 What you get is what you put in |
| Review Date: February 23, 2007 |
| Reviewer: SpiritsVisceral, St. Chuck, IL |
First my biggest complaints: (1) the publisher annoyingly ships the product on four CDs that ultimately only installs about 500MB total (with *everything*). (2) the program has pretty small videos.
The videos end up being decent to use, and intuitive within the program - popup videos wouldn't have worked as effectively - still, I think they could have increased the resolution a bit and used more screen real estate.
But the videos are not unusable. As a resource for an absolute beginner who isn't certain yet about the expense of biweekly personal guitar lessons - buying this software on sale is an absolute bargain.
The software is a first step for anyone just picking up the guitar - because that describes me. However, it does NOT, as the website claims, provide anything near enough material to: "Master an instrument...". It does show how to begin reading music, and the videos, however miniscule, allow me to correct myself.
I've had this software as well as the Hal Leanard Guitar Method books for about six months now. I think they go great together. But I can definitely see outgrowing this software in the six months with daily practice.
Ultimately I'd definitely say a resource that allows six months of daily practice is worth the price. I just wish the publisher didn't mislead about the "mastery" bit. But since it's pretty obvious the publisher (Topics-Entertainment) had nothing to do with the actual content, I can't really ding the content for the arrogance of the publisher, now can I? |
Utter Waste
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| Review Date: August 25, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Maros, |
I remember when I was first learning guitar: I wasn't a naturally gifted guitarist, and so I got several books and took lessons from several teachers.
The books were Mel Bay and they involved one note stuff my grandparents probably listened to. Talk about uninspired.
And the teachers were pretty careless. One had grown up under an uncreative institutionalized education and used Mel Bay books to inflict an equal misery on his students. Another was "born again," and kept trying to get his students to go to church vs actually help them learn the instrument. The last (as yet for me), was an old bluesman who had a really trashed guitar, his JD, that would just outright jam insanely with his eyes literally rolled in the back of his head and then "come of out it" and say "uh, that's about it. See you next week."
This CD set reminds me of all that. Since for me, guitar is there more to sooth a midlife crisis type thing (it's cheaper than a vette) than really having a professional go I'm not one to ask too much. But when the "power cord section" (3rd CD) is "Open String, 2nd Fret" on various strings, and then you're ready for blues, well, that about speaks for itself.
Do yourself a favor and get "Doug Marks Metal Method." It's the best out there that I've found. Despite the name, it's a rock-solid general guitar course.
I was just hoping to grab something with a different perspective that would be useful in some way.
This is NOT it.
If you do buy this, expect about a week's worth of use depending on the amount of time you're first learning guitar.
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A pretty terrible rip off, really
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| Review Date: March 26, 2006 |
| Reviewer: CP, |
| I don't know if other guitar learning software is like this but the "Instant Play" series is horrible. For this price I thought it would include massive amounts of diagrams and scale figures. All this has is some lame videos a few chord charts. This is a big waste of money. Everything on here and more can be found online for free. Don't buy this or any music learning software for that matter to be on the safe side. |
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November 17th, 2009 | 
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