Learn Guitar Online - Jamorama Review

Well, unless you've lived under a rock, if you want to learn guitar online and you've ever used Google then you've probably heard of Jamorama. I bought it, so here's a Jamorama Review.

What I like about Jamorama is that it's perfect for the beginning guitarist. It starts easy, doesn't move too fast in the beginning, and teaches what I believe are good habits right away. It's so easy to develop bat habits right off the bat, and in particular this happens where strumming is concerned. Beginning students have an understandable tendency to play what sounds like it should be correct. Unfortunately, when you're a beginner your ear will play tricks on you, and the end result is a poorly executed strum that isn't in time and never will be quite right without breaking it down and relearning it.

The video examples in Jamorama would also be very helpful for a beginner, pretty much for the same reason that if you're a beginner, your ear is not yet developed, so your eyes will have to see it being done right. There's also, of course, more than adequate explanation of all of this in the written materials.

I honestly think that many intermediate guitar players could also learn a lot from Jamorama, especially where chord vocabulary is concerned. Ben goes way beyond the basic C, A, G, E, and D chords that most beginners know. There's quite a bit of discussion on the proper use of barre chords and power chords.

I disagree with some of Ben's chord shapes, but I suppose that's to be expected. All guitar players have different opinions on which chords are "the best." Aside from that, though, I can't find any bad things to say about the material presented.

Last but certainly not least, there's some bundled software that's quite useful. The tuner program is cute, and does offer several tunings, but may or may not be useful if you just plain can't hear whether or not you're in tune. The GuitEarIt "play by ear" software is surprisingly good, I even missed a couple going through it. There's a metronome that works well, though you can find free metronomes any day of the week on the internet, and a chord dictionary program. Finally there's a thing called Jayde Musica which is a game for getting better at reading notes. It's good if that's what you want to do, but it doesn't really help you put the notes on the guitar, and that's really the hard part. There's a really useless music theory program. I say it's useless because theory isn't covered in any of the ebooks that you go through, so how would you possible know the answers to the questions before you start to play?

For me, as a "veteran" guitar player, it's usefulness is limited. I have, however, recommended it to a lot of people and it really is very well done, very thorough, and very useful if you don't already know pretty much every chord you'll ever need. There's nothing about lead playing at all, it just doesn't go there. There's some scale stuff in it, but I would skip over it, because the way Ben approaches it isn't useful as a lead player.

For trying to learn guitar online, of all the ones I've tried, Jamorama beats the pants off of the other methods. Good luck!