Guitar Start Guide
- A 10-part video course by head instructor Mark McKenzie
- A step-by-step path from first chords to blues, fingerstyle and lead guitar
- Pay once, own it for life — no subscription, ever
If you’re a complete beginner staring down the endless wall of YouTube tutorials and half-finished apps, this Jamorama review is for you. Jamorama is a structured, 10-part video guitar course created by head instructor Mark McKenzie — you pay once, get lifetime access to the whole library, and it’s backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee. In this review we’ll cover how it actually works, what stands out, where it falls short, what it costs, and who should (and shouldn’t) buy it.
Short version: for an adult starting from zero who wants one clear path to follow instead of a chaotic playlist — and who’d rather pay once than rent an app forever — Jamorama is our top pick. It isn’t perfect, and we’ll be honest about the cons below.
What is Jamorama?
Jamorama is a structured video course, not a listening app. It’s built as a 10-part system that carries you from your very first chord through to lead guitar, blues, fingerstyle and theory, taught by Mark McKenzie — Jamorama’s head instructor and a contributor to Guitar Player Magazine. You get sequenced HD video lessons plus play-along jam tracks, and unlike many rivals its early lessons are built around playing something recognisable rather than grinding theory first (results vary from person to person).
Crucially, it’s a one-time purchase with lifetime access — no monthly subscription, no auto-renew. The core idea is “follow the path”: instead of deciding what to learn next, you work through the courses in order. For a lot of beginners, removing that decision is the difference between practising and quietly giving up.
Who is Mark McKenzie?
This matters more than people think, because the thing that separates a real course from a recycled PDF is whether an actual teacher designed the sequence. Jamorama’s head instructor is Mark McKenzie — a working guitarist and teacher who has contributed to Guitar Player Magazine and runs The Guitar Guy channel on YouTube. He is findable, his face is on the lessons, and you can watch him teach for free before you spend anything.
What stands out in the course outline is an order that looks chosen with beginners who quit in mind. According to the vendor, the course spends its first hours on the three things that actually make people give up — changing between chords, keeping time, and sore fingers — rather than on theory that feels productive but changes nothing in week one. That is a teaching decision, not a marketing one.
He is not a big social-media personality, which surprises some people who expect a modern course to come with a million-subscriber channel. If you want a creator you follow daily, that is a fair drawback. If you care about the lessons rather than the brand around them, it is unlikely to matter.
What’s inside the 10-part system
Ten courses sounds like marketing until you see how they stack. These are not ten separate mini-products — the early ones build the hands, the later ones spend that foundation on styles. Here is what each one is actually for.
1 & 2. Beginner Guitar Method, Stage 1 and Stage 2
The spine of the whole thing. Posture, tuning, string names, your first open chords, strumming, and the 12-bar blues. Stage 1 focuses on getting a recognisable riff under your fingers early on; Stage 2 turns that into songs you can play start to finish. If you only ever finished these two, you would already be a guitarist who can play at a campfire.
3. Beginner Guitar Chords
Open chords, then power chords, then bar chords — in that order, with the changes drilled rather than just demonstrated. The chord change is where almost everyone stalls, and this course treats it as the skill it is instead of assuming you will figure it out.
4. Blues Guitar Breakthrough
The 12-bar form, the shuffle feel, and the blues scale. Blues is the smartest early detour a beginner can take, because three chords and five notes sound genuinely good long before your technique is good. This is the course that makes practice stop feeling like homework.
5. Fingerstyle Guitar
Thumb-and-fingers technique, the first picking patterns, and how to keep the bass steady while the melody moves. It is the part of the course that most changes how you sound rather than what you know.
6. Lead Guitar for Beginners
Scales you can actually use, hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends and vibrato, and a first pass at improvising over a backing track. Arriving here after the blues course is deliberate — you already know the sound you are aiming at.
7. Guitar Theory Made Even Easier
Keys, intervals, how chords are built and why certain progressions keep reappearing. Crucially it comes after you can already play, so the theory explains something you have felt rather than something you have to take on faith. That ordering is the single biggest difference from a classical method book.
8. Speed Picking
Alternate picking mechanics and the drills to build accuracy before speed. Honest caveat: this is the course you will use least in your first six months, and that is fine — it is there for when the plateau arrives.
9. The 1-Hour Guitar Workout
A structured daily routine rather than new material. If you have ever sat down with a guitar and spent twenty minutes deciding what to practise, this is the course that quietly saves you the most time. It scales down to 15 minutes without falling apart.
10. Acoustic Guitar Maintenance
Restringing, basic setup, humidity, and what to check before you blame yourself for a buzzing string. Unglamorous and genuinely useful — a badly set-up guitar has convinced more beginners they have no talent than any other single cause.
Along the way you cover open, bar and power chords, the “Tick Tock” strumming technique for rock-solid timing, scales (major, minor, pentatonic), real styles (blues, country, rock, jazz, funk), reading TAB, and improvisation. The point is the sequence, not the count: each course assumes the hands the previous one built. That is what a curriculum is, and it is what a YouTube playlist can never be.
How the lessons are structured
Lessons are short and task-focused, which suits busy adults practising 15–20 minutes a day. A typical early sequence looks like this:
- Setup basics: posture, tuning, and naming the strings.
- Your first open chords and how to fret them cleanly.
- Simple strumming patterns and keeping time with the “Tick Tock” method.
- Changing between chords smoothly (the part everyone finds hard).
- Playing along to backing tracks so it feels like real music early.
The play-along tracks are a genuine highlight. Strumming two chords in a silent room is dull; strumming them over a drum-and-bass groove feels like playing a song, and that motivation matters more than most beginners expect.
Strengths
- A real curriculum. You always know what to do next, which keeps momentum going in the fragile first month.
- One payment, lifetime access. No monthly subscription and no auto-renew — over a year it usually works out cheaper than an app you rent forever.
- You play real music early. The early lessons aim at recognisable riffs, which helps keep you hooked instead of drowning in theory (results vary).
- Broad coverage. Blues, fingerstyle, lead, theory and more mean there’s a sensible next step for a long time.
Where it falls short
No course is right for everyone, and honesty is the point of a review. Here’s where Jamorama disappoints some players:
- No microphone feedback. Unlike app-based tools, it doesn’t listen to your playing and flag wrong notes. You self-assess, which some people find harder.
- Old-school sales page. The marketing page is a dated, highlight-heavy sales letter — that’s just the ClickBank template, not a reflection of the course inside (more on that below).
- Smaller song library. If your main goal is a huge catalogue of specific pop songs, a subscription app may suit you better.
- Foundational, not endless. Advanced metal or jazz specialists will eventually want dedicated material elsewhere.
What to check before you buy
A review should tell you what we found outside the sales page, not only what the sales page says. This is what we could verify on 30 September 2026.
- Trustpilot shows a split picture. The Jamorama page on Trustpilot lists 41 reviews and a TrustScore of 1.4 out of 5. Most of the individual reviews are 4 or 5 stars, but they date from 2014 to 2017 and mainly praise the teaching. The four reviews from 2023 to 2025 are 1 or 2 stars and describe trouble logging in and no reply from support. We found no reviews from the last twelve months, so we cannot tell how things stand today.
- The lessons are the strong part; the account system is the risk. Older reviewers liked the teaching. The more recent complaints are about access to the member area and about support, not about the lessons.
- Fresh material is not a selling point. We could not find evidence that new lessons are added regularly, and one 2016 reviewer already noted that new material was slow to arrive. Treat Jamorama as a finished course, not a growing library.
How to protect yourself
- Open the free account first (we link it in the cost section below) and try the teaching style before paying.
- Buy through the ClickBank checkout and keep the receipt email. The 60-day refund is requested from ClickBank, and you can contact ClickBank directly if the vendor does not answer.
- Log in and open every course in the first few days, not weeks in. If something does not work, ask for the refund early rather than late in the 60 days.
Who should skip Jamorama
- Intermediate or advanced players.
- Anyone who wants an app that listens to the guitar and corrects notes in real time.
- Anyone who mainly wants a large, current library of specific songs.
- Anyone who would rather use a free option first — JustinGuitar is free (see our JustinGuitar guide).
Is Jamorama legit? Is the checkout safe?
Yes. Jamorama is sold through ClickBank, a mainstream digital-product marketplace that’s processed payments for over two decades — your card details go through their secure checkout, not some random site. Every purchase is backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee: if the method doesn’t click for you, you can ask for a refund through ClickBank within 60 days. Because ClickBank, not the course’s own site, handles the payment and the refund request, the guarantee is a real safety net — though the reports we cover in What to check before you buy are worth reading first. The sales page looks old-school, but there’s a real, findable instructor (Mark McKenzie) behind it and the course has been taught for years. If that’s your main worry, we dug into it in full here: is Jamorama legit?
How much does Jamorama cost?
Jamorama is a one-time payment for lifetime access to the full 10-course library — no subscription and no recurring charge. At the time of writing it is about $97, against a vendor-listed “usual” price of $287 that we cannot verify — promotions move, so check the live figure before you buy. For context, that is roughly two hours with a private teacher ($30–$60 an hour), or about five months of a mid-range subscription app. And because it is backed by the 60-day money-back guarantee, the downside is genuinely close to zero: you have two months to decide, which is longer than most people take to find out whether they will actually practise.
Prefer to try before you buy? You can open a free Jamorama account (no credit card needed) and get a feel for the teaching first.
What learners actually say about it
Jamorama has been sold for well over a decade, which means there is a long public trail of opinion on it — independent review sites, YouTube walkthroughs, and the guitar subreddits where people are notoriously blunt. We read through it rather than cherry-picking, and the feedback falls into a very consistent shape.
The praise is almost always about sequencing. The recurring version of the positive review is some form of “I had been bouncing around YouTube for months and getting nowhere; having someone tell me what to do next is what finally made it stick.” People rarely rave about the production values. They rave about not having to decide.
The criticism is almost always about polish. Two complaints come up again and again: the videos look dated next to a 2026 app, and there is no microphone feedback checking your notes. Both are fair, and we have listed them in the cons above. Older reviews mostly praise the teaching itself; the more recent complaints we found are about something different — logging in and getting support — which we cover in What to check before you buy.
The negative reviews cluster around two expectation mismatches. The first is people who expected an app and got a course. The second is people who bought it, did not practise, and blamed the product — a pattern you will find under every learning tool ever sold. Neither tells you much about the curriculum, but both are worth knowing before you buy, because if you are honestly in either camp, an app with streaks and notifications will serve you better than this will.
Ratings and review counts move around, so we deliberately do not quote a single score here. The pattern is the useful part, and the pattern has been stable for years.
How Jamorama compares
| Course | Price | Format | Best for | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jamorama | One-time (lifetime) | Video course + jam tracks | Beginners who want one path they own | ⭐ Best overall value |
| Guitar Tricks | Sale price seen 30 Sep 2026: $99 (promotion) — regular price varies, check the official page | App/site, huge library | Those who want the biggest library | Best big library |
| Simply Guitar | Monthly plan €9.99 (Spanish page, 30 Sep 2026); an annual plan also exists | App, mic feedback | Nervous beginners & kids | Best gentle start |
| Yousician | Price shown after sign-up — check the official page | App, gamified feedback | Learners who like a challenge | Best gamified app |
| Fender Play | Price shown after sign-up — check the official page | App, song-based video | Casual, song-first learners | Best for songs |
| YouTube / JustinGuitar | Free | Video tutorials | Budget-first, self-directed | Free, but you build the path |
Prices checked on 30 Sep 2026 on the official sites where they are visible; they vary by country, plan and promotion.
Worth comparing against the big names before you commit. If song-based video lessons appeal, read our Fender Play review. If you want the deepest structured library, see our Guitar Tricks review. And if budget is your priority, our JustinGuitar guide covers a mostly-free option that’s genuinely excellent. You can also browse all our head-to-heads in reviews and comparisons.
Who is Jamorama for?
Buy it if you’re a beginner (or returning after years away) who wants one dependable course to follow, would rather pay once than subscribe, and knows you’ll stick with it more easily when the next step is chosen for you. Skip it if you already play at an intermediate level, or if real-time feedback from an app that hears your playing is a must-have. New to all of this? Start with our beginner start-here guide to get set up before you buy anything.
The bottom line: if you want lessons laid out in a sensible order, taught by a real instructor, with one payment and a 60-day guarantee instead of a monthly bill, Jamorama is the one we’d hand a friend starting today.
👉 Try Jamorama Risk-Free — 60-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Jamorama a one-time payment or a subscription?
One-time. You buy it once and keep lifetime access — no recurring charge and no auto-renew, which is a big part of why it works out cheaper than app subscriptions over a year.
Does Jamorama come with a refund guarantee?
Yes — a 60-day money-back guarantee through ClickBank. If it isn’t for you, you request the refund from ClickBank within those 60 days. We can’t promise how any individual request is handled, so keep your receipt and see What to check before you buy.
Who is behind Jamorama?
Mark McKenzie, Jamorama’s head guitar instructor — a contributor to Guitar Player Magazine and creator of The Guitar Guy YouTube channel. A real, findable teacher behind the method.
Does Jamorama work for electric and acoustic guitar?
The fundamentals it teaches — chords, strumming, timing, changing chords — apply to both, and it covers styles from blues to rock. Beginners on either instrument can follow the core path.
How long until I can play a song?
With around 15–20 minutes of daily practice, most beginners can strum along to a simple two- or three-chord song within a few weeks — and Jamorama’s early lessons aim at recognisable riffs from the start (results vary).
What to Read Next
How we reviewed this (updated 16 October 2026): this page is based on the vendor’s official information, pricing and policies and on public user feedback. We have not hands-on tested Jamorama.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend what we genuinely rate.