Infinite Guitar Review

Infinite Guitar

Tired of trying to learn guitar exclusively through books or boring online tutorials? Do you constantly find yourself wanting to go beyond the scope and level of detail where traditional lessons drop off and leave you hanging? If so you may have found a friend in InfiniteGuitar.com.

Infinite Guitar was created by guitarist Sean Conklin. Sean, with the help of 6 other talented guitar instructors has created a guitar lesson database that currently contains over 1,100 video guitar lessons with more being added regularly. These lessons are not just for newbies either – on the contrary, a large portion of the lessons are intended for intermediate and even advanced guitarists.

Much of the Infinite Guitar’s technology, methodology, and even site design was essentially borrowed from other online guitar membership sites that have been around a while such as Guitar Tricks and Jamplay.  In fact, the site’s founder Sean Conklin once was an instructor on GuitarTricks.com at one time. However, one element that differentiates Infinite Guitar is their policy to make their lessons more affordable than the competition.

If you are interested in surfing around InfiniteGuitar.com, they do have a free basic membership that will allow you access to 26 free guitar lessons as well as their general forum area.

Features

Since Infinite Guitar is a video learning site, we’ll start with the video. Some, but not all of the lessons are filmed in HD. The video quality you see is definitely much better than a lot of the videos you used to see on GuitarTricks.com for example. Infinite Guitar’s flash video player allows for a full-screen view which is pretty much essential when you are trying to play along from 3-5 feet away from the screen. Some videos do indeed feature multiple camera angles, but split views that show both the right and left hands simultaneously are sorely missing.

Unlike GuitarTricks.com, you can’t download these lessons to your computer. Therefore, if you want to repeat a particular lesson, your browser will have to re-download the video to your browser every revisit. Some people might find this annoying, but really, we can see why they did it this way since there’s always a real possibility of people downloading, then file-sharing the videos illegally. Better to be safe than sorry I guess.

Besides the video, many lessons contain supplemental content such as lesson text, tablature, diagrams and other visual aids to better illustrate what is being taught. If you want to print this supplemental material you can easily do so from right within the lesson.

One thing that makes these online membership sites so great is the interaction that’s encourage between the guitarists and the instructors. Infinite Guitar has a private “Ask the Instructor” forum that’s designed for just such interaction and allows members to ask questions of their teachers.

Another prominent bonus feature of Infinite Guitar is the Chord Finder, a piece of online software that allows you to pick any guitar chord and have it illustrated on a virtual fretboard and played for you using either a “clean” acoustic sound or a heavier electric guitar sound.

Site Navigation:  When you have a substantial collection of guitar video lessons in once place, a common problem is that it soon becomes hard to find what you lessons you want to watch. Infinite Guitar has addressed this in a few ways. First, you can use the “Lesson Links” main navigation menu bar to quickly surf over to a list of recently added lessons in several categories – Beginner, Intermediate, Advances, Styles, Tutorials, Technique, Theory, Scales, Chords, and Exercises. Also worth noting is that you can always “favorite” any guitar lesson you’re working for easy access later.

Secondly, there’s also a great advanced search feature called “lesson search” that allows you to filter your lesson search results by difficulty, focus, style, instructor, media type, etc. Let’s say you’re a new guitarist and want to find some good beginner tutorials on learning chords. The lesson search allows you to select “tutorials” from search type, “beginner” from difficulty level, and “chords” from the focus category. The amount of lessons that are available using the current search parameters appear in real-time which is a cool feature. Kudos to Infinite Guitar for making it easy for their members to find lessons that appeal to them.

If you want a more structured approach to your learning (generally a good idea by the way…), you can use Infinite Guitar’s “lesson plans” that collect individual lessons and tutorials (small lesson groups) and lays out a curriculum for you to follow. They have beginner, intermediate, as well as advanced lessons plans available. For example, the beginner lesson plan is divided up into sections such as, “First things to know”, “Your First Techniques”, “Let’s Learn Chords” “Scales and Exercises”, and “Basic Music Theory”. If you are a beginner this is definitely the place to start. Having said that, such an approach is not without its problems however. Sometimes the lessons can lack in continuity (especially when there are multiple instructors in the mix) and reveal gaps or holes in the teaching. Regardless, the lesson plans are a great (and necessary) feature.

Intermediate and more advanced guitarists may want to start by learning music in a particular genre. Infinite Guitar covers quite a few mainstream styles of guitar including rock, jazz, metal, blues, classical, funk, acoustic, fusion, latin, and country. They also have some song tutorials and “in the style of…” lessons posted, though there isn’t all that many popular songs available (most likely due to copyright issues).

Site Requirements: To fully utilize InfiniteGuitar.com, you’ll need a computer with an high-speed internet connection and the latest version of Adobe Flash ® player to view the videos and online guitar tools.

Support

We noticed that Sean Conklin and his team of guitar instructors are quite responsive to member inquiries and requests. For example, in the “Ask the Instructors” private forum most topics were replied to in a matter of hours.

We didn’t find a phone number on the site but they do have a supplied email form that you can use if the need arises.

Ordering Information

Infinite Guitar is supported by membership fees. You can purchase either a monthly, quarterly, or yearly plan and as you might expect the effective price per month decreases the longer the duration of the plan.  A monthly membership is $10.95, a quarterly membership works out to $9.50/mo., and a yearly membership equates to $8.25/mo.

Purchases can be made via all major credit cards as well as through PayPal, a very popular online payment processor.

Infinite Guitar’s refund policy is a lot more stringent than virtually every other guitar course we’ve reviewed on this site. If you order a Premium membership and decide it’s not for you, you have only 3 days to claim your refund.

Conclusion

Let’s be honest here. Infinite Guitar has a lot of good thing going for it. Great customer service, decent quality video lessons, and an inexpensive price-point come together to make Infinite Guitar a good resource to increase your “playing power” on the cheap.

However, the only thing that keeps us from giving Infinite Guitar a higher rating is that there are other online membership sites that do the same thing, only better. (We mean better in terms of better content, quality, instruction, teacher-diversification, and extra site features.) If you want a better idea of what we mean, read our comparison of the “Big Three” guitar lesson membership sites below.

InfiniteGuitar.com vs. GuitarTricks.com vs. Jamplay.com
Here is a simplistic comparison between the 3 major online guitar video lesson membership websites. We hope to have a better site-by-site comparison up in the near future.

Pricing: On a monthly basis for both the monthly and yearly plans, Infinite Guitar is a couple dollars cheaper than Guitar Tricks per month, and substantially less than Jamplay. However, Jamplay’s yearly package is not much more expensive than Infinite Guitar’s.

Lesson Material and Instructors: Guitar Tricks has roughly 3x the quantity of lessons that Infinite Guitar provides, and Jamplay.com has roughly 12x that amount. Jamplay also provides the largest and most diverse pool of instructors that you’ll find on one site. Guitar Tricks comes second while Infinite Guitar currently only has seven instructors.

Lesson Quality: Infinite Guitar has good, though not exceptional video and lesson quality. GuitarTricks.com’s lessons vary greatly from lesson to lesson though they are starting to exclusively add better quality lessons to their database. Jamplay wins big in this category as their lesson are filmed in HD and are usually filmed with multiple camera angles and split views – an essential part of learning guitar.

Official Infinite Guitar Website