Choosing the Best Online Guitar Lessons – Which Services comes out on Top?

There are all kinds of options when you’re looking for online guitar lessons. Free videos, membership sites, and ebooks are just a few if the choices. Which are the best online guitar lessons?

Unfortunately, free lessons aren’t very reliable. You never know what the quality of the instructor is and if you’ll be able to get more lessons from them in the future. This puts free videos out of the running for the best option.

The old saying “you get what you pay for” is pretty spot on with guitar lessons. The best lessons are going to be those you do pay a few bucks for, but provide great content from qualified instructors.

The best method of paying for online guitar lessons is with a monthly membership website such as JamPlay or Guitar Tricks.

These are the top two online guitar lesson websites online, and we’re going to compare them to crown the winner for Best online guitar lessons.

JamPlay Vs GuitarTricks

Both of these websites offer a lot of lesson content. There are lessons for all skill levels and styles, and each site uses teachers who specialize in the area they’re teaching.

Bot JamPlay and Gutiar Tricks offer a private members support website where you can ask questions, get feedback and support if you get stuck.

On the surface both services appear to be pretty similar. In order to crown a winner we’re going to have to take a really close look at the features and benefits of both sites.

Lesson Content

The quality of the instruction is top notch both from JamPlay and Guitar Tricks. While Guitar Tricks doesn’t publicly list how many hours of lessons they have available, JamPlay is up to 386 hours and counting.

The lessons inside both sites are logically divided up by style, genre and skill level. Learning is easy, all you need to do is follow along with one of the logical lesson plans created by the qualified instructors.

One of the features I appreciate most about JamPlay is their lesson tracking system. This system reminds you each time you login of what lessons you’ve watched, where you last left off, and provides an area in each lesson for you to take notes and leave comments. This personalizes the experience a little bit more then Guitar Tricks.

Teachers

One of the great things about learning guitar online is you get to learn from several different teachers. Guitar Tricks has a whopping 60 different teachers while JamPlay comes in at 34.

It’s important to have different instructors to choose from. This ensures you find a teaching style that works for you. I don’t know how important it is that you have 60+ or 30+ teachers to choose from, or if it will make that much of a difference, but no question Guitar Tricks has JamPlay beat in this category.

The quality of the teachers at both sites is top notch. Both JamPlay and Guitar Tricks have taken the time to find only quality instructors to teach their lessons.

Support

Both sites offer private membership areas where you can ask questions to teachers of specific lessons. This ensures you don’t get stuck on a particular topic and can receive feedback to stay motivated.

JamPlay has taken this one step further and has integrated video answers into their support system. They offer a video question & answer section on their site where you can pose a question to a teacher and they’ll provide their answer in video format (if the answer requires enough explanation of course).

Sometimes answering a question by typing doesn’t get the point across. So a video answer takes down this barrier.

On top of the video Q&A’s JamPlay also offers daily live webcam sessions. These sessions happen 3-4 times each day with a different teacher from their staff. The sessions last about an hour and any JamPlay members can join the sessions to ask questions or pick up a few new tips.

Supplemental and Practice Materials

Both JamPlay and Guitar Tricks provide some additional tools and materials beyond online lesson videos. Primarily these tools are used to help you practice or learn more effectively.

In the Guitar Tricks members area there are 200+ backing tracks you can play along with, an online metronome and a tuner.

JamPlay also offers backing tracks, metronome and a tuner along with a complete chord & scale library, guitar games, and as mentioned above the daily live webcam sessions.

Pricing

I feel that JamPlay has Guitar Tricks beat out for the best online guitar lessons, but of course like I said you get what you pay for.

Guitar Tricks costs $14.95 a month for their basic membership while JamPlay is $19.95 month. There are discounts available from JamPlay if you sign up for more then one month at a time.

I’ve been provided a 25% discount coupon for JamPlay which you can use for your first month. Using the coupon you will pay the same cost your first as a membership at Guitar Tricks. Simply use coupon code 275B25 when you sign up and you’ll pay only $14.95 for your first month.

With the extra practice tools and features at JamPlay I feel they offer a more complete guitar instruction community. While it is $5 more a month I think the live web cam lessons pay for that on their own. Give JamPlay a try for at least a month and use the 25% off coupon code 275B25 to pay only $14.95. There’s no long term contracts so you can cancel at anytime.