Jamplay Review

Launched in February of 2007, Jamplay has quickly grown to become the largest video guitar lesson site in the world. Currently, Jamplay contains over 600 hours of high-definition video guitar lessons, with more being added every week. Jamplay employs 49 different guitar instructors that each specialize in teaching different styles of guitar. This variety represents an enormous advantage that Jamplay has over traditional guitar lessons where you learn from only one individual with a particular teaching style and limited stylistic exposure and experience.

Jamplay is a great choice for guitarist of all skill levels and interests, from the complete beginner to the advanced guitarist. It doesn’t matter whether you’re into fingerstyle, jazz, rock, or blues since all of these genres and many more are taught at Jamplay.com. It’s also worth mentioning that Jamplay is perfect for younger students and kids.

To get an idea of the quality of lessons that Jamplay produces, we suggest that you take a look at several of the free guitar lessons that they have available on their site.

Lesson Dashboard: Jamplay's lesson dashboard allows you to track your progress, view supplemental material and even add your own notes to the lesson.

Features

How the Course is Organized:

With more than 600 hours of video lessons currently on Jamplay, you might think that you’d have a difficult time finding the lessons you want to take. Fortunately, this is not the case, as Jamplay’s member’s area is easy extremely easy to navigate, simple to use, and free of clutter. For those new to the site we recommend that you take a look at the "getting started" section where you’ll find a video tour to get you familiar with site features and content.

The main course is divided into 3 phases: Beginners, Genre Teaching, and Learning Songs.

In phase 1, you'll learn all you need to know about the basics of playing guitar such as how the guitar functions, hand positions, strumming techniques, your first chords, barre & power chords, and other essential guitar topics.

Data from Infinite Guitar and Guitar Tricks is approximate based on average lesson length and number of posted lessons. Data from 04/01/10

Phase 2 allows you to focus on learning music in your preferred genre. Genres taught include: rock, classical, blues, fingerstyle, metal, Hawaiian slack key, bluegrass, jazz, country, funk and Celtic guitar. Phase 2 also contains skill-building lessons where you can learn specialized guitar techniques such as how to read music, music theory, ear training, how to play lead guitar, how to sing while playing guitar, and how to create a home studio.

In phase 3 you'll learn some of your favorite songs taught by various Jamplay instructors. They currently have over 180+ songs in their library and are adding more every week by member request. Songs include hits from Green Day, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin, Coldplay, John Mayer, the Beatles and more. All songs are given a difficulty rating so you can see at a glance what songs you should try.

For those who want to learn guitar in the style of famous shredders like Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones , Jamplay has a series of lessons in their "Artist Series" section where you can do just that.

Lesson Format

Teacher Page: Easily view sets of lessons by a particular teacher.

Jamplay's video lessons are produced in flash video format. Each video lesson, which ranges from 15 -60 minutes is filmed in a studio in high-definition with multiple cameras so that you can see what each hand is doing. The videos aren't downloadable, but this is of course understandable, as piracy would become an issue.

All of Jamplay's lessons have supplemental content and lesson tools which are available right from within the lesson page, such as tablature and notation. If you wish, you can even print these supplemental lesson materials. Other tools available within the lessons include a handy metronome, a comment section where you can ask questions of the instructor or other students, a progress tracker, and a place to write down your own notes.

To address the difficulties that users with slower internet connections will face when viewing the video lessons, Jamplay has recorded the videos in 3-5 different resolutions, depending on the lesson (Low-Quality, Medium-Quality, High-Quality, and Super High-Quality, and 720p-Quality). Another smart feature is the lessons are broken down into chapters since a single 1 hour-long video may have problems streaming on some computers. Despite these measures, we don't recommend Jamplay for super-slow-speed internet users. If you're unfortunate enough to only have a basic dial-up internet connection, a much better choice would be to get the Gibson's Learn and Master Guitar DVD course.

Community

One of the neat surprises we discovered about Jamplay is their vibrant and active community of guitar students from all over the world. The forums are constantly busy with activity with plenty of guitar talk going on at all times. Like other social websites like Facebook or Myspace, you can easily create your own online profile, upload pictures, interact with other Jamplay members, make friends, and chat live with other Jamplay members 24/7.

Song Lessons: Jamplay offers licensed song lessons from major music studios.

Extra Tools and Features

With your Jamplay membership, you will also have access to some professionally developed online tools to aid you in your guitar playing. You'll get a full-featured online metronome, guitar tuner, access to high-quality backing tracks, a lick and riff library, a gigantic chord library, and a scale library with plenty of video demonstrations. These tools have to be seen to be fully appreciated, and simply blew us away with how well they were designed.

Another feature recently added to the site is the Jamplay Games section. Here you can take a break and play games that teach you fretboard memorization, note identification, pitch recognition and music notation. We found the games are well-designed and very effective learning tools.

If all that that isn't enough, Jamplay's membership area also contains exclusive video of artist interviews, videos of artist performances, articles on the guitar, and guitar gear product reviews.

Follow the Teacher: Easily see what the instructor is doing at all times with multiple camera angles.

Support

If you ever need to talk to a live person at Jamplay, you have numerous options available to you. You can always contact Jamplay via the traditional methods via phone or email, or you can send a private message to a staff member in the forums, or drop into JamChat (Jamplay's chat feature), where you'll usually find at least one site admin that can assist you with whatever problems you're having. We can personally attest to Jamplay's first-class customer service.

Jamplay's support even goes a step or two further than most with an exclusive feature called "Video Q&A" where Jamplay members can ask guitar questions and get a video lesson in response. This personalized support raises the bar in terms of online student-teacher interaction to a whole new level. When we last checked, there were hundreds upon hundreds of video Q&A responses posted.

Ordering Information

Jamplay comes with a 7-Day 100% money-back guarantee. If you aren't completely satisfied with your membership, you can contact Jamplay's customer service within 7 days of ordering, and you'll receive a full refund.

For a limited time, a Jamplay membership is selling for $19.95/mo. If you purchase a longer subscription the price drops significantly. Payment plans currently available are monthly at $19.95/mo., quarterly at $16.67/mo., and a yearly plan at only $11.66/mo. Definitely check if there are any discounts or coupons that Jamplay.com has available before purchasing. (If there are, they will be listed higher up on the right hand side of this page.)

Our recommendation is that you purchase a one month subscription to see what you think, then if you like what you see, you can upgrade to a longer subscription at the reduced price. Jamplay accepts all major credit cards as well as PayPal. With Jamplay, there is no commitment and you are free to cancel at any time.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a web-based online guitar lesson program, you simply won't find a better one out there than Jamplay… Period. Our #1 pick for guitar lessons and highly recommended!