Budding bedroom guitarists who can’t afford face-to-face lessons and find books a poor substitute can use this interactive CD-ROM that provides all you need for self-based learning.

Billed as offering key skills for beginners and those in the early stages of learning guitar, GuitarCoach is filled to the brim with techniques, tunes, chords, music theory, fingerstyle and strumming lessons. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time.

While the look of the program is not exactly slick, the main menu does its job cleverly, dividing the massive amount of content and offering a simple pattern to proceed through the lessons. There are five levels to complete: the first lesson shows you how to position your hands, and the last will see you playing complex fingerstyle patterns (See here for a screenshot).

Each lesson includes ample easy-to-understand instructions, a soundbyte explaining what you will learn and why, and a video demonstration of techniques (ingeniously, it lets you view the strum hand in action from inside the guitar looking out).

GuitarCoach shows you how to play a tune, offers a sample of how it should sound, and a metronome to help you keep the beat.

After just a few hours with GuitarCoach I had realised that two years of trying to learn guitar from books had set some bad habits. And while I wouldn’t say that a CD-ROM is a substitute for a real-life guitar tutor, this one’s definitely priced right and is a worthwhile investment.

Price: $89.95
Distributor: Red Ant Enterprises
Phone: (02) 9429 3400
URL: www.charanga.com