Deciding between Guitar Tricks vs TrueFire is a difficult choice to make. Both guitar lesson websites have awesome training courses to learn guitar online and both are reasonably priced. So which one will teach you how to play guitar faster?
Well, the main question you have to ask yourself is which one will teach you what you want to learn? TrueFire and Guitar Tricks both have good beginner lessons, but they excel in different styles of teaching. They also have different levels of advanced training as well.
In this review, we’ll compare each website’s guitar lessons, training courses, backing tracks, pros, cons, and features, so you can easily decide which one will help you start shredding your guitar faster.
GuitarTricks or TrueFire Compared
Contents
- 1 GuitarTricks or TrueFire Compared
- 2 Guitar Tricks versus TrueFire Website Format
- 3 Guitar Tricks vs. TrueFire Courses
- 4 TrueFire or Guitar Tricks Guitar Lessons
- 5 TrueFire and Guitar Tricks Video Lessons
- 6 GuitarTricks or TrueFire Guitar Instructors
- 7 Backing Tracks, Songs and Guitar Styles
- 8 GuitarTricks versus TrueFire Cost & Price
- 9 Guitar Lesson Extra Features
- 10 Our Recommendation
Free Trial Offers
One thing that you should know before we jump into this comparison review is that both Guitar Tricks and TrueFire have free trial promotions that you can use to sign up for their lesson programs for FREE!
You don’t have to pay anything to start. Just sign up, test out their lessons, and get a taste for each platform’s teaching style. That will make it way easier to decide between the two. Here’s how to sign up for the free trials:
GuitarTricks Overview
Guitar Tricks is twenty-one years on the scene of the online guitar learning sites. It stands out from the others due to a large number of video lessons – it has more than eleven thousand video lessons! For beginners, there is the Core Learning System – a program that will teach you from knowing nothing about guitar playing – to playing songs and implementing techniques. For experienced players – there is a list of more than seven hundred song lessons and a lot of technique lessons.
Everybody that plays or wants to guitar playing can benefit from Guitar Tricks – beginners, intermediate, advanced players – GuitarTricks has lessons for you. The lessons are easy to follow. Each video lesson includes guitar tabs, a backing track to practice with, and a song you to learn new skills.
TrueFire Overview
TrueFire is the oldest guitar learning platform. It was launched in 1991!
Since the beginning of the platform, TrueFire has collaborated with more than six hundred instructors, and some of them are well-known masters of the guitar – like Tommy Emmanuel for example, or Pat Martino, or Andy Timmons! Even Mike Stern has a course on TrueFire!
On TrueFire you can find a huge library of courses and video lessons – there are more than 40.000 video lessons and more than seven hundred courses! Huge collection, right? Let’s dive in deeper, and see what you will get with a subscription on TruFire.
Guitar Tricks versus TrueFire Website Format
GuitarTricks Website Format
The GuitarTricks website is so easy to navigate. It just makes sense. You don’t have waste a second “getting” the site – everything can be found within seconds, it is very well designed – it is designed to fit the needs of everyone who wants to learn the guitar. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist (or any kind of scientist for the matter of fact) to find the guitar lessons that you need.
You can get to everything from the top and left-hand side menus. The lessons and the courses are organized with a great sense for organization too.
In the center is the video, under it, you can find the tablature/notation and the description info about the lesson. The previous lessons, the following lessons, and the suggested lessons are on the right side.
TrueFire Website Format
TrueFire is super simple to navigate. It might not be so eye-catching like some other sites that we covered, but it is very practical, and that is the most important aspect when we talk about site design.
There’s a drop down menu on the top with these buttons:
- Guitar Courses
- Learning Paths
- Private Guitar Lessons
- Jams
- Instructors
Everything on the site can be accessed with a few clicks, and you can find the lessons that you need in a few seconds. The courses and the lessons are very organized too. They look very similar to the GuitarTricks lessons and courses for the matter of fact.
Guitar Tricks vs. TrueFire Courses
Guitar Tricks Courses
GuitarTricks has courses for everybody, beginners, intermediate, and advanced guitarists. These are the learning paths you can choose from: Beginner Lessons, Experienced Lessons, Learn to Play songs, and Learn Styles of Guitar.
Each course on GuitarTricks consists of many chapters, which then have several lessons. Each lesson has several videos, ensuring you will completely learn the song or the technique.
If you are a complete beginner, it is best to start with “Guitar Fundamentals Level 1” course where Lisa McCormick will teach you guitar basics and pretty much every important beginner guitar fundamental. It will prepare you for the next levels.
If you are an intermediate or advanced player, then you can, of course, skip the beginner lessons, and find a course that interests you – there are a lot of courses that can be useful even to professional musicians. You can track your progress at the Progress page.
TrueFire Guitar Courses
As we mentioned in the introduction, there are more than seven hundred courses and more than forty thousand video lessons. TrueFire has the largest catalog on the internet for teaching guitar, and there are lessons for everybody – beginners, intermediate, advanced guitar players… There are even lessons for Bass on TrueFire!
If you are a beginner, it is recommended to choose your Learning Path depending on your music preferences. You’ll start playing guitar right away and improve your skill almost immediately. First, you can choose one of these Learning Paths: Jazz, Acoustic, Blues, Country, Rock, or Bass. Here you can choose which step to take based on your skill level and playing experience.
There are a lot of courses on TrueFire – there are Guitar Style courses that cover pretty much all styles – from Rock, Country, and Blues, to Classical, Jazz, and Flamenco & World, and everything in-between. There are also Practice courses, Improvisation courses, Theory courses, Scale courses, Arpeggio courses, Tone and Gear courses… The list goes on – you get the idea.
There are even courses for Bass, Banjo, Ukulele, Harmonica, Mandolin, Dobro, etc. There is even a Saxophone course on TrueFire – from the legend itself, Bill Evans! On TrueFire, you can also get a 1-on-1 guitar lesson with one of their educators.
TrueFire or Guitar Tricks Guitar Lessons
Guitar Tricks Lessons
Guitar Tricks is perfect for beginners due to the awesome instructor Lisa McCormick and the super simple learning path that the courses offer. GuitarTricks differs from the other sites because it has one and only, simple path for beginners, while the other sites have plenty of instructors and courses that teach the same thing – this can be a little confusing for the newbies.
The Core Learning System at Guitar Tricks offers a step-by-step learning path that will help you strum your first songs in a very short time.
Experienced players can benefit a lot from GuitarTricks too – there are plenty of Guitar Style lessons. All of these Guitar Styles are covered: Acoustic, Rock, Funk, Jazz, Metal, Blues, Country, Rockabily, Classical, and more.
For experienced players, GuitarTricks also offers a tons of different technique & practice lessons, Artist Studies, Chord & Scale Lessons, and Gear & Tone tutorials.
TrueFire Guitar Lessons
For Beginners, there is a lot of content on TrueFire. If you are a complete beginner, go to the Learning Paths, and start with the “Learn Guitar 1” course by instructor Jeff Scheetz – he will take you on a step-by-step path, teaching you all the basics. Then, you can continue to “Learn Guitar 2”.
After you finish these two, you will probably get an image of what you can, so you can start learning songs, take other courses on specific genres and techniques, etc.
For Intermediate and Advanced players, you can also take a Learning Path, and skip the Beginner (or Intermediate – if you are an advanced player), and start learning a new set of skills. TrueFire is the top learning site for Advanced players because it offers so much. TrueFire has courses from legends like Robben Ford, Steve Vai, Larry Carlton, and Tommy Emmanuel. We are sure you can learn from them, even if you are a hard-core professional working musician.
Of course, just like any other guitar-learning site, TrueFire has song lessons too. However, the song list on TrueFire is limited compared with the other sites. There are five types of song lessons that you can stumble upon on TrueFire:
Rhythm Covers, Song Elements, Fingerstyle Covers, Note-for-Note, and Chord Melody Covers. TrueFire is a guitar-learning platform that mainly focuses on Styles and Techniques, which is better if you ask me because with applying the techniques you can learn on TrueFire, you can learn any song in the world. However, if you are the type of player that just wants to learn a thousand-song repertoire, TrueFire is probably not the place for you.
TrueFire is filled with awesome Guitar Style lessons. There are a lot of them, and many of them are made by true legends of guitar playing.
Blues, Blues Rock, Jazz, Jazz Blues, Rock, Hard Rock/Metal, Country, Acoustic, Singer-Songwriter, Fingerstyle, Classical, Funk, R&B/Soul, Americana, Rockabilly, and Flamenco & World Guitar Styles are available on TrueFire. Every one of these Guitar Styles has a great number of courses on TrueFire. For example, there are two hundred and seventeen Blues Guitar Style courses available.
TrueFire and Guitar Tricks Video Lessons
Guitar Tricks Video Lessons
The video lessons at guitartricks.com are pretty entertaining. All of the videos are recorded in high definition, and from multiple angles. Also, the video player is probably the best way to learn guitar.
It has a Loop feature to set your start point and endpoint and loop a specific part of the video. You can also speed up and slow down the video without changing the pitch of the audio. Just in case you have a bad internet connection, you can also set the video quality to stream faster.
Under the Video Player, you can find the Description of the lesson, the Notation/Tablature, and the Lyrics (where relevant). On some lessons, next to the video on the right side is the Notation and the tablature for the lesson, which automatically scrolls with the video.
TrueFire Guitar Lesson Videos
A big portion of the videos at truefire.com are in high resolution, however, there are older videos with lower resolution due to their age (Truefire is very old, remember?). All of them are recorded with multiple cameras, so you can check out what is happening at both sides of the guitar. Pretty much all of the videos on True Fire also have the option to be sped up and slowed down, and an option to loop a certain part of the video.
Also, a lot of the videos have Tab and Notation that scrolls together with video, making learning run even smoother. There are more than 40,000 video lessons on Truefire!
GuitarTricks or TrueFire Guitar Instructors
Guitar Tricks Teachers
Guitar Tricks has an instructor for every style of guitar. All of them have are specialists in a guitar style, and some of them are experts in more than one. For example, you can get Rock, Blues, and Acoustic lessons from instructor Tom Finch.
There are thirty-two instructors at the moment on guitartricks.com, and most of them are guitar educators with decades of teaching experience. Many of them also have careers in the music business as guitar players for big names in the industry, and as studio musicians.
All of them are good at their job, professional, and they appear very friendly and enthusiastic, which is also a very important quality that an instructor must have.
TrueFire Guitar Instructors
On True Fire, currently, there are more than two hundred educators. And these are not just any kind of educators, these are the best session players and guitar teachers in the world. At True Fire, you can get courses Dweezil Zappa, Steve Vai, Mike Stern, Pat Martino, Robben Ford, Tony Franklin, Larry Carlton, Tommy Emmanuel – these are just a few of the names from the legendary list of educators that have courses and lessons on True Fire.
I mean, come on, you can’t go wrong with this kind of educators. Even if you are a working musician there is certainly a thing or two that you can learn from Mike Stern, for example.
Backing Tracks, Songs and Guitar Styles
Guitartricks.com has one of the best song lesson lists with 700+ song lessons! Most of them are a full note for note song lessons, and some song lessons are made easy for the needs of the beginner guitar players.
Still, the song list at GuitarTricks is limited, and there are not lessons from every artist on the planet. But you can find songs from all of the legends, and if you can’t, there is probably “In the Style of…” lesson where you can learn the artist’s techniques.
Every song lesson has both music notation and guitar tablature with a play-along song or backing track at the end of each, so you can jam on your new-learned song or technique to.
There are all sorts of technique lessons, pretty much every guitar style, and every guitar technique is covered with a lesson on GuitarTricks. Backing tracks are also available at guitartricks.com – there are 1288 Jam Tracks available that you get with the subscription to the site. There are jam tracks in every style: Acoustic, Bluegrass, Blues, Classical, Country, Funk, Jazz, Metal, Rock, Rockabilly, Surf, and World.
We already mentioned above that True Fire lacks a huge song list. Still, there’s plenty of songs from all genres of music. However, a discipline that True Fire shines in, is the backing tracks.
First, we must tell you about the two hundred free jam tracks, that anyone can jam on to – even if you don’t want to pay for a subscription at True Fire – check those out (they are free).
True Fire has even made backing tracks program and app – it’s called “In The Jam”. With this program not only you will get a backing track, but you also have the option to control each of the stems – you can mute or set different volume levels for each instrument, you get the chord progression and the Tab and Notation for the guitar parts. However, “In the Jam” backing tracks are paid separately – it doesn’t come with the price of the subscription to True Fire.
All of the popular Genres for playing guitar are covered on True Fire. This includes Blues Rock, Jazz, Jazz Blues, Rock, Hard Rock/Metal, Country, Acoustic, Singer-Songwriter, Fingerstyle, Classical, Funk, R&B/Soul, Americana, Rockabilly, and Flamenco, and World Genre.
GuitarTricks versus TrueFire Cost & Price
Guitar Tricks Cost
Guitar Tricks costs $19.95 a month if you choose the monthly plan. There is also an annual plan, that costs $179.99.
Also, there is the promo code “SAVE20” that will save you 20% of your first month or year, depending on the plan you have chosen.
We also recommend taking the 14-day Free Trial, before paying for a subscription, so you can test the site and see if it will work for you.
TrueFire Price
The Monthly Subscription at True Fire costs $19, while the annual subscription costs $199.
For those of you who are millionaires and want to improve your guitar playing, there is the lifetime subscription that costs $1.999.
Things like In the Jam and Private Lessons are paid additionally. But hey, with a $19 a month you’ll get access to 700 courses and more than 40,000 guitar lessons!
Another great thing about True Fire is that they give a 30-day free trial with full access to their course library without the need to enter your credit card details.
Guitar Lesson Extra Features
GuitarTricks Course Bonuses
GuitarTricks has tons of extra features. First, we must mention the thing that interests the youngsters – yes, you can watch it on your cellphone. There is a Guitar Tricks app for both iOS and Android devices. GuitarTricks has a community on Facebook and Twitter, where you can connect with other students from the site, and engage in activities that GuitarTricks organizes – such as giveaways, special promotions, etc.
Also, GuitarTricks has a YouTube channel, that has a lot of videos about all sorts of stuff concerning guitar playing, guitar gear, and similar. Of course, on Guitar Forum there is a Student Forum and a News Page. There is also the Toolbox, where you can find a lot of great tools for learning and playing guitar, such as a Scale Finder, the Jam Station, a Metronome, a Chord Finder, a Reference Tuner, Guitar Chord Charts, a Fretboard Trainer, a Guitar Tablature Guide, and a Guitar Dictionary.
TrueFire Lesson Platform Features
TrueFire has a lot of Extra Features. It has chord and scale charts, a blog called “The Punch-In”, a journal called “Riff”, a student forum, backing tracks, online tuner, a metronome, Audio lessons from Guitar Player magazine (1200+) with a PDF doc of the magazine page plus a Power Tab, giveaways, iOS and Android apps – so you can take your lessons on the go, etc.
Also, you can get Private lessons on True Fire, which are of course, subject to an additional cost, and In The Jam backing tracks, which are subject to an additional cost too.
Our Recommendation
This is truly a hard one. Guitar Tricks is awesome, but TrueFire is awesome too. So, let’s put it this way.
If you are a complete beginner, it would be probably better to choose Guitar Tricks. However, if you are an experienced player, True Fire has a lot more lessons to offer. Maybe it is best to try out both sites with their free trials, so you can choose what is best for you.
