Pickup MusicReviews of pickupmusic.com

No prices displayed. You have to signup, and then see crazy high yearly subscription price. Feels like scam website after this.

I've been a user of Pickup for about 6 weeks. In the past I've used Guitar Mastery Method; Truefire and Active Melody. Pickup is both brilliant and massively frustrating. So far, I'd give them 5* for the quality of lessons. They are well structured and there are vital nuggets I haven't gained on any of the other sites. Those nuggets both keep me engaged and improve what I'm doing. After each lesson you get a number of performance pieces you can learn and then submit to Pickup for comment. But this is where the site UI undermines everything. I'd give them 1* or maybe 2* for the way the site operates and their User Interface operability. Yes, it looks great but here's where you can get so frustrated. (I'm undertaking the course on an up to date Ipad which allows me to use Boss Wazza airs and therefore practice whenever I want without disturbing anyone). 1 For no apparent reason the videos can randomly stop and restart at the beginning. This is mildly frustrating. 2 What is worse is that, quite regularly the next video will not load. You get the spinning wheel of death and you have to re-load the entire page and then scroll back down to the video you were viewing. 3 The above two problems are frustrating but nowhere near as frustrating as the fact that I cannot get the practice playback to loop the few bars I am trying to practice. I have to keep reaching for the ipad screen and then scrolling back. Can you imagine how slow and time-consuming it is to keep scrolling back two bars to groove your practice? (Compare this with truefire and Active Melody which let you choose a section to loop as log as you like - Pickup claim you can operate a loop but when you try on an ipad you just get weird blue splodges on the screen). 4 Finally, here's the thing that has driven me to publish this review. You can only playback the practice piece at 0.75% or 1x; you can't gradually increase the speed as you get more proficient. It's a hell of a leap from 0.75 to 1. Both truefire and active melody have a very straight forward, easy to use design that allow you to very gradually increase the speed in % steps. I raised this with Pickup and they recommended using a google chrome app but it appears you can't use this on Ipad and I can't get it to load on PC. And anyway, why couldn't they design this facility into their site in the first place? So, I'm just really frustrated that this is a great learning tool currently ruined by a poor user interface.