eMedia Intermediate Guitar Method Win/Mac

Divided into six categories--left-hand techniques, barre chords, strumming styles, scales, solos, and fingerstyle guitar--the program delivers no less than 175 individual lessons and 41 appendices featuring most every popular musical scale in both open and closed fingering patterns, and a handy virtual chord dictionary. Most lessons allow you to adjust the speed of the music to suit your personal preference and loop certain sections for repetitive replay. Several sessions also offer optional narratives and video, though the narratives are too abbreviated to be truly informative and the video snippets, where veteran instructor Kevin Garry offers personal advice on certain techniques, are equally condensed and confined to a small window.

eMedia has provided several additional perks to make your job a bit easier, including an integrated metronome to help keep the beat, an optional tablature display for those who can't read musical notation, and an animated fretboard that graphically demonstrates each lesson's fingering positions in both left- and right-handed formats. The program's tuner isn't quite so impressive, behaving just as erratically as most computer tuners, and certainly not a replacement for a handheld digital or quartz unit. A small but serviceable audio recorder allows you to build a library of your own efforts and even jam along with self-penned arrangements.

The program concerns itself more with clean and semi-clean acoustic and electric guitar rather than heavily distorted hard rock. A valuable but curious assortment of songs dominates its many lessons, in particular Grand Funk Railroad's mysterious "I'm Your Captain/Closer to Home," The Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey," and Jim Croce's exquisite "Time in a Bottle." Several complex classical pieces end the proceedings, culminating in the celebrated but extremely demanding arpeggio masterpiece "Romanza." It should be noted that although none of the selections are original recordings, all are capably translated and played.

Although eMedia Intermediate Guitar Method isn't especially high-spirited, it does offer a deluge of material that will ultimately benefit any guitarist with the talent and the drive to successfully take it on. With a ton of challenging musical passages and cool licks, some nifty utilities, and plenty of guitar exploration, it is recommended to novice players with virtuoso desires. --Gordon Goble

Amazon.com Product Description
eMedia Intermediate Guitar Method is an easy way to take your guitar playing beyond basic chords and melodies. New techniques are demonstrated in over 175 lessons with full-motion video, sound, and an animated fretboard. You'll learn to play solos like the ones Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix made famous, using newly acquired skills such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, vibrato, and slides. Barre chords and different strumming styles are covered in the rhythm chapters, and there's a fingerstyle chapter as well. You can choose to learn using either tablature or standard music notation. Intervals, scales, and the basics of improvisation are also covered in this comprehensive volume.

eMedia Intermediate Guitar Method includes an animated fretboard that displays the fingering for each song and exercise in real time and is adjustable to four different viewing angles. Included are over 50 songs recorded in multitrack audio, which makes learning and listening to hit songs exciting. Also available is a variable-speed MIDI track option, allowing students to practice any song or exercise at the tempo they choose. The new scale directory provides fingerings, recordings, and variable-speed MIDI for over 200 scales, making practicing and learning new scales easy. Additional features include a built-in automatic tuner, digital metronome, recorder, and 1,000-chord dictionary with audio playback.

Intermediate Guitar Method features many hit songs by artists such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, the Steve Miller Band, Johnny Cash, and Jim Croce.

Features I really like:

Animated Fretboard diagram: How to place your fingers for chords and notes.

Chord Dictionary: Important for playing music--chords are the basis.

Metronome: Nice to have, I find metronomes annoying but they do bring your speed up as you practice.

Guitars and Their Parts: and what might be wrong with your.

Reading Chord Charts, Tablature, Notation: It's important to know how to read a chord chart, but musical notation, the backbone of all music, is not ignored. I think one should read music, so if you don't, you are encouraged to learn here.

The lessons for chords start small--one finger (like a G7), two fingers, three, and up to the tough ones with four or barred. This is rather how I learned because I learned guitar by first playing a ukelele! (The tuning of the last four strings is the same on a guitar and uke.) You are a lot less likely to suffer frustration and sore fingers if you can play a tune or two with a two-finger chord. You just don't strum the entire set of strings at first.

The strumming techniques include good video of the up and down method of the blues, and there is a section on blues guitar style, of which I was most interested.

For the money, hardly a risk. Find a good starter guitar and give it a try.