28 Day Rockstar Review

Formerly known as the Easy Guitar Method (EasyGuitarMethod.com), the 28 Day Rockstar course is apparently the definitive beginner’s guide on how to become the new Nickelback in 4 weeks. Or… perhaps not. What it is, is actually a downloadable guitar course designed to drastically accelerate the learning path for guitar newbies using, you guessed it, a 28-day plan.

So how does it fare in this mission? Though we started our review with high hopes, we quickly became unimpressed with this course from across the Atlantic. As we went through the course, we noticed many issues that made it painfully obvious that the course was self-published. These include duplicate audio lessons, dubbed over guitar audio that wasn’t properly synced, typos, imbalanced audio, and misplaced lessons. All the minor quibbles and errors aside though, one of the biggest problems this course has is the lack of good quality video lessons.

Richard Deyn, course creator and experienced guitarist, has played the guitar for around 18 years. He’s soft-spoken and knows how to communicate, both great qualities for a teacher to have. It's just unfortunate that he doesn’t know very much about creating an accessible and useful guitar course.

Features

After purchasing, you’ll need to download an eBook installer that’ll prompt you to connect to the internet to register your copy of 28 Day Rockstar. This process only occurs once. Once registered, you can download the various sections of the course from within the installer program.

Once all the bits and bytes had settled, I added up the size of the 28 Day Rockstar course and was surprised to find that it added up to almost 3 gigabytes, which made it the largest downloadable guitar courses we've reviewed to date! Now, you don’t have to download the entire course to your computer at once, which is good, but even so, you’ll need a pretty decent internet connection as well as sufficient bandwidth space to get this onto your computer. It probably would have been a good idea to add the option to obtain the course on a DVD for a couple bucks plus shipping.

Since in terms of digital size, this is the largest downloadable guitar course I’ve reviewed, I was looking forward to seeing how the 28 Day Rockstar system worked. I assumed there would be plenty of quality video lessons, (what else could be taking up 3GB of space, right?), well-illustrated lesson manuals, good quality jam tracks, and such like. What actually was in the course though, turned out to be far less exciting..

So why is this course almost 3GB when other guitar courses fit a lot more lessons in less space? One reason is that as one of the course’s many bonuses, there are a couple hours worth of supplemental video lessons that aren’t compressed at all. The other big contributing factor is that every single .pdf in this course (and there are many) was created from images, and not from text. The end result is that the course is 8-10 times as large as it needed to be.

Here’s a run-down on what’s included in the course and how it’s organized:

Getting Started – 17:00 audio, 1:08:00 video, no backing tracks
Week 1 – 55:00 audio,   4:00 video , 28:00 backing tracks
Week 2 – 1:27:00 audio, no video , 22:00 backing Tracks
Week 3 – 1:24:00 audio, 8:00 video, 4:00 backing tracks
Week 4 – 44:00 audio, 3:00 video,  16:00 backing tracks

Breaking that down, you get over an hour of decent backing tracks to jam along with, an hour and a quarter of video lessons to get you started, and almost 5 hours of audio lessons. Now, if you’re thinking, “Audio Lessons to learn to play guitar?” then we're both thinking the same thing…

Audio Lessons:

The main part of the course is the audio-only lessons, which Richard Deyn himself coaches you through. The length of these sound files vary, but they tend to be under 3 minutes in length (some files are as short as 8 seconds and as long as 15 minutes). Each audio file’s track name shows the Week, Day, and Track number for ease of reference.

PDF Lessons:

As you go through the audio lessons, you’ll be flipping back and forth between the 27 page Workbook (which you’ll probably want to print out) and your current week’s manual. The .pdf manuals are well-illustrated and show icons that indicate when you should listen to the next track of the day or watch one of the few video lessons.

Throughout the course you find plenty of Daily Practice Planners and Tick Charts to tell you what you need to be practicing at any given time.

Richard Deyn’s approach for practice is unique as he places the responsibility of writing most of the course’s music to the student (usually he dictates what you should be writing in the printable music sheets). I’m not entirely sure that’s the best way for a complete beginner to learn, but there you have it.

Video Lessons:

Other than bonus videos, the 4-week course has less than an hour and a half of video lessons. (The main part of the course has only 15 minutes total) Not exactly the multimedia guitar program I was expecting.

The videos included with the 28 Day Rockstar system are uncompressed and shot in standard definition. Even so, the picture isn’t very clear, probably due to the video camera setup used. There are no close-ups or multiple camera angles, and it’s difficult to see what strings Richard is playing. At times there is a hard glare that comes off the guitar from a window in the room that makes it even harder to see. Also, all video lessons are taught solely using an electric guitar.

Bonuses:

• Guitar Tuner – Great little flash based tool.  Has both guitar and tone sounds. You can actually find it available for free here.
• Timer - Basic start, stop and reset functionality. Can also output your time as a text string. Nothing special. Also available for free here.
• Idea templates to help you create your own musical compositions.
• A 1 hour audio interview with Martyn Booth, a well known British guitar maker that used to work for Yamaha and Gibson Guitars. The interview is supposed to be on how to take care of your guitar, but in reality, it’s mostly about Martyn’s professional background and advertising Martyn’s guitars. There’s only about 15-20 minutes of talk and tips on how to take care of your guitar.
•  Blank music notation charts for you to print out.
• 8 Play along canvas tracks. Some songs have different versions (full, drums only, and a version without the guitar) An accompanying .pdf provides suggested chords to help you make up your own tunes.
• 3 additional song lessons covering popular songs, Let it Be, Rockstar, and First Cut is the Deepest. There is no video or notation provided. Each lesson averages 16 minutes of audio.
• 8 bonus videos that span one and a half hours and teach alternate tuning, how to improvise, strumming, how to use the capo, how to use effects, amongst other things.

Support

A working email and UK physical address is displayed on their website. Richard Deyn advertises unlimited email support for customers of his course. We haven’t tried that out though, so we can’t speak to its effectiveness.

As mentioned on their site, the course won’t work for Mac computers due to the file formats used.

Ordering Information

The course runs at €47, which right now equates to approximately $75 USD. The ordering process takes advantage of 3rd party shopping cart software, 1shoppingcart.

One issue that potential buyers should keep in mind is the noticeable lack of a published product guarantee or refund policy (One of the only guitar courses we’ve reviewed that doesn’t have one in place). This means that if you did not find that the 28 Day Rockstar course lived up to its promises, you don’t really have any recourse other than filing with your credit card company.

Conclusion

Overall, the 28 Day Rockstar course is severely handicapped as it doesn’t take advantage of using video, glosses over music theory and other beginner topics, and isn’t terribly well put together production-wise.

Can you learn to play guitar simply by listening to someone describe how to play a particular chord or play a scale? Yes, but it will take a many times more effort and it’s more likely you’ll learn things wrong (Imagine trying to learn the guitar over the phone...). With all the great video guitar curriculums out there, 28 Day Rockstar does not make for a very attractive choice.