Lesson 2 of the first Jamorama book talks about tablature in more detail, showing you exactly how it relates to the fretboard of the guitar, and to chords. There’s an exercise written in tab to practice the chords you’ve already learned, and then you can have fun with the first Jamorama Jam Track, where you play along with a recorded backing track, just like playing rhythm guitar with a band. Your part is written out in tab, so you can just follow along with that.
Lesson 3 discusses some more basic music theory, including note time values, an introduction to time signatures and reading notes on the treble clef. The you learn about note picking, and the main notes on the first and second strings. Exercises are included to practice the new notes, and then you can play along with the second Jam Track – unlike the first one, this one involves picking out a simple melody, rather than strumming chords. Both aspects of playing the guitar (note picking and chord strumming) are equally important, so it’s good that Jamorama introduces them both early on.
Lesson 4 introduces the E major chord, plus notes on the third string. Again there are practice exercises, plus another fun Jam Track which includes the new chord.
I’m still impressed with how Jamorama is shaping up – everything is well presented, and the Jam Tracks are lots of fun. However, I want this review to be an objective one, so I’m also going to discuss the things I don’t like so much about the course. My main annoyance (now that it has started to include long pieces of tab) is that when using the reader within the software, only one page is displayed at a time, and you have to scroll down to get to the next page. Normally this isn’t a problem – but when you’re playing from a piece of tab that is spread across two pages, it is! So it would be better if you could opt to display adjacent pages side by side on the screen, like you can with Adobe’s PDF reader. As it happens, the course is currently available in the older format, which includes PDF versions of the text, so I could use those if it gets to be a real nuisance. And printing them out is another option too – so this isn’t a huge issue, but it is a bit annoying, and I’m surprised that the designers of the software didn’t take it into account. Hopefully future updates of Jamorama will address the issue.
There is one other thing that bothers me – the E major chord is wrongly described in Lesson 4 as being ‘constructed of the notes E, Ab (A flat) and B’. This is not true – it should be E, G# (G sharp) and B. Yes, Ab and G# are the same enharmonically, so the chord will sound correct, but in terms of music theory the statement is incorrect – the E major scale doesn’t contain the note Ab (and a complete beginner isn’t likely to know this, so the mistake is misleading). So, a black mark there!
