My Electric Guitar - Review

3.8

0.0 (0)

The latest addition to eMedia's line of instrumental instruction software products takes the ideas that made their previous products major hits and expanded them to provide individualized instruction on the electric guitar. With intelligent, useful instruction, videos, graphical tools, and games, anyone young or old can learn how to play the electric guitar with this fun, easy to use software product.

My Electric Guitar is a software based instructional title intended to help beginners learn to play the electric guitar. The software ships on a Mac/Windows hybrid CD that can play on most Windows and Mac machines. In order to use all of the features of the program a user must also have a microphone.

General Topics Covered:

Basic setup of guitar and amplifier

Amplifier sound adjustment

String replacement

Tuning

Basic beginner chord fingerings

Palm muting

Tablature

Blues scale

Bent notes, pull-offs, and hammer-ons

Editor review

The Fun and Easy Way To Learn Electric Guitar

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Of all of the titles in the eMedia My Music series, My Electric Guitar is probably my favorite. As usual, the visuals and progression of instruction are well thought out and demonstrated in a way that makes total sense for both young children and adults. While it is obviously geared for the younger age student as evidenced by the use of the animated "Rocky the Guitar" character, any adult that wanted to learn to play electric guitar could also use this software and progress through the entire series of lessons in just a few practice sessions. While the lessons do not get too elaborate, they certainly do cover enough material and provide enough activities to get a beginner moving along the path toward being a respectable musician. Most lessons come with video explanations performed by a professional guitarist.
The Pros:
Instruction progresses at a very natural pace as the student first learns to set up their instrument and amplifer, then immediately learns how to play three very easy one finger chords. These chords are put together in a song, and reinforced through a simple game to help students remember the correlation between chord name and fingering positions on the fretboard. At first the games seemed confusing, and could use a bit more instruction or demonstration (at least for the first game on the disk) but the games are rather intuitive, and most students will quickly catch on. Once the basics are covered and the student has built up some confidence with the beginner chords the instruction progresses to more complex three finger chords and longer songs. All of the songs have both slow and fast versions, so that a student can practice and improve at their own pace. Navigation through the lessons is easy to do, and a built in guitar tuner and metronome compliment the lesson materials.
The Cons:
While the benefits of the software greatly outweigh the negatives there are a few things missing that from a music educator's viewpoint should be included. When progressing through the lessons involving strumming chords the music on screen shows them with rhythmic symbols and rests, but as far as I could tell the duration of the notes and rests was not covered. This leads the learner to learn the music by rote, and while not necessarily a bad thing, I always insist that my students be able to identify notes by the duration and count the rhythms correctly in the absence of the play along track. The other missing link is any instruction using traditional music notation on a five line staff, but that may be left out by design, as many teachers do not introduce traditional music notation until later in a student's guitar instruction. There are no teacher materials provided with this software product as it is not marketed or intended for classroom instruction.
The Bottom Line:
The eMedia My Electric Guitar software is an excellent value for any parent who wants to give their child a jump start at playing the electric guitar.