"These two CD-ROMs for the PC are an inviting way for beginning and intermediate guitarists to learn about the instrument, develop technique, and get some tunes under their fingers. Both Guitar Coach and Electric Guitar Coach offer five levels of study, a digital tuner and metronome, good sound quality, and an easy-to-navigate interface. They also feature extremely useful camera angles. The view from under the strings is especially cool - why didn't anyone think of that before?

Electric Guitar Coach includes exercises on fretting, picking, power chords, scales, and soloing. The program also offers nine songs by Eric Clapton, Green Day, and others that put these techniques to use. There are 60 lessons, 200 video clips, and 100 backing tracks (which can be played at different speeds).

Guitar Coach is designed for acoustic and classical guitarists and provides lessons, exercises, and songs to build techniques such as fingerpicking, chording, and strumming. The lessons are broken down into easy-to-digest chunks that should keep students from feeling overwhelmed.

Guitar Coach and Electric Guitar Coach are great resources for players just starting out. The system requirements (PC with 486/66Mhz, 8MB RAM and 3.1MB hard disk space) are modest given the cool look and sound of these tutorials."
Guitar Player

Computer Active 'Buy It' Award
"One of the biggest problems when learning to play the guitar on your own is that it can often be very difficult to make any meaningful progress. Many turn to 'teach yourself' books and while these can tell you what to do, they can't really show you.

Electric Guitar Coach solves this problem by going into great detail to teach you the skills that you'll need if you're going to succeed and makes extensive use of excellent video footage to show you exactly what to do.

Multiple camera angles are used to provide close-up shots of both hands in action and there is even video footage from beneath the strings. More than 60 hours of study are included, beginning with basics such as getting the best from your amplifier, as well as tuning and basic chords and culminating in advanced fingering techniques and impressive sounding blues soloing.

The Cool Trax feature allows you to play along with real audio recordings of a live band performing rock and indie tracks originally recorded by the likes of Cream, Paul Weller, Green Day, Placebo and Bush. Being able to play along to such great songs really does boost confidence and gives an enormous sense of achievement when it all comes together.

It's a great way to learn to play and you'll find that it really does open doors to many other similar songs that are a lot easier to play than you may have guessed.

This really is an inspirational product, so if you want to play electric guitar, do yourself a favour and get Electric Guitar Coach."
Computer Active

"Electric Guitar Coach has a mass of interactive lessons that teach beginner and intermediate players technique, chords, lead, rhythm, and some cool tracks by artists like Eric Clapton, Paul Weller, Bryan Adams, Green Day, Bush and Placebo. Electric Guitar Coach is jam-packed with video, real audio full band backing tracks and loads of other stuff which makes the £29.99 price tag a bit of a bargain."
Guitar Magazine

"IF YOU’VE BEEN FOLLOWING our 21st Century Guitar series, then you’ll already know that there’s more to your PC that watching Lara Croft’s jubblies bouncing around the Lost Tomb of Geekarama. Not only can you use it to make music but also as your own personal guitar tutor, with Charanga’s award-winning Electric Guitar Coach.

Aimed at ‘beginners and anyone in the early stages of learning to play’ it’s ideal for a young computer-literate relative who’s taking up the guitar or for yourself, if you plan to go back over the basics. But why should you buy a PC guitar tutor rather than a book and CD or video?

By showing tab and letting you hear the music being played it does everything a book does. With a video clips of action at both the fretting and the plucking ends, it seems to do everything a video can. But there’s still much more to come. As its on CD ROM, there’s no rewinding or trying to find the right track…it’s easy to get back to the lesson you need or to skip right to the end of the practice section. With 60 interactive lessons and nine songs to learn from artists such as Clapton, Bush, Dodgy, Paul Weller and Placebo, there’s a hell of a lot crammed in here…When you’ve learnt the song you can rehearse it with a band at slow speed then with a full backing band at full tilt. It’s fab…it's easy and I had great fun learning some top riffs from it. Let’s hope they bring out a more advanced one soon."
Guitarist magazine

When we reviewed the acoustic guitar version of Guitar Coach (Issue 12) we were mightily impressed with it. This new version for Electric Guitar takes things several steps further. The user can play along with a full band, or with the band minus the guitarist, or just with the guitarist. All the parts are shown in notation and TAB.

The neat thing is that all the while you can see two separate close-up camera shots - one of the fingers on the fretboard, the other of the picking hand (shown from inside the guitar). Video clips can be looped and played in slow motion - making them excellent as a learning tool.

The package is divided into five main sections: technique, lead guitar, chords, rhythm guitar and ‘cool trax’. These sections are then divided into five playing levels (roughly beginner to Grade 5 standard) - so you get plenty of material for your money. One of the real bonuses is that the ‘cool trax’ feature vocal lines which enable you to follow the song much more easily than normal backing tracks. Ranging from standards from Clapton and Weller to latest hits by hip bands like Dodgy and Bush. Production quality is superb.

This is the best guitar learning software package on the market bar none and it provides the ideal complement to lessons - giving the student plenty of material to practice. It gets the full RGT seal of approval.
Guitar Teacher

Electric Guitar Coach achieves 90% and a PC Format Gold Award

"As Radiohead opined, "Anyone can play guitar". But the gloomsters forgot to mention that it takes months before you’ve even got the hang of Baa Baa Black Sheep. Instead of shelling out on expensive lessons, buy Electric Guitar Coach - it will have you making a racket in no time.

The program covers everything from how to hold your guitar to advanced techniques including hammer-ons and soloing. There’s a decent range of music to learn (Placebo and Paul Weller instead of the usual blues tracks), and the program also includes a tuner that you can use by plugging a microphone into your soundcard. There are two rehearsal modes and two performance modes for each song, giving you the chance to get the hang of things before playing tunes at full speed.

Electric Guitar Coach is very well designed, with plenty of examples and some great video clips that show you what each of your hands should be doing. If it also showed you how to pose like a real rock god, it’d be perfect."
PC Format

"What a breath of fresh air. Electric Guitar Coach is a brilliant way to learn guitar and it stands out a mile from all the other guitar software I’ve seen.

The standard of teaching is excellent and the video, of which there is a great deal, gives amazing views of what both hands are playing. The video shot looking at the strum hand from underneath the strings is a fantastic idea.

The way you get to work on classic tracks right from the start is exactly right and it’s good that Blues and Indie styles are covered as well as Rock. Practising with the full band backing tracks definitely helps make the whole experience of learning just about as exciting as it can be.

The whole thing is incredibly easy to use and I’m sure everyone who uses it will learn loads and have a really good time."
Bruce Dickinson
Academy of Contemporary Music