Guitar Tricks review: still a great video-based learning platform in 2025?
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If you’re in the market for a guitar learning platform, you may well have come across Guitar Tricks. The platform has been going since 1998, and so has accrued quite the status as a place to start learning, or hone your skills – but can a website that long in the tooth still keep up with more contemporary tools? Let’s dive in.
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What is Guitar Tricks?
Guitar Tricks is first and foremost a curated library of video lessons. Its biggest selling point is the Core Learning System – a set of courses that cover the very fundamentals of guitar and then proceed to dive into blues, country, acoustic and rock playing. From the trunk of the core learning path grow some smaller branches – with some more specific lessons covering certain techniques or niche styles.
Alongside the videos, there are some basic tools which will be helpful for beginners in particular. These include an online tuner, a backing track library, a metronome and some tools to help you learn the notes of the fretboard and lay out some common chords and scales.
What is Guitar Tricks like to use?
Guitar Tricks’ interface is, as you may expect from a site that’s been around since 1998, a little old-school, with a ‘list of lists’ approach to categorising the video lessons, rather than a modern, dynamic interface. Similarly the tablature is presented as a static image, as opposed to a dynamic tab as you’d have with platforms like Songsterr. It does auto-scroll along with the lesson in some cases, however. The tools, such as the scale finder and the tuner, are all perfectly functional – but do look quite ‘2008’ with a lot of dark gradients, busy textures and slightly cluttered design elements seemingly tailored for lower-resolution screens.
Guitar Tricks’ Scale Finder
Thanks to the sheer amount of lessons within the library with the slightly old-school approach to site design, Guitar Tricks is initially a little overwhelming from a navigation standpoint. I’d recommend taking some time exploring how the lessons are categorised to get a feel for the site before you dive too deep in and get lost.
But once you’ve done this, Guitar Tricks does open itself up to you. Lists of lessons are organised into either the core learning paths or more specific sets. So if you’re the kind of learner that quickly wants to move towards what you want to play, you’ll likely click with the platform. While complete beginners should obviously start with the fundamental courses, there’s a lot of freedom when it comes to the other lesson paths. You don’t have to unlock anything, and courses are easily returned to if you decide to meander down a different fork in the road for a while.
Guitar Tricks’ Core Learning System
The Core Learning System offers two levels of fundamentals, and while the foundational playing techniques are included, it’s also good to see things like dialling in a great tone and taking care of your instrument being covered.
After the fundamental courses, there are two levels for each of the four main styles: acoustic, blues, rock and country. But importantly, the lesson library doesn’t stop there – beyond the Core Learning System, you can explore further courses grouped into either beginner or experienced levels, with lessons on 13 different genres and on more granular techniques such as tapping, harmonics and hybrid picking.
The interface of the Guitar Tricks lesson page.
The Core Learning System courses themselves are incredibly in-depth, going from the very basics of a given style to much more advanced theory – the blues course, for instance, starts with an overview of the 12-bar form but goes on to explore things such as the nuanced differences between regional blues styles and advanced lead techniques.
The non-core courses vary in length, but still mostly offer a good broad overview of the technique or genre – however, they won’t give you the same ground-up knowledge of the topic like the core courses will.
As for the site experience with the actual lessons, the focus is clearly on the video. As mentioned, the tablature is static, but some of the lessons do also offer some in-video tabs, or automatically scroll the tab image along. In some ways this can be viewed as a positive, as it ensures you’re not just noodling away while looking at an abstract tab while ignoring the ‘why’ of the lesson – similarly, the tab that is there comes with proper rhythmic notation, which is very important for developing a sense of timing.
And for many, far more important than the quality of the notation is the quality of the teaching, which I have to say is of a very high standard indeed – instructors present information clearly, and often talk through that all important why, rather than just getting you to the point where you can play the part in question. The focus overall is on building a complete and robust relationship with the guitar and the style or technique being covered – and this is done with a friendly, easy-going and engaging manner.
The available style-specific lessons on Guitar Tricks
The video player itself also offers some handy learning tools, including the ability to slow or speed up playback, and choose a section of the video to loop if you want to drill a certain part. This feature can be a little glitchy at first, but (on desktop, at least), it works.
Is the Guitar Tricks Mobile App any good?
For taking the video lessons on the go, the Guitar Tricks app does the job – provided you have a good data plan, as there’s no way to download videos on the app to view them later. You can download lessons from the desktop site, provided they’re not any of the licensed song lessons, but for my money a download feature would make more sense on the app.
Sadly the app’s issues go beyond the lack of a download button. The ‘progress’ page refuses to load for me at all, so I have no way of telling you how helpful that is. Sometimes, the video player just crashes and needs to be reloaded – and it consistently crashes when I either lock my phone or fullscreen some tabs.
Speaking of, the app is where the lack of truly dynamic tablature becomes a much bigger issue. The tabs here have not been optimised for a smaller screen in any way, don’t autoscroll and cannot be zoomed in on – even when rotating my phone to landscape mode. So unless you have the world’s best eyesight (or a huge phone), the tabs are simply too small to read, especially when you’ve got a guitar in your hands and your phone propped up on a coffee table.
This is as zoomed in as tab gets when your phone is in landscape mode.
Playback is a little limited compared to the desktop version, too. There’s no playback speed adjustment on the mobile app, and while you still ostensibly have the ability to loop sections, this feature doesn’t work for me – it just pauses the video. The mobile app also doesn’t offer any of the tools like the scale finder or the tuner – things you’d think would be no-brainer inclusions when it comes to putting the features you’ve paid for in your pocket.
With all of that said, I’d not really recommend Guitar Tricks if you’re a mobile-only user – the experience seems very much designed for use on a laptop.
Is Guitar Tricks good for learning songs?
As well as lessons on techniques and styles, there’s also a fairly sizable library of over 800 song-specific lessons. These are in-depth video courses that go over every guitar part of a song, and explore some of the relevant techniques and theory.
Like the other lessons, the song lesson videos are all well presented, easy to follow and clearly shot. The level of detail that the instructors go into is also appropriate for the given song – meaning that beginners won’t feel lost, but those taking on more intermediate material won’t feel like they’re going over the basics again and again.
However, Guitar Tricks’ song library makes the platform’s age starkly apparent. Classic rock dominates the list, and rock in general makes up almost half of the entire library. If you were energised to pick up the guitar by the Rolling Stones or AC/DC, great – otherwise, Guitar Tricks’ song library likely won’t resonate with you at all. The jazz, metal, surf, funk and bluegrass genres are very underserved in comparison.
The same goes for any contemporary music – in comparison to Fender Play, which boasts tracks by Paramore, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, Guitar Tricks’ pop offerings are incredibly slim. There are only 28 pop songs to learn in total – the newest is Perfect by Ed Sheeran (released in 2017), five of them are Kings Of Leon tracks, and one of them is the Addams Family theme.
On the heavier side, things are equally as focused on the old-school. A collection of ‘modern’ metal is mostly from the 1990s, including multiple Pantera songs released 35 years ago. Like with the rest of the site’s selection, you’ll have to look elsewhere for any truly modern music. There’s so much fantastic guitar music that’s been released in the last few years, heavy or otherwise, that has driven people to pick up the instrument – and it is a real shame not to see that reflected here.
This doesn’t detract from the quality of the lessons that are here, but it’s worth keeping in mind if your tastes lean in any direction away from classic rock and blues. Of course, many bonafide ‘guitar classics’ are within that classic rock/blues scope – tracks that many will want to have in their repertoire, such as House Of The Rising Sun, Hey Joe and the like, are well represented within the library.
Is Guitar Tricks worth it?
While you can access a limited number of lessons for free, to make the best use of Guitar Tricks you’ll want full access to the platform. This comes in at either $14.92 or £12.67 per month if you bill annually, or $29.95/£24.99 per month billed monthly – but you can also save 20% on either a monthly or an annual subscription, or grab a free trial below.
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And while I do have my issues with the platform’s song choices and mobile app, Guitar Tricks does justify its price tag by offering a great structure to everything. The core learning paths are worth the price of admission in how strong an overview they give you of the fundamentals of the instrument and of four styles that undeniably underpin a huge amount of guitar music out there – and there’s undeniably a massive benefit to a deliberately-structured lesson path compared to just piecing together bits of technique from random free lessons.
So given the sheer number of high quality video lessons available and the strength of the fundamentals courses, Guitar Tricks is absolutely worth its annual subscription cost for a beginner. Even if the song list fails to inspire, there are those other free resources you can look to to learn some contemporary tunes alongside Guitar Trick’s well-structured lessons on the fundamentals.
On the other hand, if you’re an intermediate player, you might want to take a look at the available lessons and the song list before committing to a subscription, but there’s still a lot to like here – especially if you want to make a sideways move from country to rock, or vice versa – thanks to that Core Learning System, you’ll be well catered for.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
