PLUNGE - a local band in the Reading, PA. area. Be sure to visit their web site.

If you stumbles across this site and you are a guitar player, be sure to stop in at Guitar Pedal Pusher. We specialize in used and vintage guitar effects and equipment. Thanks!!

Guitar Lessons on the Web

There are many music websites dedicated to guitar players of various styles and experience levels. Considering the “artistic” nature of guitar players, it’s always interesting to see what web sites for guitar players have to offer. This analysis will encompass the area of “lessons” as opposed to guitar gear, styles, sheet music and the many other areas of guitar playing. If I were to put myself in the shoes of a student guitarist who is seeking instruction, how would I respond?

My first visit was at Eric’s Guitar Page. The home page offers the visitor a link to view the site in frames (suggested) or in a standard web page format. Offering these 2 formats is one of the better features of the site. I chose the standard format. Every page on this site has a blue swirl background and makes reading the yellow text extremely difficult. Music files are embedded into each page making it extremely distracting while surfing or attempting to read a lesson. The only way to turn the music off is to hit the mute button on your PC system tray. These embedded files also extend the load time for each page. The lessons appear to be poorly designed and offer very little information. I would be amazed if anyone could get past the color scheme, the long lines of text, and the embedded music files to even bother with the lessons. Sorry Eric!

Guitar-Masters home page is very inviting and is set up like a of table of contents. I think the home page would be more functional and easier to navigate in a frames format, but it does provide a good starting point. The color scheme and the font size make the text very easy to read with very little page scrolling. There are no animations on this site, only the use of graphics in a GIF format. The interlaced graphics (GIFs) are absolutely fabulous throughout. Pages loaded quickly and graphics displayed immediately and gradually came into focus. Chord charts are easy to read and color-coding schemes are applied to all the charts. Music files in midi format are linked to many of the lessons so a student can hear how the exercise should sound with a simple mouse click. Guitar-Masters does a great job of fulfilling its purpose of teaching with great content, graphics, and music style.The navigation is somewhat poor at the child level forcing the user to use the browser ‘Back’ button. The most appealing thing for students seeking to learn is the use of well-crafted graphics and sound files to teach and enforce a concept. Nearly every guitar player should find a lesson to suit his/her need.

The Guitar Mansion makes good use of white space but the home page would look so much better without the redish border. The navigation is good on the upper level pages but is very poor at the lower child level pages. Many of the lessons go to a separate web page with no hyperlinks to return to the preceding page or home page. I found this to be the very frustrating. Students should have a clear path ahead of them and the navigation or "internet sign posts" should be there to provide direction and establish one's location. The Guitar Mansion is a good place to learn but some poor soul with a guitar slung over his shoulder may get lost in one of those rooms!!!.

The Essential Guitar Guide is one of my favorites guitar sites and gets a -5 Gold Pick- rating. The home page is very professional looking with a nice watermark background, modest color scheme, nice font size, and a table of contents for navigation. This site makes great use of white space and I found it to be one of the most informative and easy to read sites that are available on the web. Navigation is very clear and thoughtfully arranged. Links are provided at the bottom of every page and help to provide a sense of direction. The textual content is nicely arranged in a narrow paragraph format and sprinkled throughout with images and graphics to lend some “eye relief”. The author of this site seems to understand his audience by developing a superb online learning environment that’s rich with content, visually arresting and just plain hard to resist.

Wholenote is more of a 'community' of guitar players sharing ideas and teaching music. There is an incredible amount of content and resources here for the guitar playing family. Lessons are categorized by the users preference; style, member (teacher or instructor), and skill level. Because this is a community site, contributors to the lessons vary in levels of expertise, method of approach, and frame of reference. Visitors are able to look for a certain teacher (member) and categorize the user preference by member. The pages are in a frames format and provide a consistent look and feel for the entire site. Wholenote uses a proprietary software tool called Composer, which members use to upload or compose music. When listening to files, a user can even change the tempo, sound, or loop and repeat a music file in order to master the exercise. The search engine on Wholenote adds a nice touch for a site of this magnitude. Lessons seem to revolve around learning songs and guitar licks rather than theory. Undeniably, Wholenote has done very well in providing a good learning format with great tools. A good site to learn and chime in (or strum) if you're in the mood.