Which Online Guitar Lessons Are Right For You?

If you play the guitar or would like to and have spent any time looking on the Internet for online courses and lessons, you may well have found it a pretty depressing experience. There's no shortage of lessons and courses out there, it's just that sorting the good ones from the dross seems almost impossible.

Visit the websites of these courses and you'll find paragraph after paragraph of hype, promising you the earth, telling you that if only you buy this course or sign-up for this site, you'll be transformed from guitar zero to guitar hero in a matter of weeks. Worse still, if you try and find honest, hype-free reviews of these products you'll find that most of the sites that turn up in the first few pages of Google's search results for the product name followed by 'review' offer little more than a rehashing of the original sites. Many of these so-called reviewers haven't even tried out the product they claim to review, let alone written a careful and honest appraisal.

The one piece of good news is that nearly all these courses, including the likes of Jamorama, Guitar Scale Mastery, and Riff Master Pro Slow Down, offer a money-back guarantee if you don't like what you get when you buy. But that still leaves you with the task of laboriously buying and downloading one after the other in order to find which one's right for you.

So, what should you do? The first thing is to be honest about your own skill level. There's no point buying a course for advanced players if you're a complete beginner, and vice versa. Next, decide whether you work better from reading something that's written down, or watching a lesson on video. Thirdly, prepare to practice. No matter what they promise, none of these programs will make yo a better guitar player without hours and hours of effort on your part.

To find out which lessons are right for you, forget about searching Google for reviews. Head off to your favourite guitar forums and ask there if anyone has any experience for the courses you're interested in. Go to Yahoo Answers or AllExperts.com and post a question. And head to Technorati and find some blogs written by guitar players, or better still, teachers, and ask their opinion.

Like improving your playing, these research techniques take time and effort, but the reward is that you won't spend hours downloading courses which don't deliver what they promised and then claiming a refund. It'll be well-worth it in the long run.

Robert Armstorong is a contributor to Online Guitar Lessons Report, a website which publishes consumer reports on online guitar lessons and tutorial packages.

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