Rating: 5/5
Product Quality: Excellent
Ease Of Use: Excellent
Formats of Supplied Materials: dvd, animated tab, pdf & mp3
Customer Support: Awesome! Very Active Forum
Guarantee: 60-day money back
Price: $14.95 per DVD or the Complete Basic Guitar Course – (6 DVDs) includes Stage One through Stage Six – only $69.70 (save $20.00)

Metal Method was created by Doug Marks who played guitar in the popular band Hawk that used to play the Sunset Strip back in the 80′s. Doug also started selling his video guitar lessons on VHS in the 80′s ( you may have seen his advertisements in Guitar World magazine ).

Doug has redone those lessons over the years, listening to the feedback from his customers/students in the very active Metal Method forum and tweaking them to make them better and up-to-date.

Today, Metal Method is made up of 6 DVD “stages” and each stage has 4 lessons that Doug says should take you a week to complete. When I went through the course, I found that lessons in the later stages will take you much longer to complete.

Those later stages are much more challenging and if you are a beginner guitarist or someone with not much experience, you will need to spend more time on those lessons. If you are a real go getter – you can finish the course in about 6 months. For most people though, you will end up spending more time than that to complete.

But that’s ok because there is no rush… the whole secret behind learning how to play guitar is to stick to it and practice. Metal Method makes it easy to stick to it because the lessons are extremely well produced, easy to follow along with and fun to practice. The course is laid out in a way that teaches you all the proper fundamentals you need to be a well rounded guitar player.

Each lesson is played at different speeds ( slow & normal )… comes with animated tab on the DVD so that you can see exactly what note or chord is to be played and play along with it… and close up camera views of the fretting and strumming hands to know exactly how your hands should be placed to be most effective.

Descriptions Of The Guitar Stages:

Stage One – Introduction & tips to get the most from the course, practice schedule, equipment, how to tune your guitar, basic techniques, reading tab and chord diagrams and learning the notes on the guitar…

Want more information?
Download: Stage 1 Details

Stage Two – Open chords, power chords, barre chords, strumming patterns, notes on the fretboard, drop d tuning, Pentatonic Minor scale, electric guitar effects and more…

Want more information?
Download: Stage 2 Details

Stage Three – Scales & soloing, techniques ( hammer-on, pull-off, string bending ), reading notation & symbols, complete solo and more…

Want more information?
Download: Stage 3 Details

Stage Four – Learn a complete solo, Minor Pentatonic to Major Pentatonic, phrasing, expressive techniques, four bar chords with fifth string roots, several great sounding & fun to play riffs, Natural Minor scale, two handed tapping techniques, string muting, harmonics and more…

Want more information?
Download: Stage 4 Details

Stage Five – Special techniques ( octaves, trills, bend/release, hammer-bend, pick scrape, rake picking, volume swells, tremolo picking, fast alternate picking, chromatic runs, rubato and free time ), two solos & a Blues Jam, new chords and more…

Want more information?
Download: Stage 5 Details

Stage Six – The power of music theory, principles of tonality, modal theory, harmony and more…

Want more information?
Download: Stage 6 Details

What You Will Be Playing Once You Hit Stage 4:

Conclusion:

As you can see – Metal Method is packed with everything that you need to become a complete guitar player. Whether you want to become a rock star or just want to play for your friends and family… Metal Method is your best bet to get you there.

Many guitar courses aren’t able to teach people how to play guitar because they are confusing or just plain boring and you would rather do anything else than sit for hours playing their boring exercises.

But Doug has made his course entertaining and you will find yourself making time out of your busy day to practice.

And if you get to any exercises that you don’t understand or just can’t seem to play properly no matter how hard you try… don’t worry because all you need to do is go on over to the Metal Method forum and Sarah, the MANY active Metal Method students and even Doug himself are more than happy to help you solve your problem ( usually within the same day ).

The forum members are really supportive and help to keep you on track which gives you a much better chance of sticking to your lessons.

Also, people who buy the Metal Method course get access to a special section on the forum where bonus material is provided.

So no matter if you are an absolute beginner or if you are an experienced guitar player looking to improve your guitar playing – Metal Method covers everything from the basics to all the techniques you need to master to play professionally.

The Metal Method lessons can be purchased 1 stage at a time as you need them or if you are serious about learning to play guitar, you can grab all 6 stages at a special discounted price.

Then after I purchased Jamorama I started seeing results right away. I learned more chords, my chord changes were much smoother and my rhythm improved. A few times I would run into a problem, like the “F” chord for example. I remember having a hell of a time trying to get that one down. No matter what I tried I couldn’t play it. So I put the guitar away and didn’t touch it until the next day. Then when I decided to practice again, I watched the example video and paused it so I could concentrate on where to place my fingers. I then tried it and it sounded pretty good. It wasn’t perfect…a few strings were muted but with a little more practice I finally got it to sound right.

Rating: 5/5
Product Quality: Excellent
Ease Of Use: Good
Formats of Supplied Materials: pdf, downloadable video & mp3
Customer Support: Forum & email
Guarantee: 60-day 100% money back
Price: $49.97 USD

The main reason why you can learn faster from Jamorama is because of the way the lessons are set up with high quality video examples. There are other products on the market that you can get lessons with video examples but you won’t get anywhere near the amount of information like you do in Jamorama for such a low price. I’ve seen full guitar lesson dvd packages selling anywhere between $150-$400 a set. That’s a lot of money to spend on dvd’s and most people can’t afford to spend that much.

The main reason Jamorama can offer so much information at such a low price is because they offer it as downloads. They don’t have to spend money on creating a dvd, packaging it and then charging for delivery. So in the end they can sell it to you at a much cheaper price. The best part about it being downloads is that you can get started on your lessons right away.

What You Get With Jamorama:

Jamorama provides a huge amount of information in their recently updated product. They added 64 new video examples and exercises for a total of 148 videos.

You also get:

• 250+ pages of lessons
• 148 video lessons
• 26 professionally recorded JamTracks
• package that will teach you the guitar from beginner to advanced level
• GuitEarIt! – Ear training game
• JaydeMusica Pro – Learn how to read music game
• GuitarTuner Pro Software
• The Jamorama Metronome
• Jamorama Chord Kit
• Jamorama Members Forum (for any questions you may have)

Conclusion:

Jamorama is perfect for anyone who wants to learn to play the guitar but doesn’t want to pay a lot of money to do it.

The Jamorama course is a little clunky compared to some courses because when you are going through the lessons in the pdf… you then have to go in your computer files and double click on the file to watch the video. Then when you are done practicing the lesson, you would then have to flip back over to the pdf… read the next lesson and then flip back to your computers files to double click on the next lessons video files.

I know that really isn’t a big deal and the only reason I bring it up is because Jamorama used to have a special software that you would download onto your computer that controlled ALL of the lessons files. All you needed to do was open the Jamorama software by double clicking the icon on your desktop and then go to the lesson you want to practice. Each lesson would have an icon for both video and audio and when you double clicked on the icon, the video would automatically start playing… no need to search for it.

Below is a video that shows how Jamorama looked before when it included the desktop software. Jamorama still contains the same video and pdf lessons – it just doesn’t have the software included any more.

Like I said I guess it’s not really a big deal to do the extra steps but I guess I was spoiled by the software

But since it’s only $49.97 for Jamorama – I guess you can’t complain!

With the help of 8 other talented professional instructors from around the world, you can learn guitar in almost any style you are into. Styles such as rock, metal, classical, fusion, jazz, blues, acoustic, funk, country, latin and even holiday!

There is even a Private Members Forum where the guitar instructors hang out on a regular basis to assist you personally with any questions that you may have.

Rating: 4/5
Product Quality: Excellent
Ease Of Use: Good
Formats of Supplied Materials: flash video, mp3, text & pop out tab
Customer Support: Forum & email
Guarantee: 3-day 100% money back
Price: As low as $8.25 USD/month

The first thing that grabbed my attention was the amazing high quality of the video lessons. Each video lesson is super clear and capable of playing at full screen so you can see everything that the instructor is doing… perfectly.

And there are many lessons – to date there are over 1,276 of them.

With so many lessons and with more being added all the time… you might think that it would be hard to navigate through the site. But Infinite Guitar has a great navigation bar that you can use to sort lessons by the skill level you are at, style you want to learn, technique, theory, scales, chords and exercises.

The skill level search is separated into 4 categories – beginner, intermediate, advanced and CRAZY! Love that category

Infinite Guitar also has lesson plans to follow and offer them in 3 different categories – beginner, intermediate and advanced.

This site also has a forum that has great interaction between the students and the instructors. This is important because when you get stuck on something, you can go on over to the forum and ask for help and get a pretty fast response. There is nothing worse than getting stuck on a lesson and not having anyone respond to you for a week. By that time you will have lost any motivation that you had when you first started the lessons. The forum even has a private area open only to paid members called “Ask The Instructor” and I noticed that these questions were answered in an acceptable amount of time.

What you get:

• new lessons are added every week
• high quality video with multiple camera angles, close-up shots and full screen option to make following along a breeze and you will always know exactly how a lesson is to be played
• styles in acoustic, blues, classical, country, funk, fusion, jazz, latin, metal, rock and more
• in-depth tutorials in beginner, intermediate, advanced and crazy!
• original song tutorials
• Professional instructors
• backing tracks
• lesson bookmarking
• chord finder software
• Private Members forum

Video Tour:

Conclusion:

Overall, Infinite Guitar is a good site that is packed with tons of high quality videos and could be good for you if you don’t mind paying monthly fees. But if you think about it, the monthly fees are still much cheaper than if you took guitar lessons at your local guitar store. Guitar stores normally charge around $20 for a half hour lesson and you would usually have a lesson every week… so if you decided to invest in Infinite Guitar, you will save yourself around $69+ per month.

You can sign up to Infinite Guitar monthly, quarterly or yearly. The advantage to signing up long term is that you will get a better deal. Paying the membership fee monthly is $10.95 per month, quarterly is $28.50 ( $9.50 per month ) and yearly $99 ( $8.25 per month ).

Word of warning to those of you that don’t have a good internet connection – you may have problems watching the videos. The videos can only be viewed online and you can’t download them. They are also pretty big file sizes and you will probably need a high speed connection to watch them comfortably.

If you are still unsure if this guitar lessons site is right for you, Infinite Guitar offers a free basic membership where you have access to 26 of their guitar lessons so you can try them out before you shell out any cash.