Learn & Master Guitar Review

The Learn and Master Guitar course by Legacy Learning Systems is a very complete guitar instruction classroom on DVD. It comes delivered to your house loaded with information and several different approaches to learning guitar. The first path to learning the guitar is the DVD sessions. These are followed up by workshops and your own practice time. To help fully incorporate the sessions into your consciousness there is also a 107 page workbook to follow with the sessions and jam along CD’s to cement what you’ve learned. With all of this there is also a member’s only web-site where as a Learn and Master Guitar owner you can go and get even more valuable learning information for your guitar playing.

The DVD’s, with 20 sessions in all, are packed with extensive instruction in a setting that is very comfortable and at a very good pace for any guitar player. They are produced very well with a split screen so the student can watch the instructor (Steve Krenz) play his guitar and also see the notes, not only in tablature but also in musical notation. Steve Krenz is a very well spoken and well rounded guitar player. He has played with several recording artist and orchestras and is a working musician in Nashville. The latter alone, as any musician knows is no small feat.

After each session there is workshop time. This is about fifteen minutes of going over what was taught in the session. This is a good feature simply because it focuses your practice. If you end up being short on time you can just go through the workshops and keep yourself up to pace until you have time to sit down for more sessions. There are also sections for guitar knowledge, in these you are told the basics of the guitar, the names and locations of its different parts what they are for and why they are needed. As a musician who also likes to know how and why everything works these little side sections were fantastic.

In addition to the DVD sessions there are also five jam along CD’s. These have the songs learned in the sessions played with a full band and at a variety of tempos. Incorporate these with a metronome and they are really great tools to learn proper beat and strumming techniques. There is no better way to learn to play a song than to play it with a band and at a pace you are comfortable with.

The workbook is in essentially the sessions on paper plus! It is one hundred and seven pages of learning. Legacy definitely put some thought into this complete learning tool. The workbook covers everything in the sessions and allows you to write in notes and do different exercises without the guitar so you may incorporate the lessons with different learning processes to really lock in what is being taught. I really had a feeling of a complete learning experience with the DVD’s, the jam along CD’s, the workshops, the guitar knowledge sections and the workbook.

On top of all of this, with the course you also gain access as a member to the Learn and Master Guitar web-site. There you can take on extra exercises and ask questions on a chat board that can be answered either by your peers or Steve Krenz himself. This is a great added feature for this very effective guitar learning tool.

If you are looking for a DVD guitar lesson that has the best potential to help you obtain your goal, Learn and Master Guitar is your best bet. If you follow the suggested time for each session the course will take you about a year. With proper practice time, about fifteen minutes to a half hour a day, you will be very pleased with the rate of success. Cost to product it is far cheaper than a year of personal lessons! I would highly recommend this course to any of my friends who wanted to learn guitar. I think it’s great!

Marc Smith