Best Online Guitar Courses & Lessons Reviewed:

Promoted and marketed for the school system in the UK, Gigajam is an online music website based in where else, but the United Kingdom. They are a site dedicated to guitar teaching lessons, and also have different courses for other band instruments like bass guitar, keyboard, and drums.

Gigajam has different teaching options for every instrument and offers downloadable lessons, paperback books with the same content, and video courses that have been previously aired on the Musician's Channel. You can watch the two-part intro video for different instruments on the site free of cost.

The author of this guitar course, David Young, has taught private rock, classical guitar, funk, jazz, music theory, and sight-reading lessons for the past 10 years. He is a known freelancer/session guitarist who has played with many renowned artists like Marti Cane, Jim Davidson, Brain Conley, and Gerrard Kenny.

The Gigajam course has been designed to take new guitarists a step ahead toward the competent intermediate level in a short span of time. It is a decent way to begin, and you will get a good head start. However, there is one point to be noted – the course lacks adequate material, as it was not designed to be a comprehensive guitar curriculum.

The guitar course contains a series of PDF lessons with necessary hyperlinks pointing to the audio-video lessons. It also contains interactive Xtractor modules.

Gigajam has been divided in to 3 levels .

Level 1 contains:

• 10 computer based lessons
• 55 instructional videos
• 54 play-along files

Level 2 contains:

• 10 computer based lessons
• 89 instructional videos
• 66 play-along files

Level 3 contains:

• 10 computer based lessons
• 61 instructional videos
• 60 play-along files

Gigajam uses Xtractor, which is proprietary and innovative software that uses MIDI audio files in the lessons and enables you to mix different instruments played on the track. You can mute the guitar tone and play along with the music. It also allows you to vary the tempo and transpose the music if you want to.

Xtractor also offers an advanced feature that will enable you to record and compare your guitar playing skills against the lessons in the MIDI format. Regrettably, you need some special devices to take advantage of the same. Thus, if you own a MIDI enabled guitar and the required hardware, this is the guitar course for you.

Do note that the software will not make or break this course; you would not even need any particular hardware for getting the best out of Xtractor. However, it will definitely make the experience worth it. If you want to have the required equipment for Xtractor, you can check the list of requirements on the site.

Gigajam offers better customer support than most other guitar guides, as they have additional phone numbers along with email support for their customers. Unfortunately, North American customers will have to pay extra for overseas calls. Gigajam also has a support forum like Jamorama, though no mention of it could be found on the website.

Gigajam lessons are available in an incredibly easy format, and this includes the related audio-video lessons and other materials.

The Xtractor software, however, has some problems with Windows Vista. However, since there is a workaround published on the website, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Gigajam is also compatible with Mac and runs on OS X 10.3 or later.

Gigajam offers a 30 Day Money Back Warranty on all products.

While the cost may seem to be little higher than other choices, Gigajam is still considered a good option that is a lot cheaper than private guitar lessons.

If you are new to playing the guitar and want to start off slow, Gigajam will be the perfect choice for you. However, you cannot expect to pick up a lot of theory from this course. For such in-depth learning, you can try other high quality options.