Pricing
Jamorama has recently revamped its membership and pricing structure.
If you’re on the fence about a membership and want to check out the site first, you can register for free to get Basic Access. This lets you create a user profile, use the site’s badge and achievement system, and browse forums and blogs. You’ll also get access to three basic courses: Stage 1 of the Beginner Guitar Method course, Beginner Guitar Chords, and Acoustic Guitar Maintenance. That’s not a lot of material, but it does give you a good taste of what Jamorama is like as a learning tool.
Lifetime Access for $99.95
If you’re ready to pull the trigger on a membership, you’ll find that Jamorama’s new price gives you one of the more reasonable deals out there. Instead of offering access as a monthly subscription, Jamorama now charges a one-time fee for lifetime access to all of its content. That includes everything from the video lessons to supplementary resources like printable references, jam tracks, and more, as well as any new content that Jamorama pushes in the future.
Jamorama backs its paid membership up with a lengthy 120-day money-back guarantee. If you’re unsatisfied with your experience, you can claim a refund anytime within that period, no questions asked.
7th Place8.4 out of 10Features
On paper, that lifetime access offer looks like a fantastic deal. Still, we took the liberty of digging a bit deeper to see just how much value you can get out of a Jamorama membership.
Lesson Coverage
Compared to many of its competitors, Jamorama’s collection of courses has a fairly limited scope. The material is oriented more towards beginner and intermediate students, so you’ll be going through Beginner Guitar Method up to Speed Picking and the foundations of Guitar Theory. Unfortunately, there aren’t many courses or lesson series dedicated to specific styles, genres, or more technical topics, so more advanced users probably won’t find anything here that they don’t already know. Jamorama adds new courses regularly, but unless it truly ramps up its production of new materials, even intermediate users might find themselves outgrowing the site.
In the meantime, though, finding your way around is easy. The course selection page lets you filter the course menu according to skill level or other relevant categories like “guitar theory” or particular techniques. Courses themselves are well-organized, often divided into weeks that are further divided into topics.
A separate page lists all of the available jam tracks, which let you toggle the guitar track as you play along to your chosen song.
Lesson Format
Jamorama’s lessons take the form of high-definition videos. Course material is presented in small chunks of around 10-15 minutes each — handy if you’re short on time and just squeezing in a new lesson. Unfortunately, you don’t have as much control over lesson or track playback as you’d get from other sites.
Video pages come with links to the relevant forum and downloads of supplementary materials like exercise PDFs. The exercises are the only things you can download, though; the lessons themselves remain off-limits. Aside from these, you’ll also see links to the course group, which comprises all the users who are taking, or have taken, that particular course.
Jamorama uses a system of achievement points and badges to give users more incentive to keep developing their skills. Your points and achievements are displayed on your profile, and you can compete with other users, too. The Learning Dashboard, meanwhile, gives you a good overview of your progress for all your lessons.
Social Networking for Guitarists
In line with this new emphasis on gamification, Jamorama also undertook a recent pivot to a more social approach for its business. The site encourages interaction between users, and you’re free to add other members as friends to your account.
Like all social networks, Jamorama gives you a wall where you can post your thoughts for other users to like or leave a comment on. There’s a News Feed feature that keeps you updated on your friends’ posts, too.
You can also take Jamorama with you anywhere, thanks to its compatibility with mobile platforms.
Customer Support
Jamorama’s website features a short FAQ page that answers basic questions regarrding membership, site features, and so on. You can also check out the community forums, where you can post questions for other Jamorama users (and, occasionally, staff) to answer. If you need more specific assistance, you can file a support ticket through Jamorama’s Help Desk section, or you can send them a letter through post. Jamorama also has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube that you can follow for news and updates.
What's the Verdict on Jamorama?
Jamorama Review 2020 – Conclusion
Jamorama’s pivot to gamification and social networking brings a new sheen to the online guitar learning experience and gives you more tools for staying motivated. Well-organized lessons still use the typical video tutorial approach, however, and Jamorama’s lesson catalog doesn’t quite reach the broad scope of its bigger competitors yet. Advanced users might be better off with a different site; beginners and intermediate students, meanwhile, can get a lot of mileage out of the site’s lifetime access membership, which only requires a one-time payment. If you’re a beginner looking to pick up some skills and some new friends to boot, check out Jamorama today!
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