While the last few years have certainly had their downsides, one thing's for sure—more time spent at home means there's never been a better time for aspiring guitarists to finally pick up their instrument and do some serious woodshedding.
And, suitably, there has never been a better selection of the best online guitar lessons platforms to choose from. In fact, there are so many that it can be pretty hard to choose one for yourself, especially if you're a beginner with little to no practical experience.
But there is one name that's sure to stand out to anyone with even a passing familiarity with guitar culture—Fender Play.
Fender's relatively new online lessons platform had a big name to live up to; there's no doubt about that. And the good news is Fender Play is a worthy addition to the glorious history of the storied Fender brand.
In this article, we'll give you our full review of Fender Play lessons, diving deep into course curriculum, content structure, cost breakdowns, and more. We'll also recommend a few alternatives to Fender Play if, for some reason, it sounds like this platform is not the best one for you.
Now, let's jump into our full Fender Play review and find out whether Fender Play is the online guitar learning program to help you learn guitar and finally get shredding as you've always dreamed.
Fender Play Review: What Is Fender Play?
Since its inception in the 1940s, the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation of Fullerton, California, has been ground zero for some of the most influential innovations in the realm of musical technology. So it's only fitting that Fender is responsible for one of the leading online lesson platforms on the market.
And now, the people responsible for such iconic creations as the Stratocaster, the Telecaster, the Twin Reverb, and the P-Bass have introduced another technology that's sure to make its mark on the stringed instruments landscape for years to come: Fender Play.
But what exactly is Fender Play anyway?
It's essentially an online platform, available on desktop or iOS/Android mobile app, that's designed to teach guitar, bass, and ukulele lessons to beginner and intermediate players.
With a focus on well-produced video lessons, Fender Play uses an interactive, step-by-step approach to teach the guitar from the ground up.
Fender Play's user interface is both extremely easy to use and very well-designed and attractive. It's no mystery that Fender was able to spare no expense when it came to developing their take on an online learning program, and it really shows—it's a beautiful platform, true to the Fender brand.
How Much Does Fender Play Cost?
There are a few membership options available through Fender Play, all of which provide a frankly tremendous value.
If you're not sure how committed you are, not to worry—there's a monthly subscription available for $19.99, billed monthly.
However, we recommend opting for the annual subscription for $149.99 billed annually—that's just $12.50 a month. An annual subscription also includes a 14-day free trial, cancellable at any time within 14 days free of charge.
There's only one tier of membership, so no matter what your payment plan, you're getting full access to all of Fender Play's content. Some of the best online lessons available, for some of the best prices on the market. A pretty tempting offer if we do say so ourselves!
And, what's more, brand-new players might want to select Fender's Annual + Acoustic Bundle, which includes a free acoustic Fender guitar with the purchase of an annual membership. Now that is honestly an incredible deal. Beginners, take note!
What You'll Need to Get Started Using Fender Play
All you need to get started using Fender Play is a computer or mobile device with internet access and the instrument of your choice.
Fender Play offers lessons for acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and ukulele. Again, if you don't even have a guitar to start out with, fret not. With the purchase of an annual membership, Fender will send you a free acoustic guitar.
Fender Play Review: What’s Included in the Curriculum?
Fender Play's course curriculum consists mainly of video lessons geared towards beginner and intermediate players.
Lessons begin with the most basic guitar skills like how to hold a pick, proper posture, tuning the guitar, strumming, picking, and other techniques, just as a way to get brand-new players comfortable with the instrument as they start out.
Players will then proceed to learn basic open chord shapes, eventually working their way to some transitions and basic chord progressions.
From there, you can move on to learning to play scales and finger exercises that will get you riff-ready, including tutorials on minor pentatonic scale soloing and more.
At this point, you're ready to learn songs. And the song lessons are where Fender Play really shines. You'll watch a tutorial on the song featuring one of the Fender Play teachers, with multiple camera angles for a more in-depth understanding of the techniques involved.
Teachers will give a step-by-step breakdown of the songs covered, showing finger placement, strumming patterns, picking techniques, and more. Then you can even try jamming along to a backing track of the song to get the feel of playing with a real band.
The more intermediate-leaning lessons go on to cover barre chords, music theory, and more. What's more, there are a ton of YouTube lessons available online for free, so we recommend checking some of those out for a taste of what Fender Play has to offer.
How Is Fender Play’s Course Content Structured?
So how does Fender Play work?
First-time users will begin by answering a few questions about their experience level, genre interests, equipment, and more. This serves to place the user according to their existing skill set and structure their experience based on what they want to get out of their Fender Play lessons.
Players will then set out on their own customized learning path designed to provide a logical progression of lessons. They'll start out learning all the basics and gradually build up to more advanced concepts.
Each learning path is made up of five levels, curated especially for the player's stated needs and interests. Each level consists of bite-sized lessons featuring different videos and interactive elements like Feedback Mode to teach and test your progress.
One really insightful design feature is the interspersion of actual songs, riffs, and chord progressions within levels to ensure that having fun playing guitar is a fundamental part of your learning process. This, coupled with the interactive elements (quizzes, jam tracks, etc.), makes it much easier for players to stay on track.
There's also a ton of content outside of the learning paths. Song lessons, riff tutorials, and style breakdowns are just the tip of the iceberg.
Fender Play has done a really great job of including lots of different genres, popular songs, and artists to make sure their platform appeals to as many players as possible.
As a self-paced system, it is ultimately up to the player to get the most out of Fender Play. But with the easily digestible content and fun, simple interface, beginners won't have any trouble getting hooked on playing the guitar.
Additional Features
Fender Play boasts a lot of nifty features outside the guitar lesson learning paths. Fender has gone out of their way to make their site a one-stop-shop for guitarists, with informative videos and articles serving up all kinds of educational content.
They've got resources for guitar setup and maintenance and repair, parts and accessories, tone advice, artist performances, and much more. There are even supplementary articles going further in-depth about your favorite artists' songs, chord progressions, and techniques, so you can learn even more.
Fender definitely doesn't skimp on the content, and passionate players are sure to appreciate the extra features included with Fender Play.
Fender Play Review: Who Is This Course Best Suited For?
Fender Guitars' mission with Fender Play seems clear. They wanted to court new prospective players and get them hooked on playing guitar, ideally creating lifelong Fender customers. A beautiful vision, to be sure—and one will definitely make dollars as well as sense.
Therefore, however, the Fender Play program is pretty straightforwardly targeted towards beginner guitar players and intermediate players to a slightly lesser degree.
So, that begs the question: is Fender Play good for advanced players? Unfortunately, at this time, the answer is: not really. Although Fender Play offers up some really fantastic guitar courses for beginners, an intermediate or advanced player might be put off by the lack of nuanced, more in-depth tutorials.
That's not to say an intermediate or advanced player won't get some use out of the platform, however. You can't go wrong with the quick song tutorials if you just want to have fun learning new songs and riffs or dabbling in different playing styles.
But it must be said that Fender Play is definitely designed with beginners' needs first and foremost.
What We Like
There's a lot to love about Fender Play's platform. Learning guitar online has never been easier—or looked so good.
Fender has truly gone the extra mile when it comes to making its lessons easy to follow and fun to watch. With scores of likable instructors teaching popular songs, legendary riffs, and more, all with multiple camera angles and simple step-by-step walkthroughs, you really can't go wrong.
The structured learning paths are logical and intuitive, and the way they are organized makes it easy to stay committed to your guitar learning journey. Complete beginners are definitely sure to get a lot from this approach.
Plus, the user interface is beautifully designed and easy to navigate. It's so simple just to browse around learning new songs and riffs. You could easily keep yourself entertained for hours on end by simply clicking around and jamming on whatever catches your eye.
What Could Be Improved
Our primary gripe with Fender Play is that it could use more advanced lessons, especially if its aim is to keep players coming back year after year.
Of course, we understand that the business model depends primarily on hooking new players. Once that's settled, Fender is sure to reap the benefits of its new legion of lifelong gear addicts, and the cycle continues with more new players. Nothing wrong with that—but we just thought we'd mention it just in case.
Another minor quibble is that the beginner lessons can, at times, seem over-simplified, to the point that you don't fully get the sense that you are playing along to actual songs.
This might be useful for complete beginners, but at a certain point, players would probably benefit from slightly more challenging lessons.
So, all-in-all, while Fender Play has a lot to offer beginners and intermediates, advanced players would do better to steer clear of Fender Play in favor of either private lessons or an alternative online course that's better suited to their needs.
Fender Play Alternatives
Now, while Fender Play is a terrific platform with a ton of great video content to offer for beginners and intermediate players, that doesn't mean it's going to be right for everybody.
So whether you're an advanced player looking for more suitable material or just want to shop around, below we'll offer some brief reviews of alternative online guitar lesson platforms for you to consider.
And if you find yourself still wanting more, be sure to check out our list of the best online guitar lessons for an even more comprehensive look at what's out there on the market today.
1. Guitar Tricks
If you think you might need a bit more than Fender Play can offer in the advanced curriculum department, we recommend Guitar Tricks.
Guitar Tricks' lessons are focused on learning songs, riffs, and licks that will help you establish your guitar playing skills in a wide range of genres and at all skill levels.
There's a wide variety of video lessons, from guitar fundamentals for complete beginners to creative guitar techniques for advanced players and beyond. Guitar Tricks has a special focus on more obscure genres like Rockabilly and Surf music in addition to the well-trod blues and classic rock music lessons.
In contrast to Fender Play, intermediate and advanced players will find a lot to enjoy and learn from Guitar Tricks.
Where Fender Play is designed mainly to allow beginners to get the hang of fundamentals, Guitar Tricks' curriculum is comprehensive and wide-ranging enough to keep even experienced players coming back for more.
And not only does a Guitar Tricks subscription include a 14-day free trial and tons of free lessons on their platform (as well as many more on YouTube). They also include a 60-day money-back guarantee if you're not having fun learning guitar on their platform.
2. Simply Guitar
Simply Guitar is an app-based platform that uses a gamified approach to offer step-by-step lessons and teach essential skills, basic chords, and strumming patterns to help learners start playing songs quickly. This is definitely a platform geared more towards younger, tech-savvy aspiring guitarists.
With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, Simply Guitar offers learners an opportunity to practice at their own pace.
The app's interactive features include real-time feedback, a really useful and innovative tool that guides you on finger placement as well as strumming techniques as you go along, helping build good habits from the start.
Simply Guitar uses bright graphics and animations to make the learning experience fun and easy. Video lessons are accompanied by clear visual cues, demonstrating finger placement, strumming patterns, and more.
While the gamey aspect may not be for everyone, it is sure to be a hit with kids and young beginners.
If this sounds like it might work for you, head over to Simply Guitar now to take advantage of their 14-day free trial.
3. Truefire
Finally, for the experienced player who knows what they want, there's Trufire. Truefire guitar lessons are based around their massive assemblage of high-quality video lessons, which cover a wide range of topics, including technique, theory, improvisation, song tutorials, and more.
One standout feature of TrueFire is its focus on interactive learning experiences. All Access members can use the interactive video exchange lessons feature, where students can submit videos of their playing to receive personalized feedback from the instructor.
If you're looking to simulate the experience of real guitar lessons online, Truefire is a great option. Their combination of top-notch video lessons with interactive lessons and a user forum creates a real sense of community among users that's ideal for serious players looking to expand their skill set.
Truefire has a ton of content, but it comes at a price. Still, if you think you might want access to more advanced content than Fender Play has to offer and you have some spare dough to spend, give Truefire a shot. They offer a 14-day free trial of their all-access membership, so you may as well head over and sign up!
Fender Play Review: Verdict
Thanks for checking out our Fender Play review for 2023. We hope this review has led you one step closer to fulfilling your dreams of becoming a better guitar player! One thing's for sure—if you choose to subscribe to Fender Play because of reading this article, you're definitely on the right track.
That's because Fender Play is a fabulous platform for learning to play guitar online. Whether it's acoustic or electric guitar, bass, or ukulele, Fender Play has made learning and playing music easier than ever and a lot of fun to boot.
Fender Play's combination of intuitive self-paced learning paths and well-produced, easy-to-follow video content makes for a failsafe guitar learning experience for beginners and intermediate players.
For our money, Fender Play is well worth the price of admission, and we think you'll keep coming back for more.
