Wednesday, January 30, 2008

ivideosongs - like iTunes for guitar lessons!

Posted by Jon in • Guitar Instruction

I know that is a big call comparing a site to iTunes but after watching the demo video it seems they have taken the same kind of approach to their site model. www.ivideosongs.com is currently in beta but already seems like a very strong entry into the online teaching genre. The first thing I did was look to see what was in the Folk Acoustic category and was suprised to see that there are a couple of lessons by Erik Mongrain! That impressed me a lot, then I headed over to the Electric rock section and found a tutorial by Alex Lifeson of Rush!

Now don’t expect all the tutorials to be by the original artist that isn’t really the point, but what they do seem to have done is to put together some great high definition video tutorials from very capable teachers. The only thing I would say is that it is a little pricey, for instance just to learn Jet’s “Are you gonna be my girl” will set you back $4.99. There are, however, some tutorials that are free to download at beginner and intermediate levels which I’m sure they will expand on.

Also worth a mention is a similar service called nowplayit.com which also offers tutorials by artists (although at $8 per video they are a little bit more expensive) but you can also get a Lite version and an in-house version. ‘In House’ tutorials are exactly the same format at the ‘Full’ tutorials, but instead of featuring the actual artist who wrote or performs the song, it features our own in house tutor. The Lite version is a bit weird, it is like the Full version except the artist is removed… so really you just get a music video with tab overlaid? hmm…

The interface for iVideosongs is far superior to nowplayit.com which is primarily based around a search rather than categorised content.

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