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dougguitar
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Joined: 10/11/07
Posts: 41
dougguitar
Full Access
Joined: 10/11/07
Posts: 41
11/03/2023 3:10 pm
#63 Originally Posted by: aliasmaximus

TrueFire has on two occasions over the past 3 years offered members the opportunity to purchase access and lifetime download rights to their entire song library (currently ~425 songs) and every future song that they will ever publish - for $99. I've not yet taken advantage of those offers but it's tempting. In any case, as W3 stated, members can download entire song tutorials (including tabbed sheet music) for $5 or less. I've seen popular songs go for as little as $1.25.

I've been a TrueFire All Access member for about 5 years. I cannot say I've ever seen an opportunity to purchase/download all current and future songs. They have provided a couple of opportunities to purchase the whole library as of a point in time (and once that did include the songs that would be released through the end of that current month; the total number of song lessons was 65). I did take advantage of that at the time, but I assure you, new songs that have been added since then were not added to my Owned collection. But I did get permanent access to 65 songs for a very good price.


I should also clarify the nature of their Song Lesson library (it's a little complicated by the recent move of the JamPlay content over to the TrueFire platform). JamPlay had a library of 385 Song Lessons. At some point, they stopped adding song lessons, and this library was frozen in time. The quality of these song lessons was, in my opinion, a mixed bag. Some were good, others were downright inaccurate.


Along the way, TrueFire acquired JamPlay, but nothing really changed on either site, other than the occasional exchange of courses on the sites so that members of one site could access a few courses from the other site.


In December 2021, both sites began to add what I call the New Generation Song Lessons. This marked the first time that TrueFire offered note-for-note song lessons. And they are fantastic, making use of SoundSlice to provide synced tab to the video. They teach all the guitar parts and (with two exceptions, White Room and Have You Ever Loved a Woman) are note-for-note accurate. The same format was used for the Song Lessons being published on both TrueFire and JamPlay. Many of the Song Lessons were offered on both sites, but there were always a few on each side that had not migrated over to their sister site. Unfortunately, JamPlay never got the synced tab working on their site.


In July of this year, all of the lesson content from JamPlay, including Song Lessons, was moved over to the TrueFire site. At the time, TrueFire had 65 of the New Generation Song Lessons, and they added 23 from the JamPlay platform. They also brought over the 385 older, "mixed bag" Song Lessons. Since that merger, 4 more New Generation Song Lessons have been added, bringing the total to 92 currently.  By monitoring the social media accounts of their teachers and other means, I'm aware of about 10 more song lessons that are in the hopper which have not yet been published. TrueFire has greatly slowed down their release of new Song Lessons (it used to be one a week). They have also yet to go back and add SoundSlice synced tab to the 23 new generation Song Lessons they brought over from JamPlay.


To add to the complicated story, TrueFire also offers a variety of what it calls "Song Packs". One of these is a collection of 5 of the note-for-note, new generation Song Lessons for Country songs. The rest are not note-for-note song lessons, but instead teach either beginner, easy strum versions, fingerstyle versions, or chord melody versions.


Oh, and one more twist: they recently released note-for-note, new generation Song Lessons for five Van Halen songs. These are the same high quality as the other Song Lessons, but they are only available bundled together as a "course", rather than as individual songs. I think they just wanted to give these very popular song lessons a more special treatment.