What do we do?
We provide beginner guitarists like yourself with structured, step-by-step lessons; making it easier for you to learn guitar in your spare time. Unlike some of our competitors, we don't expect you to know anything about guitar before you begin. We take an extremely simple, yet effective approach to teaching you to play guitar so you never find yourself lost in our lessons. And because our courses are for download, you can use them anywhere, anytime. That's why over
200,000 students just like you have used Jamorama.
The Jamorama Story
(As told by Jon Coursey, Jamorama Co-Founder)
I have a confession to make -
learning guitar didn't come easy to me. 10 years ago, while struggling my way through Jazz school as a drummer, I turned to the guitar as an alternative musical out-let, to help "vent" some of my frustrations when my drumming wasn't going so well.
After learning a few chords and strumming patterns on my own I realized I was going to need some serious help if I ever wanted to play guitar properly. So I turned to a good guitarist friend of mine, Dave McKinnon, for help. As Dave and I had played a lot of music together in the past, I was sure he would help me out. And he did!
Dave
started teaching me the guitar basics, getting my chord knowledge up and helping me to tighten up my strum. Over the course of a few weeks I learned most of the major and minor chords in open position and had made a start on playing barre chords. Things seemed to be going great, but then the worst thing happened! We got to scales.
Every-time I tried to play a scale,
my brain would malfunction and my fingers would freeze up completely. I tried and tried again to learn the scales Dave was giving me but it was useless. I couldn't grasp the theory behind them and my clumsy fingers were making it impossible to play anything.
Eventually I'd had enough. I told Dave not to bother teaching me anymore - I was a lost cause. Lucky for me, Dave is a patient guy, and he didn't give up on me. He said, "Look Jon, I know the theory is difficult to grasp. It never came easy to me either, but somehow, I hung in there. I kept playing music with other people and eventually, after years of practice, the theory and the practical began to work together for me."
This wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for. I had already spent 8 years to get to where I was on the drums. I wasn't about to spend another 8 or so years to become the guitarist I wanted to be.
"There has to be an easier way?", I threw back at Dave. "If I can't get this a lot quicker, I'm going to lose interest in it", I said.
Something about that really struck Dave because a few weeks later he came to see me about it. Now, Dave is a very analytical, questioning type of guy, and when I threw the question of an easier method to learning the guitar, it got him fired up. Maybe there was an easier way out there that we just didn't know about?
As it turns out, Dave had done some research on this. Basically,
Dave spent 4 full weeks researching as many different methods of learning to play the guitar as he could find. The results? In short, he could find no viable alternative methods to learning guitar that did anything to overcome the difficulties I was experiencing. They all pushed the traditional boring drills that guitar teachers had been pushing for years. None, had a viable way to bring the theory and the practical sides of guitar together easily.
I was intrigued by his findings and started to think, maybe this was something we needed to investigate further. So we began talking to other guitarists,
guitar teachers and guitar students to see what we could find out about their methods of learning. What we found was astounding!
Of all the people we talked to, not one had a better method of learning or teaching guitar! Their stories all sounded the same!
They had all confronted the challenge of understanding and applying theory and had all tried the same ineffective methods to try and overcome it. Their stories went much like this:
Shortly after they started learning guitar, they found it difficult to take chords and scales and actually put them to use to play something that sounded like music. Looking for answers they invariably turned to tedious and boring books and DVDs which only made matters worse. Failing that, they tried to teach themselves songs, putting in hours and hours of hard grind in front of the CD player. When that failed, many tried a tutor but still couldn't get the results they wanted and had to give up due to the expense.
Does this sound familiar to you?
In pretty much all cases, we found guitarists were not at the level they had hoped to be at for the time and effort they had put in to learning the guitar.
This settled it for us. We knew we had to do something about the state of guitar instruction. We had to come up with a solution to this problem. There just had to be
a better way to fast-track a guitarists learning!
From that week on we started work developing a guitar lesson curriculum that would provide an easy, fast and fun method for nailing the guitar basics and beyond. A course that could provide an easy way of connecting guitar theory and practical skills, so any guitarist could become great.
We spent months doing extensive research, working with multiple talented guitar instructors to write, film, test and then re-work our course. It was hard work, but in the end we developed something completely revolutionary to the field of online guitar lessons.
Finally there was a guitar course that made learning the guitar easy.
Jamorama Today
Currently, Jamorama comprises of 7 full-time, dedicated staff members who are fanatical about our students success on guitar. Each team member is a fully fledged musician with a passion for teaching and this comes across in
our course and online community.
On an average day you'll find us in the office, guitars at the ready, cooking up some fresh new guitar video lessons or working beside individual students via email, offering helpful tips and support for getting the most out of their learning.
Beyond that, we love playing music - so it's not uncommon to find us having fun, just jamming away the last hour of the day. To us, that's what it's all about!
Address:
Jamorama.com
Rock Star Recipes Ltd
Unit 1, 123 Blenheim Rd,
Christchurch 8011
New Zealand
Phone:
+64 3 365 0800 
