Infinite Guitar
There is a new contender in the online guitar video tuition called Infinite Guitar, as I have previously mentioned on Guitar Noize there are loads of great resources for learning guitar on the internet these days and with broadband internet comes video streaming and ongoing access to the kind of tuition that has never before been available to guitarists. I was very fortunate to be given unlimited access for a week by Infinite Guitar instructor Sean Conklin to Infinite Guitar’s large collection of lessons in order to review and assess how useful this site is to the average guitar player. Now Infinite Guitar is a fairly new enterprise, I believe launched in March 2008 but they have made sure that they had plenty of video lessons online to make the site immediately useful to players of all levels. For a start the site has a group of very talented instructors from around the globe all proficient in a variety of styles from the high energy shredding techniques of Sean Conklin and Rick Graham to the melodic Jazz techniques of Mike Edwin and everything in between including acoustic and classical lessons.

Infinite Guitar makes it very easy to choose lessons by style, ability, exercises, theory etc. or by instructor. Once you choose a lesson, all associated lessons are listed in a drop down for easy access and suggestions for other similar lessons are located at the bottom of the page. Each lesson has accompanying tab which can be easily printed and saved to your favourites and this is displayed below the video player so you may want to download the pdf to open in a new window so that you can position it on your screen next to the video so you can follow along with the instructor. The technical ability of all the instructors is very high, the kind of level of playing that makes you wonder why you don’t own their solo album yet! I seem to have gravitated towards Sean and Rick’s lessons going with their rock and metal lessons and in particular I liked how Sean uses his own compositions to illustrate techniques so you are learning examples within the context of the music. They are the modern day equivalent to studies that classical guitar composers such as Fernando Sor and Heitor Villa-Lobos created to improve pupils technique. For example his composition, “Fahrenheit” includes fast legato phrasing, alternate picking and sweep arpeggios and pose enough of a challenge for the more advanced guitarist while breaking it down to slow speeds for the beginner. Each example is shown at full speed, then at a slower tempo with different camera angles helping you really see how the example is being picked and fingered and if for some reason there is something you don’t fully understand there is a forum where you can ask the instructor questions.

All this tuition obviously comes at a price, these guys have to make something for lessons as valuable as this and I think for such a new venture they are off to a really great start. A great balance of instructors focussing on techniques and exercises useful to all guitarists I think in particular rock and metal guitarists will really have a lot to get their teeth into! So down to the nitty gritty, how much? Well for only $8.25/month you get unlimited access to all of the 549 lessons currently on the site and this number is ever expanding. The guys even take requests in their forums so you can get exactly what you want such Rick Graham’s “In the style of Guthrie Govan”. I really can’t fault what Infinite Guitar has achieved so far, the site design needs a little tweaking all those silver gradients look a bit dodgey and the video player could do with a little design refinement but these are all visual enhancements that I’m sure will happen as the site grows.

So why not head over and check out the 10 free lessons available at Infinite Guitar and make your own mind up!