Guitar Lessons

These days it’s quite easy to get access to some great quality online guitar lessons for free! My #1 favorite source to find them has to be YouTube.com – it’s simply packed with good stuff on how to play guitar regardless of whether you’re a beginner, intermediate or advanced player.

As the site has grown bigger and more popular so too have the number of guitar tutorials increased – some of the more famous ones have over 5 million views which ain’t so bad for a simple guitar instruction video under 10min long right? Such is the power and popularity of YouTube for learning to play guitar.

If you spend some time searching around the internet for guitar websites you’ll probably notice that there’s a definite bias towards beginner guitar lessons and while that’s great for some (beginners make up the mass market of those looking to learn guitar online) it can be frustrating if you’re an advanced guitarist trying to find some lessons for how to play slide blues guitar like Robert Johnson (Delta blues guitar) or chord shapes for a DADGAD fingerstyle guitar tuning.

This is where YouTube is pretty helpful and while you won’t necessarily find entire courses to follow along to in online advanced guitar lessons you should get quite enough to occupy you for an afternoon and hopefully inspire you to go out and purchase a guitar DVD or book dedicated to what you’re trying to accomplish on guitar.

Many of the more popular guitar sites now have some decent samples of their content to check out on the bigger video sharing sites. This is an obvious way to “try before you buy” – or else you can sign up to a trial membership for free.

One of my all time favorite YouTube guitar lessons is here but let’s break down some of the other categories… here’s the raw URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON-k7E19rZo

Black Metal guitar lessons is another popular category for electric guitar and this tends to be huge among the teenage market obsessed with learning as many guitar riffs and metal guitar scales as possible. Firm favorites continue to be the intro arpeggio lick of “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, the easy riff to “Smoke On The Water” and lots of old classic tunes that you can pick up with metal guitar tabs right here at ultimate-guitar.com. While these certainly aren’t death metal guitar lessons many will start with the classic riffs and work their way into heavier material especially with Metallica stuff.

Acoustic guitar lessons are very well catered for. They tend to concentrate of learning to play guitar chords and strumming patterns. The primary goal is to get raw beginners strumming along to their favorite acoustic guitar songs campfire style in about 4 weeks. This is achievable but the structure of beginner acoustic guitar courses need to be well thought out to be effective. Not all tutors have a good ability to teach people just starting out, it’s actually a bit more specialized so if you find great quality guitar lessons for beginners stick to ‘em! Acoustic guitar tabs are not as popular as basic song sheets in this market due to technical restrictions.

Online Blues guitar lessons have just started to get super popular in the last 2 years or so and there’s one really cool site I like for blues guitar right here… http://www.steviesnacks.com – its got some of the most clever technical ways of delivering video guitar lessons you’ll find anywhere, Anthony really seems to know what he’s doing and he’s got the best Stevie Ray Vaughan replica sound I’ve ever heard. You’ll learn all the blues essentials like blues guitar scales, string bending, vibrato, slides, rhythm guitar parts, turnarounds and phrasing.

Blues acoustic lessons is a little more specialized – most of the tutorials are for electric guitar. For blues guitar tabs I would again check out ultimate-guitar.com as they have a massive selection to learn from but really the best way is still to go ‘old-school’ and learn the licks by ear of original recordings. That will do more for your development as a guitarist who is able to express themselves than anything else anywhere.

Shred guitar lessons. Now here’s something which is sorely missing, someone please do a decent site for learning how to alternate pick fast on guitar! I’ve yet to ever find high quality site about how to do it.

A warning about online guitar lessons review sites! Don’t trust or believe a single word they say! They are mostly built by affiliate marketers who are receiving compensation each time a visitor to their sites goes ahead and buys the products they are ‘reviewing’. So this seriously compromises their claims of presenting you with unbiased advice about which guitar course is best. In fact, many of them just recommend whichever program pays out the most.

Online electric guitar lessons come in all shapes and sizes so it’s basically a ‘take your pick’.

Spanish guitar lessons: Like fast picking this market is also a little under-served and could do with a few more quality sites teaching flamenco guitar techniques. The problem is that it’s a very serious art form which takes years of practice to perfect, the web could really use a site where an expert player knows how to break it all down into simple terms so others can learn it from home.

Guitar lessons for dummies books are kind of popular I guess but I honestly wouldn’t waste my time with them. They are quite traditional in their approach to guitar and you’ll learn a lot of things which won’t really do much good for you. The main problem is they try to teach you a little bit of absolutely everything which leaves you not knowing much about anything! Just my opinion.