I bought this course with my own money, and this is the one I am learning from myself (see the rest of this site for my progress) but that does not make my biased, in this Gibson’s Learn & Master Guitar review I’m going to discuss the good and the bad points about it.
What is it?
Learn & Master Guitar is a DVD course which teaches you to play the guitar. It is more expensive than most courses (around $149.95) but for that you get not only a gorgeous boxset of DVDs to follow (I mean the box is really funky, you’ll understand what I mean if you buy it!) but you get an award winning course too, it has won an award from the Acoustic Guitar magazine, two Telly Awards and an AEGIS Award for Excellence in Education.
So you get a series of DVDs, a workbook, and access to an online community forum where you can discuss the course and lessons with others, ask the instructor questions, review information given to other students, and get motivation and advice.
With each lesson then you are introduced to a concept that the instructor talks you through, and you will play along with him too during the lesson, then at the end you are given an assignment. Usually the assignment is a set of exercises in your workbook, along with a couple of songs to learn that use the new concepts/notes/chords you just learnt in.
You also get workshops for each lesson, where you the instructor will take you through all the exercises in the workbook and you’ll play along with him on them. That helps you to make sure you are doing them correctly, motivate you, and make practice more fun!
You also have ‘Jam-along’ CDs for each lesson with the songs on that you are learning, so you can play along with a band to make the song more interesting, and to keep pace with the instructor who plays the song with you so you make sure you are playing it correctly.
This course starts of slowly and really gives you a firm understanding of music and playing your guitar, most other course throw you in at the deep end and get you playing as fast as possible, this course aims to give you a solid foundation so you don’t struggle later on. It is up to you if you prefer that or not, if you really want to master the guitar then you need to put in the work and this course gives you that chance, if you just want to learn some quick songs to play at parties, then a different course might be better.
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Pros
- Very professional quality course and lessons
- You get to watch the lessons so you see the instructor taking you through the new chords and notes and playing them for you etc, rather than reading them from a book like in some other courses
- You get Jam-along CDs to play along to
- You have access to a vibrant online forum to get help if you need it, or just to chat with other students about how quickly they made progress etc
- Gives you a solid understanding of music and playing guitar so you can really master it
Cons
- Can be slow to get going at the start
- The songs you learn are not that modern (think ‘Greensleeves’, ‘America the Beautiful’, ‘House of the Rising Sun’ etc)
- Pushes you quite fast in the workshops with chords (I struggled to keep up, but maybe I am a slower learner)
Verdict
This is a professional course, and you pay for that too with it being the most expensive course I have seen (around $149.95). But for that you get an award winning course that takes you from not even knowing how to hold a guitar right through to playing really advanced stuff, and you learn at a comfortable pace, getting introduced to a new concept in each lesson, then working on exercises to allow you to master that new concept.
This is not for people who just want to quickly learn the guitar and then stop, it is for people who really want to get stuck in and play the guitar for the rest of their lives, that is why I chose it to learn from and I am thrilled with it (I’m on lesson 7 at the moment learning some really tricky chords).
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You’ve reached the end of the post, you can head back to the how to learn guitar homepage or here are some reviews of guitar courses you might like: