Our Guitar Tricks review needs to begin with the fact that GuitarTricks.com is the oldest video guitar lessons website on the Internet. It was established by Jon Broderick in 1998, thus they have a lot of experience in delivering online guitar lessons. The website itself is a membership based website, which contains more than 11,000 video guitar lessons, which are taught by 45 different instructors. They have 24 free lessons available, if you want to check out the style of the lessons before becoming a member.
GuitarTricks Quick Review Sheet
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Ease of use - 9/109/10
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Quality - 8/108/10
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Support - 9/109/10
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Price - 10/1010/10
Summary
GuitarTricks is an online guitar lesson site, which has lessons for beginners to advanced guitarists. It’s major strength is it’s well structured lessons for beginners, and it’s repertoire of popular song lessons.
Disclosure: The reviews written on this site are carried out by professionals, who receive compensation from the companies whose products get reviewed. We test each product thoroughly and recommend only what we believe to be the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.
During our review of GuitarTricks, we found out that the website is absolutely massive. There are lessons covering all different guitar styles and levels of playing, so it caters to everyone from the absolute beginner to highly experienced players as well.
The lessons are organized and categorized in several different ways, which is a must, given the number of lessons available. You can search according to skill level (absolute beginner, beginner, easy, intermediate, advanced and extreme), which saves a lot of time because you don’t have to search through lessons that are too easy, too hard, or just not your thing.
A great feature for intermediate-advanced players is that the search allows you to find lessons in the styles of famous guitarists. This section of GuitarTricks.com is called “By Inspiration,” and it lets you find played by stars from Carlos Santana, to Chet Atkins, to Eddie Van Halen to Jack Johnson, and more.
(Updated on Nov/21/2024)
You can get full access to all of the lessons on the site for free for 2 weeks!
The lesson formats offered at GuitarTricks.com vary from quick licks and riffs, to multipart tutorials, to larger courses. Most of the lessons contain HD video of exceptional quality, if you have broadband (otherwise they stream too slow).
Since the website was born back in 1998, the quality of the lessons vary. The older lessons don’t have that good video and sound quality, but we only experienced this on about 1-3% of all of the lessons during our review, the rest are in HD. Each lesson has reference material, such as tabs and chord charts, which can all be downloaded in pdf format for easy printing.
Most of the lessons are by independent guitar teachers, which also means the audio and video quality of the lessons will vary. GuitarTricks has a quality-control review process in place to keep low quality videos from being added, so none of the lessons are bad, just some are better than others.
GuitarTricks.com Screenshots
What you’ll learn at GuitarTricks.com:
Styles Covered:
- Acoustic
- Alternative
- Bluegrass
- Blues
- Classical
- Country
- Folk
- Funk
- Jazz
- Metal
- Rock
- Rockabilly
- Surf
- World
By Inspiration
- A.C. Jobim
- Al Di Meola
- Albert Lee
- Andres Segovia
- Angus Young
- B.B. King
- Brian May
- Brian Setzer
- Brent Mason
- Carlos Santana
- Chet Atkins
- Danny Gatton
- David Gilmour
- Django Reinhardt
- Eddie Van Halen
- Eric Clapton
- Frank Gambale
- Gary Moore
- Jack Johnson
- James Taylor
- Jason Becker
- Jimi Hendrix
- Jimmy Page
- Joe Satriani
- John Mayer
- John Petrucci
- Jorma Kaukonen
- Kirk Hammett
- N. Bettencourt
- Paul Gilbert
- Richie Blackmore
- Shawn Colvin
- Stanley Jordan
- Steve Vai
- Steve Wariner
- S.R.V.
- Taj Mahal
- The Edge
- Yngwie
- Zakk Wylde
Ease of Use
The GuitarTricks.com website is easy to navigate, and the search and categorize function works superbly. There is also a structured method of learning, which relies on a 3 step study course, targeting different levels of experience:
1. Fundamentals – For Beginners
Suitable for the absolute beginner guitarist, which takes you from the moment you pick up the guitar all the way to the forming and strumming chords. No previous knowledge is required, since the beginner lessons are all step-by-step based and thoroughly explained.
You’ll become a well-rounded guitarist by learning the lessons in this section, since after the very basics, you’ll also cover scales, reading music notation and tabs, minor chords, song structure, and barre chords.
2. Style Courses – For Beginners to Intermediate
After you are comfortable with the basics, you can move on to learn different styles: blues, country, rock. Each style is explained thoroughly, as well as the techniques that you would use to play each style of music. Another great feature we found was that since each style requires different gear, amp setings, and generally a different tone, Guitar Tricks walks you through getting the right tone for the given style as well.
3. Selected Topics – For Intermediate to Advanced
Once you are at an intermediate to advanced stage, the “Selected topics” part of the website will teach you advanced techniques, styles, and also how to play like your favorite famous guitarists, such as Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, Zakk Wylde, etc. (see complete list above)
What You Get with GuitarTricks.com
The site offers 2 levels of membership at GuitarTricks, the free basic membership and the full access membership.
Basic Membership
- 24 free video lessons
Full Access Subscription
- More than 11,000 video guitar lessons
- Full access to video tutorials and reference material
- Downloadable Guitar Tricks FLV player to view video lessons on your computer if you don’t want to go online
- Technique reference library
- Many instructors teaching you (45)
- Jam Station (150 jam tracks)
- Large community site
- Online metronome and guitar tuner
- Personalization features (bookmark the things you like, history of what you’ve watched, progress indicator, etc.)
- Quick support
Pros:
- Huge database of video lessons, enough for a lifetime, with new lessons being added weekly.
- Many ways you can browse and search for lessons (skill level, inspiration, tutor, style).
- One of the best features we found during our review of Guitar Tricks is that videos on the site are all downloadable, and you get a free offline video player to view them with.
- Very diverse in skill level, catering to guitarists at all playing levels.
- Very affordable pricing (only $10.75 a month with the annual membership)
Cons:
- Some of the older videos, produced back in 1998-2000 have bad lighting and not the greatest sound quality. These account for maximum 1-3% of the videos on the site.
Support Services of GuitarTricks.com
E-mail, telephone, forum
Setup/Compatibility
Their online site will play videos on your PC, Mac, or mobile device. They have an independent FLV player for Windows PCs so that you can view downloaded videos from the site.
Warranty
Their warranty includes an excellent 60-day 100% money back guarantee, so if you are not satisfied with the lessons, you can ask for a full refund within 60 days of becoming a paying member.
Price
- NEW: 2 week free trial at GuitarTricks >>
- $14.95/month – Sale alert! Regular price is $19.95!
- $129/year
Gift Certificates also available, if you want to give them to your loved ones as a gift. The recipient will get the gift certificate via email.
Conclusion
In conclusion of our review of GuitarTricks.com, we can say that GuitarTricks is a huge video guitar lesson database, which is suitable for all player skill levels. Because of the wide variety of material available in the website, it might be tempting to skip around, which could cause you to miss some necessary skill lessons. Guitar Tricks is a incredibly affordable online video guitar lessons site with many helpful tools that are of true benefit to guitar students, therefore it comes with our highest recommendations.
GuitarTricks is a huge video guitar lesson database, suitable for all player skill levels and is incredibly affordable.
I bought a membership a couple of months ago, and am still very satisfied. The lessons are very good and you can pause and go back as often as you like.
There is more stuff on there than you’ll ever be able to get through, and they keep adding new guitar lessons all the time. You can download a lot of extra things from each lesson, in fact if you download everything you’ll be running out of ink very quickly 🙂
I play electric, mostly rock and metal, and really want to learn blues. there are a bunch of blues guitar lessons at guitar tricks, thats what I use it for right now. great site, has lots and lots of material.
wow, this was one of the best, really detailed review of guitartricks I’ve found so far, seems like a good online guitar lesson site.
Hello Everybody,
I have a question to the editor or to someone who could help. I’m thinking of signing up to the guitar-tricks site, I’m somewhat experienced and want to improve my acoustic guitar skills. Will the site be of help in my endeavour?
Thanks
John
Hi John,
As you can see in our review, GuitarTricks.com offers many lessons on playing the acoustic guitar, and I definitely think it will be of help to you and allow you to advance your playing. I would suggest you sign up and check out the acoustic guitar lessons, and if you aren’t satisfied with them, just ask for your money back within 60 days, GuitarTricks will refund the total amount.
I really appreciate the chance to read a review of a guitar lessons site, before I sign up.
I have been looking around for this info for quite a long time and finally happened upon your blog! Thanks for all the great tips, this site rocks!
I can never get in to the site after paying my money.cant find a # to call.I think so far (it’s shit)
Your password is sent via email, it probably ended up in your spam inbox. Their number is 866-216-3786 by the way.
These reviews are repasted everywhere and a primary difference always given between GuitarTricks and JamPlay is the price. This being the case, it is worth noting that JamPlay also has a yearly subscription offer which lowers the price substantially. The reviewer noted that the annual membership brings the monthly fee down to $10.75. I don’t believe it was mentioned in the JamPlay review (at least not when I read it) that the annual fee there brings the monthly fee down to about $11.66. Additionally, it is relatively easy to find a 10% of coupon code for any membership at JamPlay which brings the monthly fee down around $10.50!
The point is, don’t be too swayed by reviewers talking about price being a major factor between the two when it is not. Check them both out on trial, maybe even invest in a month of each, and then decide what to do from there.
Good website! I really love how it is easy on my eyes and the data are well written. I’m wondering how I could be notified when a new post has been made. I have subscribed to your RSS feed which must do the trick! Have a nice day!
Thank you for every other informative web site. The place else could I am getting that type of info written in such a perfect manner? I’ve a venture that I am just now operating on, and I’ve been at the glance out for such information.
joined last night recieved confirmation havent been able to connect to guitartricks.com been tryingfor over eight hours ????
Your password was sent to you via email, it might have ended up in your spam inbox. You can give them a call to get things going though, their number is 866-216-3786.
I’ve just bought a monthly membership, but it’s great, so I think I’m gonna upgrade to a yearly one, it’s cheaper in the long run. Thanks for the review, it helped be decide.
I tend not to write a great deal of remarks, but i did some searching and wound up here GuitarTricks Review, User Complaints and Feedback – LearnMusicEasy.com.
And I actually do have some questions for you if you don’t mind.
Is it only me or does it look as if like a few of these comments look as if they are coming from brain dead visitors?
😛 And, if you are posting at other sites, I would like to follow everything fresh you have to post.
Could you list of the complete urls of all your community
pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
I was recommended this web site by my cousin. I’m not sure whether this post is written by him as no
one else know such detailed about my problem. You’re incredible!
Thanks!
I am kinda skeptical, Because websites tend to be scamming people a lot, and if you lose money or give them your card info, Bam, you’ve been suckered and they have access, and what can you do? it’s all on a computer and they are located half way around the world, and then at the top in the disclaimer, it says they have been paid to write reviews, so you can’t really find any honest reviews about them rather it’s worth it or not, Hell I don’t know what to do now, I just want an honest review on someone that was a beginner when they tried it and see how it helped them.
Hi James, we do get compensated for reviews, but this does not change anything. If a service is bad, we’ll say so. There are lots of providers out there, and we are vocal about the ones we don1t recommend.
You can rest assured GuitarTricks is not a scam. During our reviews, we even make sure they honor their refund by creating a test account, subscribing, and asking for the refund. They sent it without questioning anything.
I have been a GuitarTricks.com (GTC) member for just shy of a month. I was an intermediate player until about 35 years ago when life took me in other directions. Now 65, I’m about to retire and want to return to enjoy playing … and maybe even making music far beyond what I knew back in the late 70s. Today’s online tools make immersion learning possible like at no time before.
Because after so many years and a couple of injuries my fretting hand was dead, I started GTC at the very beginning … and have since plodded and still plod through every single-string chord and simple melody with Lisa McCormick the Core Learning System (CLS). I have found that the CLS requires utmost discipline on the part of the the learner. Yes, especially if one has ever played before, even at the most basic levels, it is hard to not want to jump ahead or get distracted in to learning to strum a bunch of songs to impress yourself, friends and family. There is a way to do this without breaking off CLS, but don’t put the CLS aside and delude yourself to believe you are “advancing.’ If you do, you’ll impede picking up new skills and optimizing what you’re paying GTC to teach you! Even while still at the fundamental lessons, moving into Guitar Fundamentals II, I admit that I am learning basic concepts and theory that I never picked up when I played three+ decades ago.
Lisa teaches a ‘Learning Process’ of five steps during your daily learning, which also includes spending some time going anywhere you want for a half hour or so to have some fun as part of your learning routine. This is where you can off-ramp from CLS for a little while but that should only be briefly, before you merge back onto the track return to the CLS.
The basics have also helped me build my hand musculature back to usability … and I can hit Fs and D7s all day long, and hammer a couple of notes (here I again admit that this was based on latent knowledge from years back). … but then I suck it up and get back to my lessons as designed, knowing that in a year, I’ll be so much better than I ever was in 1979 … and onward.
For this reason, I rate GuitarTricks.com as 9.8 out of 10.0. The only frustration is that I sometimes feel the instructor becomes a bit too analogous and over-explanatory when teaching a concept which could take five minutes and it it creates impatience.