Are Patreon Guitar Lessons Worth It? An Honest Look at Paying a Guitarist to Teach You

June 29, 2026by OpenFret Team

The same question shows up on r/Guitar every few weeks. Someone's been playing for years, they're a decent player, but they feel stuck on theory and soloing and they want more chord knowledge across the neck. They've been eyeing a player's Patreon, someone like Brandon Ellis, and they want to know if it's worth signing up. Then the comments split in half. One camp lists their favorite paid teachers. The other says some version of “don't pay for any of it, it's all free on YouTube.” Both camps are partly right, so here's an honest walk through it, including the parts that don't flatter anyone selling lessons.

What you're actually buying

A guitarist's Patreon is usually a monthly subscription with a few tiers. The cheap tier, often just a couple of dollars a month, gets you the tabs and backing tracks for the lessons they already post for free on YouTube. Higher tiers add longer breakdowns, a private Discord, monthly Q&As, and on some channels a video critique of your playing. You can cancel any time, which is why a lot of people sub for a single month, grab the tabs for a lesson they liked, and unsubscribe. That is a completely fair way to use it, and the teachers know people do it.

The thing to be clear-eyed about: on most channels the actual teaching is on YouTube for free, and the Patreon mainly sells you the tab, the backing track, and a way to support the person. You're usually paying for convenience and to keep someone making videos, not for some secret method that's locked behind the paywall.

The players people actually pay for

Go looking and the same names come back. For jazz and improvisation, Jens Larsen gets recommended over and over, and he teaches at a conservatory on top of his YouTube channel and courses. Levi Clay comes up for transcription and phrasing, and he runs a Patreon alongside his fundamental-changes books. For shred and metal lead, players point to Brandon Ellis, Jack Gardiner, Chris Brooks, and Dan Mumm. And the name that gets quoted as the sleeper pick is the LogGuitar Patreon, tied to loglessons.com, which more than one person called the best thing they've paid for and wished they'd found as a beginner.

One caveat the thread always surfaces, and it's a real one: a great player is not always a great teacher. The person who can rip a solo at 200 BPM may have no idea how to explain what their fingers are doing, because they stopped having to think about it a decade ago. The teachers worth paying for are the ones who can slow a concept down and put it in an order that builds. That's a separate skill from playing, and it's the one you're really buying.

When a Patreon is genuinely worth it

There's a real yes here, and it usually looks like this. You have a specific goal that a specific person's content serves: you want to sound like them, learn their songs, or work through their exact system, and the tabs and backing tracks save you hours of figuring it out by ear. Or their free videos already moved your playing and you want to keep them going. Or you're past the beginner stage, you're self-directed, and you just need good material to point your practice at. In all of those cases a few dollars a month is an easy call. Support the people whose work you actually use. That part isn't in question.

When it's probably not

The “it's all free” crowd has a point too, especially for the core stuff. Music theory is not a secret society. The notes, the scales, how chords get built, why progressions work, all of it is explained for free by good teachers, and we cover a lot of it in our own free pieces on the circle of fifths and scales for beginners. If you're a beginner, a Patreon is almost never the missing piece; you don't need someone's advanced tabs, you need reps on your first chords. And if you're the type who collects lessons and never drills them, paying monthly just buys you a more expensive way to plateau.

The gap neither Patreon nor YouTube fills

Here's the part both camps skip past. A Patreon and a YouTube channel both hand you information. Neither one makes you practice, and neither one is listening to whether you actually played the thing right. You watch a great lesson, you nod along, you tell yourself you'll come back to it, and then you don't. That's how people quietly stall for years, sitting on a folder of saved videos and a Patreon sub, grinding the same handful of licks. The bottleneck was never access to the lesson. It was the reps, and there's more on why consistency beats everything in our piece on how long it takes to learn guitar.

Where OpenFret and Guitar Quest fit

This is the part where I'm biased, so I'll be straight about it. OpenFret doesn't compete with the teacher you like; it covers the reps their lessons assume you'll go do on your own. The reference side is free: full libraries of chords, scales, and modes in every key, a Studio that puts a fretboard viewer, metronome, and tuner in one tab, and a free tuner so your practice isn't teaching your ear the wrong pitches.

The piece that closes the gap is Guitar Quest. It listens to your real guitar through the browser and turns the drilling into an RPG: you fight monsters by playing the right notes, run scales to cast spells, and level up by learning the neck. It's the thing that keeps you coming back to do the reps a Patreon lesson tells you to do. Here's what it looks like:

On price I'll be straight, since the whole article is about money: Guitar Quest is $30 once, paid once, no subscription and no ads. The demo is free and needs no signup, so you can plug in and play before you decide anything.

A path that actually works

Put it together and the move is simple. Learn the concept from a teacher you like, free on YouTube or paid on their Patreon if their stuff genuinely clicks for you. Keep the free chord and scale libraries open for quick reference. Then go burn it into your hands with real reps, the part most people skip, using a practice routine and a game that makes you play instead of watch. Pay the guitarist whose work you love. Just don't expect the sub by itself to make you better, because that part was always on you.

If you want the wider view on paid teachers, apps, and free options before you spend anything, we laid it all out in guitar lessons for beginners, and there's a companion piece on the best free guitar lessons on YouTube if free is where you want to start.