Is GuitarAlliance Right For You?

An In-Depth Review of the online guitar courses taught by GuitarAlliance.

Course Author / Instructor

GuitarAlliance is an instructional website that offers a very full selection of guitar lessons on line. The site is the brain child of Kenny Mann. Kenny is the onscreen instructor in all of the videos and a member of the Malvern, Arkansas based band, Spinning Jenny.

Course Contents - What You Get

This is a subscription site. It offers a complete selection of online guitar courses for beginners to intermediate players. The lessons are broken down into a free set of lessons and a set that you get after joining. The free lessons cover beginner oriented material. These free lessons include:

• The Core series, which covers things like how to hold the guitar, intro to chords and how to tune the guitar
• Just Acoustic, which shows how to strum the guitar, some acoustic guitar based songs, and sections entitled Fingerstyle and And Acoustic Fingerstyle Blues Songs.
• Blues Guitar, showing the styles of blues guitarists like Muddy Waters, SRV and B.B. King
• Lead Guitar which is a series of rock guitar themed lessons

After subscribing, you are given access to a big range of lessons that seem to build on the lessons in the free section. The majority of these lessons are split between theory/technique and songs.

The theory/technique lessons can be used on a wide range of material. The songs themselves lean strongly toward the rock and blues genres.

There is also a Fingerstyle section. There are several lessons in this series, starting at the most basic level. They introduce basic right hand technique, some basic exercises and songs. There are pages listed as the History of Fingerstyle Guitar and Fingerstyle Masters. After the exercises, there are several lessons showing how to play what are termed basic songs.

The songs included are all fairly recent songs and should be familiar to most people - Fire and Rain, If You Could Read My Mind, Stairway To Heaven and Time In A Bottle.

There are also sections covering Travis Picking, Slack Key and what's termed Percussive Fingerstyle.

The final area of interst in the GuitarAlliance Fingerstyle section is the Tab. They offer dozens of Tabs in the Power Tab format. The tab includes a ton of Chet Atkins arrangements, as well as Classical, Blues, Folk New Age, Flamenco and Rock. If you don't have a Power Tab reader, a link to download one is provided.

Support

Support from GuitarAlliance seems very good. I have had a couple of questions for them and they've promptly answered them.

Overall - Our Verdict

GuitarAlliance offers a comprehensive training program for guitarists. The theory, chord and scale information will benefit all players. The overall program seems to have a strong rock and blues focus, although there is fingerstyle content.

This is a good training program for players wanting to improve their rock and blues playing, both pick and fingerstyle. If your main interest is fingerstyle guitar though, JamPlay is probably a better choice.

Price and Guarantees

The price for a years subscription is a very reasonable $83 per year. There are monthly and quarterly payment plans available also. If you cancel your subscription within 30 days of sign up you get a full re-imbursement, no questions asked.

You can learn more about GuitarAlliance here.

Return to learn-fingerstyle-guitar.com .