Guitar Tips Review

Guitar Tips is a multimedia guitar course created by Australian guitar instructor, Chris Elmore, founder of Elmore Music. Elmore Music has several different learn-guitar products on the market, but this review focuses exclusively on their Guitar Tips module.

Guitar Tips is Elmore Music’s beginner guitar course and is only available as a download. The lessons incorporate text, audio clips as well as some video. The quality of the course is a bit of a mixed bag, but a low-price tag makes Guitar Tips a decent choice for someone who is looking to get basic guitar training without making a large investment.

Features

As a Guitar Tips member, you can access the course in two different ways. First, you can always login to their membership website whenever you want from any internet-enabled computer. Secondly, you can download the entire course to your computer (Guitar Tips is PC and Mac compatible).

We preferred the latter option as it made the entire course more responsive, especially the video and audio components. Keep in mind however, that the Guitar Tips course will take approximately 270MB of bandwidth to download. (If you are dial-up, this might not be a viable option…)

Within the member’s area, Chris Elmore lays out a 30-day learning plan to get you fast-tracked in learning guitar. Since most of us learn much faster when we have some kind of structure in place this is a really useful feature. Tip: No matter what guitar course you end up taking, remember to learn at your own pace. No one learns exactly the same, and it’s usually a good idea to have a firm grasp and understanding of one topic before moving on to the next.

Lessons are in html format which means that you’ll need a web browser to view them. Note that if you download the course to your computer, you won’t need to be connected to the internet to view the course, though you'll still use a web browser to view the lessons. Guitar Tips has both right and left-handed versions of all their guitar illustrations. This is a bit gimmicky though, since all they did was invert identical pictures.

Sprinkled throughout the course are the video mini-lessons. These professionally recorded videos feature high-quality video and audio, and make great learning aids. Some videos incorporate dual-camera views as well. They are much higher quality than you’ll find in most online courses, but it’s just too bad that there aren’t all that many of them. The videos are in Apple’s QuickTime ® format.

Extras included with Guitar Tips:

Guitar Tips includes 5 different different jam tracks you can play along with. The tunes are pretty cool, but aren’t terribly high quality as they were created using some kind of synthesizer. We also wish there were more tracks available.

A nice add-on to the Guitar Tips course is the inclusion of 21 popular songs that you can learn to play. Some of these songs have video lessons attached, but they aren’t recorded by Chris Elmore, and aren’t produced nearly as well as some of their training videos. Here are a few of the songs you can learn to play.

- Time of your life (Greenday)
- She will be loved (Maroon 5)
- Put Your Lights On (Santana)
- Every Breath (Sting)
…

Guitar Tips includes a couple pieces of software that are available as freeware.

• Easy Chord Dictionary
• Scale Tool

Additionally, there are a few more extras included in the form of articles, guitar-playing advice and other online resources.

Support

Elmore Music makes itself available to their customers via email, phone, and fax.

Ordering Information

Elmore Music accept credit cards and PayPal.

Like many other downloadable guitar lessons reviewed on this site, Guitar Tips has a 60-day 100% money-back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied for any reason. (The site mentions a 30-day refund policy but it actually is 60 days)

Buyers Tip: Due to the world-wide economic slowdown, Elmore Music announced that they would be reducing the prices on some of their guitar-learning products. The basic Guitar Tips course price was reduced from $47 to $27 and their full Speed Learning Guitar system was reduced from $197 to $147.

Conclusion

Of all of Elmore Music’s guitar courses, Guitar Tips definitely has the most value for the money. With the sale they have on right now it’s a good deal for $27.

We could see beginning guitarists struggling with the lack of visual aids in the course. Although the videos are very well-produced, they tend to be on the shorter side and lacking in terms of thorough explanations.

Guitar Tips is a good pick if you aren’t quite sure yet if you want to learn guitar, but want something relatively inexpensive that has some decent learning material. Once you decide on learning guitar however, you’ll find that you can learn much faster with a more comprehensive video-based course such as Learn and Master Guitar.