advanced metronome. This software was well-developed and works great. The JamStation is a great feature but takes a while to load up (possibly pre-loading tracks?).

Buyer's Tip: The metronome that Guitar Tricks offers as a free download to its full access members actually sells separately on UltimateMetronome.com for $20. Yet another great reason to give GuitarTricks.com a try!

Support

If you need help with your membership, Guitar Tricks has both email and toll-free phone support available.

If you need help with your guitar playing, you can post your questions in their public guitar forum. If you’re a full-access member however, you’ll have the additional option of asking questions directly to some of Guitar Tricks’ teachers. Their community is very active and you shouldn’t have to wait long for a helping hand.

Ordering Information

Compared to other online lesson sites, Guitar Tricks’ monthly membership is a steal at $14.95. You can save an additional $25.00 or so by purchasing a one-year membership, but you’ll probably want to try it out for at least a month beforehand. You can order using a credit card, paypal or even by check if you prefer.

We found that Guitar Tricks does have a refund policy in place where if you aren’t satisfied with your membership for any reason, you can contact them within a 60-day period for your money-back.

Conclusion

With an exceptional price-point and plenty of good quality guitar lessons to get you going on your guitar-learning journey, Guitar Tricks is definitely worth a look. Just be prepared to spend a little extra time finding the lessons you want to take. Recommended.

Official Guitar Tricks Website