Six String Country
Online Guitar Lessons that Take Your Playing To The Next Level
Six String County is my favorite place to go when I’m looking for new licks. Today, learning how to play guitar online has never been easier. Maybe you know how to play already, but have hit a snag or plateau in your playing. Six String Country has something for you whether you’re a beginner or an expert.
If you’re a fan of Waylon Jennings, Dwight Yoakam, The Outlaws, or Charlie Daniels, you’ll like the lesson selection. They even have lessons on Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan up there for a little variety. What makes Six String Country really great, is they teach both the rhythm and lead parts for the songs. If you’re in a band, this is a great way to learn your part, and jump right in with your buddies.
Song Lessons
To give you an idea of what a $9.99/month subscription buys you, I’ll start by describing what you’ll see when you click on one of Six String Country’s lesson videos. Each song lesson provides you with a wealth of tools to help you to learn including video, chord charts, chord diagrams, strum patterns, and sheet music.
You’ll quickly see that videos are what you come for, and this is where Six String Country excels. The landing page for each lesson gives you an introduction video where the instructor gives you some quick background info on the song. The video will also go over what is going to be covered in the lesson.
At the top of the page, you will see a tab for a Jam Along video. The Jam Along video plays back all parts of the song including rhythm and lead, bass, drums, and a vocal. The idea with the Jam Along video is you can learn the song, and play along with the Jam Along to practice your part with an ensemble. A cool feature on the jam video is they have a small pop-up mixer window. The mixer allows you to turn one of the tracks up or down, so if you’re distracted by another track, you turn it down or simply mute it. This helps you focus in on what you’re trying to learn without being Immediately overwhelmed by the other instruments.
Next, many of the lessons on Six String Country have a tab for rhythm only and lead only. These tabs will give you an isolated video of each part (rhythm or lead) along with a click track or drum track.
Lead & Rhythm Lessons
Six String Country breaks their lessons down into lead and rhythm lessons. Usually the rhythm track is covered in one video. The lead tracks are often broken down by verse, chorus, and solo depending on the difficulty. The more complex the lead lines, the more lesson video tabs you’ll see. I think this is great because often you don’t have 3-4 hours to commit to learning an entire song all at once. This allows you to digest some of the material in bite size pieces.
Watching one of the videos will take at least 45 minutes to get the notes memorized. Depending on your skill level, you may go faster or slower. You’re going to need to practice what you’ve just covered, so I recommend stopping after each video lesson and practicing for a day or two before moving on. Learning the songs in small chunks like this is really beneficial because you can focus on a couple licks at a time rather than jumping to playing the whole song. After you get the hang of the first video, move on to the next video and begin to expand your skills gradually.
Difficulty & Skill Level
Six String Country provides a difficulty meter from 1 to 5 picks (in lieu of stars, they rate difficulty in picks), 5 picks being the toughest difficulty. If you’re just starting out, look for songs in the 0.5 pick to 1.5 pick range. If you find these are too easy, great! Move on to 2 and 3 pick difficulty songs.
If you’re more advanced, I would recommend starting at the 2.5 to 3.5 pick difficulty level. The 5 pick difficulty has some friggin’ awesome guitar tricks and licks to learn, and they will definitely take your playing to the next level. There’s a reason they rank these at 5 picks though, so be ready to spend some time working on these lessons.
Guitar Courses
Maybe you’ve got some of the basics down, but really want to have command over a certain style. Six String Country can help with that. They have different courses that cover country, blues, fingerpicking, etc. This is a great way to learn a new style or strengthen your foundation.
When looking at the courses, they will recommend some prerequisite courses too so you can prepare yourself. For example, if you’re interested in the Country Pickin’ course, you will see the description recommends you take their General Guitar 101 course and have some improvisational experience prior to taking the course. Things like this help you build your own course program.
Lesson Quality
The lessons on Six String Country are good. I mean, really, really good. I don’t think I’ve found a video yet where I’ve thought, “Come on, dude. That’s not how they played it on the record.” The lessons videos are true to the song recordings. If you heard a song and want to play those exact licks, Six String Country can teach you. The amount of time that the instructors put into their lessons is apparent when you look at the chord charts and sheet music. These guys know their stuff and are making their best effort at passing what they’ve learned on to you.
Lesson Pace
The pace of the lessons are great. They’ll walk you through each part, step by step. And if they go a bit too fast for you, the video player has an option to slow the video down. This is especially helpful after you’ve learned the different parts of a song, but may not be able to play everything at full speed. I will often go to the Jam Video after I’ve gone through all of the lead videos, set the Jam Video to half speed, and get to work. After a couple days of practice, you can put the videos on normal speed and enjoy what you’ve learned.
Be wary of biting off more than you can chew. If you feel like the instructor is rushing over parts of the lesson video, you may consider a less difficult lesson. If you are bound and determined to be the best guitar player ever (like I was) then by all means struggle with the difficult videos for hours. Learn what makes you happy!
The Wrap Up
Six String Country provides a great online guitar lesson experience. The instructors review each lesson meticulously and will help you improve your guitar playing. Some may be deterred by the $9.99/month subscription, but honestly, it’s not that much money.
Many in-person instructors charge $40-50 for a 30-40 minute lesson. If you go to this instructor once a week, or 4 times a month, you will spend $160-$200 for your guitar lessons per month. That’s 16 to 20 times more expensive than Six String Country. If you live in your parents basement and don’t have a job, you can sit in front of your computer screen all day learning guitar. For $9.99/month. It’s an incredible deal. Go get a job you lazy guitar bum. Or at least start hustling and get a gig.
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