Guitar Tricks Review

Guitar Tricks

Founded in the late 1990’s, 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.

As of this writing, GuitarTricks.com has a free 14-day trial membership available which grants full access to their massive video guitar lesson library. For those new to online video lessons, this is an excellent way to see how you like them.

A GuitarTricks.com membership is a good option for beginners, though many of the lessons are for intermediate to advanced guitarists as well. Regardless of skill level, guitarists are sure to find plenty of lessons to keep them busy. One strength of GuitarTricks.com is that they are one of the few websites that offer licensed song lessons from artists such as Fall Out Boy, 3 Doors Down, Five for Fighting, Nirvana, and the Eagles among others.

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 probably 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. While the lessons tend to be on the shorter side, there are quite a few of them!

Many of the lessons include supplemental material like lesson transcripts and tablature, which are accessible without having to leave the lesson area, a great feature. We really appreciated the ability to view all relevant lesson information in one place.

Guitar Tricks’ online lessons are in flash video format, which means that you can watch them from any computer or device as long as it has the latest version of Adobe ® Flash player installed (a free download). One cool thing 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 will need to 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 of GuitarTricks.com allows you to take the lessons with you on the fly, say, on your laptop, even when you don’t have internet access.

Video guitar lessons are available in both high and low resolutions. Buyer's Tip: If you lack a hi-speed internet connection, we 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 hi-speed internet, your absolute best bet would be to pick up Gibson's Learn and Master Guitar, which is our #1 pick for DVD guitar lessons.

Audio and video quality varies from instructor to instructor, but is generally pretty good. One minor complaint we had when navigating through the site, was that the majority of the lessons on Guitar Tricks didn't have dual-camera views available which is a really helpful feature. It’s also worth nothing that while the newer lessons that Guitar Tricks has released have great audio and video quality, some of their older content isn’t quite as polished.

Extras:

Guitar Tricks provides several 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 is well-developed and effective. The JamStation is a great feature but takes a while to load (possibly due to pre-loading tracks).

Buyer's Tip: The metronome that Guitar Tricks offers as a free download to its full access members used to sell 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. Full-access members 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 response.

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 may 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 discovered 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 to get 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. Recommended.

Official Guitar Tricks Website