Steve PMHGuitar Tricks: They say they’ve coached over 4 million members, and that they’re the most fun way to learn guitar. But are they?
With sales offering value bundles at dramatically reduced prices, they’re also one of the most affordable guitar teaching websites around.
We’re going to take a look at their affordability, their teaching style, their presentation, and their videos and come away with a verdict on how well they follow through on their promises for teaching guitar.
And while they’re at it, we might just learn a few things about the Guitar Tricks system.
Guitar Tricks and the Online Instruction Environment
For aspiring guitarists looking for a guitar teacher online, Guitar Tricks promises the best songs and the easiest system.
It accomplishes this by breaking up styles into levels after a two-level fundamentals course that teaches how to play guitar by breaking up technique into basics, the most common approach.
The beginner quickly learns to hold the instrument, read tablature and learn to carry a tune in a bucket, and all the basic pieces of guitar and music theory.
Guitar Tricks’s Fundamentals 1 section starts by getting you through basic open chords before you go on to Fundamentals 2, getting you to power chords, chord progressions, and every beginner goes through these lessons to learn the basics of playing guitar.
Once you’re through the fundamentals and have a good basis on these techniques, the “class” splits off into four technique-based subclasses, each with a similar pair of levels. Blues, Country, Rock, and Acoustic. Guitar Tricks also offers custom lesson plans for a discount.
Going beyond guitar theory, Guitar Tricks also operates the website “30 Day Singer” on its network, and since I was a singer in high school but haven’t had that kind of exposure in a while either, that’s another point of interest to check out.
Once You Sign Up?
Guitar Tricks is a helpful site in that it includes free content when you sign up for the site, before you’ve started paying for their lessons.
In a handful of beginner lessons, they take you from quick tuning and playing your first notes, through simple chords, rhythm, and strumming patterns.
The free content is a significant enticement to hang around on GuitarTricks and learn what it has to offer before you decide to take the plunge and start learning your guitar from them.
If you’ve come from other sites like Fender Play, you know that free lessons can be a good way to judge the quality of instruction on a website without committing.
You’ve Decided to Stick Around
Setting yourself up in the paid system is as simple as virtually any other ecommerce website. GuitarTricks uses a standard commerce interface that lets you buy your lessons with confidence.
The annual contract is a very good deal, all things considered – if you’re thinking about signing up, you may want to set up on the annual plan to have the peace of mind that you know you’ve already paid for the next 12 months of lessons ahead of time.
Even if life circumstances change, you still have your music around. Once you’ve started your subscription, your formal lessons begin immediately.
If there’s a downside to the full site subscription, it’s that some of the oldest lessons are in 480p standard definition. This can be a bit of a jolt for people used to widescreen 720 or 1080p videos. But it’s not a serious problem overall. Just something you should know: Some of the videos are a bit on the older side.
Feedback Isn’t Just Something From a Microphone?
Well, the catch is, like most online lesson systems, the beginner guitar course of Guitar Tricks can’t watch your technique for bad habits.
This is why for beginners, I will strongly recommend supplementing your main guitar tuition with GuitarTricks or another online learning system, rather than trying to learn the instrument entirely without an expert in the room.
A story about myself: Through learning mostly online, I failed over my first several years of guitar lessons to realize that I was holding my guitar picks pretty much entirely wrong, which stopped me from being able to play quick notes.
Because I was holding picks parallel to the strings, and strumming more or less perpendicular, I couldn’t reverse my stroke quickly and it became difficult to follow along my online lessons when they started speeding up.
You can guess what happened then: I stopped playing as often, and then I stopped playing entirely. Because of a technical error that a live instructor caught and corrected within five minutes.
Although some online reviews will recommend GuitarTricks in place of a live instructor, because of this experience, I will always recommend online lessons as an adjunct to a live instructor.
There is an option to get feedback on your playing by sending in videos. I’ve done this but with the instructor not necessarily having the best view of both hands, it can be a little hit-or-miss on correcting technique mistakes.
Of course, my first live instructor didn’t get that mistake either, so there’s that. What you can do is keep plugging, and try to correct problems as you see them.
Another catch, though this is in common with plenty of other sites, is that once you advance past a certain level, the amount of content offered by GuitarTricks slows to a trickle.
You’re going to still find some content at that point, but, like competitors like Fender Play, GuitarTricks is mostly aimed at beginner-level guitarists – and this is partly because the beginner guitarist is more likely to need structured lessons while a more advanced player will need a live partner that they can work with.
So this is another example of what I said before: GuitarTricks, like other websites, is a potent adjunct to a live teacher, but not a full replacement.
Song Lessons Are Great
One of the most potent advantages for any guitar instruction website is their catalog of instructional songs.
Guitar Tricks differs from competitor Fender Play in that they are not affiliated with a guitar producer (Fender), and so they’re not going to have problems attracting songs by artists who are affiliated with other guitar manufacturers. Fender, for example, lost the opportunity to have John Mayer songs on their website’s instructional section when he bolted for PRS in 2017.
So their list of artists is as eclectic as you would hope, including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Clapton, Taylor Swift, the Beatles, and more across the universe of music. And they’re not just rock-focused but have many styles. GuitarTricks’s song lesson catalog is a real strength for them, with over 1500 songs in their library from a global selection of styles.
OK we have the catch and the online environment. Now what about the competition?
GuitarTricks is a highly beginner-focused and structured site. While they have options for higher-level guitarists, it’s not what they specialize in, and they’re going to fall behind other sites that cater to higher-level players.
Among the best sites out there as alternatives to GuitarTricks include TrueFire, TheGuitarLesson, and Fender Play. Of these three alternatives, I have been a member of Fender Play since 2018.
TrueFire offers a wider array of skill level lessons than GuitarTricks. TrueFire’s beginner lessons, however, are not as good as GuitarTricks. Their videos are excellent, and their instructors are all professionals, giving you access to a reasonably-priced array of lessons for the aspiring professional guitarist or the serious hobbyist. Keith Williams of FiveWattWorld endorses TrueFire; I cannot because of its focus on the advanced guitarist over the beginner. If you’re not a beginner, maybe check out TrueFire. If you are, maybe it’ll be right for you in a year or two.
Fender Play is the lesson arm of guitar manufacturing giant Fender Music Instrument Company, and I’ve been using Fender Play off and on since 2018. It, like GuitarTricks, is aimed at the beginning guitarist; it (unsurprisingly!) shares a few instructors with GuitarTricks, such as Barrett Wilson, because of this. Fender Play has a different structure in its instruction, siloing students into their preferred genre from the beginning of their program, although all programs share almost all of their level 1 and some of their level 2 lessons, making the distinction academic at the lowest levels.
I don’t recommend Fender Play as much because of its mass popularity. Because a free month of Fender Play is packaged in with every Squier instrument, it’s a bit crowded with students and can be hard to get the attention of an instructor. Their “Office Hours” streaming on Facebook and YouTube is a definite plus, though. Overall, I do recommend it. Just not quite as much as GuitarTricks.
TheGuitarLesson, offered by Tom Fontana, is an option but not quite as highly recommended as the first three. If you’re not into GuitarTricks, you don’t think you’re ready for TrueFire, and you don’t want to hitch yourself to a major corporation’s ecosystem, maybe consider TGL. But overall, there’s just too much competition out there that’s at a higher level to make this a real competitor to the above options.
What’s the Guarantee Provided by GuitarTricks?
Unsubscribing is a matter of taking your membership off of billing status. GuitarTricks offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, which does require you to cancel and request a refund from their billing department. If you signed up on Google Play or the Apple App Store, go through their respective processes. Apple is a bit trickier because they perform all of the billing for their ecosystem.
The 60-day unsubscribe policy is notably generous for a site of this nature. Compared to competitors like TrueFire which gives a 14-day grace period and Fender Play which offers no grace period, the 60-day grace period of GuitarTricks means that you effectively have two entire months as a “free” trial period in which to give the site a full, top-to-bottom evaluation before deciding to trust them with your money.
The Verdict
As a long-time Fender Play veteran, I’ve been burned out on that website for a couple of years (and my subscription may have lapsed, because I never updated it when my old debit card expired).
I’ve been looking for a new site to reignite my passion for the instrument that sits mockingly on its stand in my home office, and GuitarTricks might be the one. I’m looking forward to continuing my lessons with this site.
If you’re either a brand-new beginner clutching your first guitar in your hands and wondering what to do next, or a burned-out digital orphan of one of the web’s other guitar instruction sites, consider giving GuitarTricks.com a try.
Its instruction style isn’t exactly a breakthrough or a revolution, but sometimes you don’t really want a revolution, you just want somebody new. And if you’re in that space, where the thing you’ve been doing feels like a rut, getting into a new lane can unlock new creativity and passion. Good luck, digital guitarist.
