Jamplay Guitar Lessons Review: Online Guitar Lesson Review Series

This Jamplay guitar lessons review has been updated. I decided to completely start from scratch since there has been a lot of changes since I last reviewed it.

I have kept the old review that I had which you can read at the end of this review.

Table of Contents

• What’s In This Review?
• Overview
• Pros & Cons
  • Pros
  • Cons
• Who Jamplay is Best Suited to?
  • Ability Level
  • Budget
  • Music Genre Preferences
• The Breakdown of the Platform
  • When You Log In for the First Time
  • Inside the Lessons
  • Beginner Lessons (Phase 1)
  • Phase 2 (Genres plus advanced skills)
  • Phase 3: Songs
  • Phase 4: Song Writing
  • More Lessons
  • Live Lessons
  • Tools
  • Progress Report
  • Community & Support
  • Jam Points
• Comprehensive Rating
• Value-For-Money
• Final Thoughts

What’s In This Review?

In this review I will cover:

• The pros and cons
• Who Jamplay is best suited to
• Jamplay broken down
• A comprehensive Rating
• The price
• Value-for-money
• My final verdict

Overview

Product being reviewed: Jamplay

Overall Ranking: 92/100

Price: $19.95/month or $49.95/quarter or $159 per year

Website: www.Jamplay.com

Disclosure: This a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• More material than you’ll ever be able to get through
• A great variety of material to suit any genre
• Material for every level of guitar you might be at
• A huge selection of different instructors
• Helpful tools
• A much improved and easy to follow members area
• More and more material being added all the time including live lessons
• Good community and easy to ask questions
• Free trial – set up an account for free and then you can try everything out before deciding if it’s right for you

Cons

• Could be more song lessons – What’s there is really good but I feel like there could be a lot more in there. And with time there will be. The volume of everything else is almost scarcely believable but they could do with more songs in there.

Who Jamplay is Best Suited to?

Ability Level

I feel like it’s a cop-out to say this but really it’s suited to any guitarist out there. The beginners section has really improved since I last reviewed it, so it’s definitely good for beginners and great all the way up to advanced and expert level guitarists.

Budget

For those on a budget, it’s also great. it’s one of the more affordable online lesson platforms and compared to in-person lessons you could a whole year’s subscription for the price of a half dozen or less in-person lessons.

Music Genre Preferences

There’s also a huge variety of genre specific lessons so they cater to a massive amount of different styles of music tastes too.

The Breakdown of the Platform

Here’s an overview of what to expect when you you set up your account.

When You Log In for the First Time

There are some questions for you to answer about your playing background, your goals and then you can fill out your profile and add pictures, if you want.

Cool that they ask for your goals and how much time you are able to commit each week. This helps with progress tracking and making sure you improve.

Sure, some of these questions are probably used by Jamplay internally to make Jamplay better. But if it’s making the system better, then that’s not really a downside.

Logged In Area

This area has changed since I last reviewed Jamplay.

The layout is easier to follow with a top menu that follows you down, which I like.

Since I last reviewed Jamplay, there is now more of a focus on the community aspect of the site. So if you want to discuss things, ask questions etc, that’s really easy to do. There is also more of a focus on live courses, if that’s something you would want to get into.

Inside the Lessons

Within each lesson you can:

• Take notes
• Make a comment
• Ask a question from a teacher
• Download the lesson in case you want to follow the lesson when you’re off line
• Guitar tab and musical notation for each lesson

This applies to all of the lessons in all the phases.

You can also:

• Bookmark parts of the video if there’s something you think you’ll want to go back to
• Slow the video down or speed it up. You might wonder why you might want to speed it up but I actually found it to be quite good for some of the times that the instructors are talking. The slowing down is of course great for slowing it down if you want to see something being demonstrated but at a slower speed if you’re not quite catching What’s going on

Get a Free Trial Account

Beginner Lessons (Phase 1)

• There are 13 different instructors that do beginner acoustic guitar lessons.
• There are another 8 instructors who provide beginner lessons for electric guitar
• There are also bass beginner lessons but this review is focused on the guitar end of things

Seems like they all cover all of the basic things you would want to know so it’s a matter of browsing through and finding the instructor that you like the most and that teaches in a style that you like the most. Then it’s just a matter of following through all of their lessons.

This is pretty easy to follow and understand and following through each lesson should give you a solid foundation.

If you were really keen to make that foundation even more solid, you could go through all of the lessons of more than one instructor. In my opinion, you are better off doing all of one instructor before moving to the next one (if you plan to do more than one set of beginner lessons). If you chop and change between them, your progress will be much slower and more confusing. So find the instructor that you like and stick with it through to the end.

The other thing these beginner lessons are great for is any guitarist who was self-taught and wants to fill in gaps in knowledge and work on technique deficiencies.

An Example Video of a Beginner Lesson

Phase 2 (Genres plus advanced skills)

There are two parts to this section.

Genres

The first part is all about learning a specific genre.

Genres included are:

• Blues
• Fingerstyle
• Bluegrass
• Celtic
• Folk
• Reggae
• Acoustic Rock
• Metal
• Hawaain Slack Key
• Rock
• Classical
• Country
• Jazz
• Surf
• Funk
• Flamenco
• R & B
• Brazilian
• Gospel
• Pop

So there’s heaps there. No matter what style you are trying to learn there should be something there for you.

Check out a sample video of one the thousands of lessons

Advanced Skills

The second part of this phase is all about enhancing your skills. Skills that can apply across genres.

This section includes the following sections:

• Speed & Technique
• Helpers & Tips
• Singing with Guitar
• Reading Music & Rhythms
• Lead concepts and techniques
• Theory and Improvisation
• 12 String
• Rhythm Training
• Ear Training
• Studio Skills and Engineering
• Instrument Care & Maintenance

As you can see there’s heaps in there that can keep you going for a few lifetimes!

Phase 3: Songs

I wouldn’t so much call this a phase myself; you’ll no doubt have learnt countless songs if you were to go through phases 1 & 2 before coming here.

But whatever you want to label it, this is a really valuable part of Jamplay.

Have you ever looked up tab online and found it and tried to play along to the song but you either couldn’t quite get it or it just didn’t quite sound the same.

These songs are video lessons that take you through the song and break it apart and teach you it from top to bottom.

By my count there are some 360 songs in there, in various styles and various difficulty levels. Whilst this sounds like a lot, I would like to see more of these in there. They are adding stuff all the time so this number will go up.

You can sort through the songs by:

• Whether it’s taught using an acoustic guitar or electric guitar
• By Artist
• By Song Title
• By Teacher
• By Genre
• By Skill Level
• By the Length of the Lesson

Another sample video to give you and idea of some of the lessons

Phase 4: Song Writing

The final phase; again, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a natural progression from phase 2 or 3.

But your song writing will certainly have more places it can go if you are more advanced in your skills. And you’ll need a decent grounding in guitar to understand what’s going on too.

There are 8 instructors who take courses on song writing for acoustic guitar and 1 instructor for song writing on the electric guitar.

More Lessons

Also under the lessons menu you’ll find the Artists Series and the Lick & Riff Library.

Live Lessons

Jamplay seems to have placed a real emphasis on live lessons since I last reviewed it.

This is pretty cool – and part of what makes it cool is that all of the live lessons are archived and you can go back and watch any of the past live lessons.

The live lessons menu is separated into Active Courses and Archived Courses.

Tools

There is also a tools section where you can find:

• Chord Library
• Scale Library
• Jam Tracks
• Metronome
• Guitar Tuner
• Bass Tuner
• Chord Namer
• Training Games

I really enjoyed having the Jam Tracks tool. it’s really fun to be able to go in and play along to a backing track, especially if you don’t have other musicians to jam with or they’re not available but you feel like a good jam.

I had heaps of fun on the 12 bar blues jam track.

I also found the training games really fun. But that’s the music geek in me!

Progress Report

I really like to see my progress and I also believe that being able to track your progress is really important when learning anything.

To learn anything well you need to know, IMO:

• Where you are on the map
• Where you want to end up on the map
• A plan to get to where you want to go on that map

The progress tracker gives you that information as to where you are on the map. If you don’t know where you are then you want know which direction to head in to get to where you want to go. So for me this is a great feature.

Now in my progress report currently I have a bunch of unfinished lessons but this is only because I was going through and checking out different aspects of Jamplay for this review.

In my opinion you are better off mastering on aspect completely and then moving on to something new.

Community & Support

I really feel like this is an aspect of Jamplay that they’ve really stepped up since I last reviewed their system. Either it’s improved a lot or the layout just makes it seem more accessible.

I think the biggest improvement here is the “Ask a Teacher” section in all of the lessons. This is great to have there for any questions you might have (which may have already been answered as all the questions and answers remain in the lesson).

I especially like the fact that you can ask a question right there in the lesson and don’t have to leave the lesson to go off somewhere else to ask the question. And all the questions and answers contained in there are relevant to that lesson (well, most of the time anyway!).

And there are live Q & A sessions with the instructors too which is pretty awesome.

Jam Points

This is also a new aspect since I last reviewed Jamplay (they’ve been busy!).

You collect points for completing lessons and for other things.

This was in Beta at the time of writing but they plan on enabling members to use their points for special access and privileges in the future. I’m hoping that they make whatever you get something that’s valuable because it would work as a nice motivator if they do.

Comprehensive Rating

Value-For-Money

Hands down this is value for money.

You can get a whole year’s worth of essentially unlimited material for just $159.

If you were to get in-person lessons it would cost you at least $1,000/year and you would be limited to one lesson per week for that. There are advantages and disadvantages to online and in-person lessons but in terms of value for money overall, online lessons are quite far ahead.

But that’s only if they’re good and Jamplay is one of the good ones.

Also, Jamplay is actually really reasonably priced among online guitar lessons even.

You get the option of a free trial to start with too and there’s a 30 day money back guarantee (used to be only 7 days so that’s another nice little improvement).

Final Thoughts

This is what I thought of Jamplay. A couple of things that impress me about Jamplay at the moment.

1. They have listened to some of the points on their weaknesses and they’ve improved a bunch of things. It shows they listen to their users and that they are actively improving the platform all the time.
2. Despite an almost inconceivable amount of material that they have, they are still uploading on average 11 hours of video lessons every month. This isn’t a stagnant website by any means at all. This is a constantly improving beast. By the time you read this I may need to update my review again!

But don’t take my word for it. Check out the link below to try it out and see for yourself.

Set up a Free Account Here

Thanks for reading and I hope this review has given you enough information to go on and has helped you to decide if Jamplay is right for you.

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