Ebay Guitar Lessons: Part II

I had a chance to check out both courses.


I popped in the DVD for the first one is the Jam Guitar DVD. Pretty much garbage. First off, the guy who does the video is a geeky dork. I think I'm like most other guitarist wanna-be's out there: "I wanna be that guy" is what I should feel. Euh not this one. The stuff he teaches is so basic that it's crazy, plus he just sits in front of some drape for a background. The production quality is in the crapper. He'll be showing the notes "This is C, D, E oops no this is E" I'm just gonna leave it with a rating of 1 1/2 sloppy strings out of 6. The only reason it gets 1/2 sloppy strings is that it might be usefull for a TOTAL beginner. Waste of money at $9.95. There are tons of better learning videos on Youtube.



The second video is called How I Got Killer Guitar Chops While I Was Still in High School: Confessions of a High School Shredder
Wow! What a title but what a package for $19.99! The course comes with 3 CD-ROMs: 1 e-book and 2 audio CDs for the exercises. The author taught himself a disciplined approach in high school to really improve quickly. He went on to go to University for music and and later write a bunch of books. The course contains a systematic approach to improving your guitar skills. He encourages you to use the Student Log to track your progress. The excercises are grouped under Alternate Picking, Hammer-Ons and Pull Offs, Stretching, Tapping, String Skipping, Sweep Picking, Scales, Arpeggios, Songs, Additional Areas of Study, Super Chops Work-outs (his own combination of stuff). You track your date, duration, and metronome tempo used for each exercises. I did the first two exercises of Alternate Picking which wasn't too bad because i had been practicing that a lot with scales, so I could get 200 beats per minute fairly easily. Then I tried two Hammer-on / Pull off exercises. I did each for 3 minutes with a tempo of 120 bpm. My hand cramped up.

I'm super stoked about this course. I had been looking at a way to give more structure to my learning and this fits the bill perfectly. I haven't gone through all of it but I will give it a tentative 5 sloppy strings out of 6 because I can truly see how this will help any guitarist improve dramatically by using a structured approach vs. going at it randomly. The only thing I'd like to see would be a bit of video thrown in for motivation, though I really don't mind the format it has been presented in.

Cheerz.