Steve is currently an active guitarist playing and recording in Nashville, Tennessee. Besides having taught thousands of lessons to students of all ages and skill levels he has held guitar playing and music workshops all over the world.

I found Steve to be soft spoken and down to earth with out being boring. His matter-of-fact style of teaching made me feel like I could really succeed. His teaching was logical and thorough while moving along at a good pace. He cleverly offers short, fun and impressively inspiring performances as transitions between many lessons.

Guitar Types: Learn & Master Guitar teaches both Electric and Acoustic guitars are used in the course demonstrations. It is important to note that learning either guitar type requires learning the same fundamental skills.

The Packages: Your Choices Include a 10 or 20 set of well produced DVDs that include 20 learning sessions, a 108 page companion book that follows the contents of each DVD and five Jam Along audio CDs that contain a full band playing all of the songs offered in the lessons. You can play along with the Guitar part or turn down the guitar by reducing the left stereo channel. The Jam along CDs were definitely the most fun of the entire course… a nice payoff to all the hard work.

The Lessons: Each Lesson is divided into three main parts; a play along video lesson demonstrated by Steve Krenz followed a video tips section that offers helpful information on useful auxiliary equipment, guitar maintenance and protection as well as how to pick out a guitar.

The final section of each lesson is called the Workshop. This is a play along guided practice session. I found the Workshops to be an ingenious way to learn how to practice. The built in structure prevents wasting time. It’s almost like having your teacher helping you at every practice session without the additional cost.

Beginners: Learn & Master Guitar is nearly perfect. It begins with the assumption that the student knows almost nothing about the guitar. First the parts of the guitar are named followed by a quick but smooth transition to the first two guitar strings and two chords. Simple songs are soon introduced to break up the tedious work of playing notes and chords smoothly.

I found that I actually progressed much faster with the video lessons than when I had a conventional live teacher. The play along Workshop practice sessions are nicely designed to teach efficient and effective practice habits.

Intermediate Players: As an intermediate player I found new material in about the 5th CD. I found that although I knew most of the beginner lessons I was glad they were there as a refresher.

Minor Negatives: …and I do mean minor. The companion book doesn’t lay flat. A wire binding would solve this problem

The Bottom Line:

Learn & Master Guitar is the best beginner guitar courses I have ever seen. It has been designed to suit many different learning styles. It involves no set up. Just grab your guitar, pop in the first DVD and everything is on autopilot. It's simple, fun and jammed with tons of lessons, songs, tips..... but, best of all it really works. Without hesitation I highly recommend Learn & Master Guitar.