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Jamorama has been around for years, and they haven’t been resting on their laurels. They appear to be the market leader, not that that’s a necessarily good indicator. (“Transformers 2”, anyone?)

Jamorama review virtual image

Media

I like learning books and ebooks over video almost every time. I just tend to learn better through words, at least with academic concepts. Learning an instrument is a huge exception. Here, video excels. Jamorama comes with a reported 148 videos (I haven’t counted). Jamorama also comes with an ebook, so it scratches both my itches. The ebook is 250+ pages and matches the videos well. The download sizes are hundreds of megabytes, but they’re broken up into chunks of under 200 megabytes. They took about 6-7 minutes to download on my somewhat pokey DSL connection.

The graphics are gorgeous. The ebook and videos are all top quality in both appearance and sound quality. Doesn’t sound important, but when you’re faced with a lot of material and a necessarily steep learning curve, these things get more important. The videos are much higher than DVD quality. The sound is clean. Overall design is elegantly smooth and easy on the eye, thus reducing fatigue.

Jamorama has audio for each lesson, both with guitar and without. These are called backing tracks. The backing tracks are integral to the ebook (in PDF form), and they sound fantastic. They aren’t cheesy General MIDI crap that sounds like bad karaoke, an unfortunate trait of many guitar instruction products. These sound like a real band recorded the tracks.

Extras

When you buy a book at the bookstore, you don’t get “extras”, but with ebooks you very often do. Jamorama’s extras shine. The best to me are backing tracks so you can jam over instrumentals. Unlike practicing with a metronome, you can’t cheat because you can’t start over (at least for 12 bars). Considering you spend about half as much as Jamorama costs at the music store just for a backing tracks CD, this rocks.

The backing tracks come in two versions: one with the guitar, and one without. Nice especially in the early lessons, because a beginner doesn’t normally have a teacher nearby.

Just as important is the tuner. Beginners often sound terrible not because they’re doing poorly, but because they aren’t tuning their instruments properly. It’s so much easier now that you don’t have to use a piano, pitch pipe, or tuning fork. While I tend to like the pocket Korg tuners when they go on sale at MusiciansFriend.com, software tuners like the freebie with Jamorama are godsends.

The extra that the mosts guitarists will avoid is GuitEarIt, a horrendously named ear training program. Guitarists tend to hate ear training (okay, most musicians do) and this slightly clunky program will do nothing to get them back to the fold. I dutifully tried GuitEarIt and found it did help temporarily. Then I gave up like anyone else would because I’d rather jam.

Free stuff

You can sign up for an amazing amount of free stuff. There are 6 free lessons. There’s a sensational free online chord book. The photos are of a real guitar neck, and they show both a photograph of the hand position and a superimposed guitar tab. This gives you the best of both worlds, and it’s something no printed book has the room to do. The lessons culminate in “Midnight Special”, with backing tracks. A music teaching game called the Jayde Music Game is included with the freebies. It is also much better than I expected. It teaches note reading in multiple cleffs, not just bass and treble but also alto and tenor.

Problems with Jamorama

For some reason I have better memories than most of learning guitar the first time. It is apparently easy to forget that some of the hardest material isn’t tricky scales or nasty barre chords, but just getting the very basics right: pressing down strings without causing fret buzz, for example, and even strumming. Strumming looks easy until you try it for the first time. Jamorama glosses over these areas and does not give additional guidance. This would be an area of learning where video could shine, and they dropped the ball.

Another shortcoming was that the PDFs have tables of contents, but you can’t click a chapter to jump to it. Lame.

What if you don’t like Jamorama?

If you buy a book/DVD combination and unseal the DVD, good luck getting a refund. You don’t have that problem with Jamorama. You can get a refund anytime within 60 days of purchase. Impressive: credit card merchants are required to offer a 30 day refund, but Jamorama does them a month better.

Click here to purchase Jamorama

Summary

Jamorama was easy to review. It’s an incredible product. It does almost as well as could be expected without plopping a teacher down right in front of you.

Jamorama Review
Value
You get a lot for your money, plus a ton of extras
Suitable for beginners
Takes you from tuning to some impressive blues licks
Video quality
Looks great-much better than the DVDs I've bought

Overall
Average score

photo credit: Adrian Miles ©