Online Guitar Lessons For Beginners

The birth of the internet has opened up a whole new avenue of education for people. The internet has made it possible for people to learn new languages, retake failed exams and learn a new skill. Not only can they do this but they can now do it in their own time and in many cases for a fraction of the cost. Prior to the internet they were tasked with tuition times, tuition fees and these just don't fit in with peoples lifestyle these days. I have previously written a hub called Why You Should Learn The Guitar Online which goes into more detail of the benefits of online guitar lesson if you wanted to take a look.

Online Guitar Lessons are no different, over the last ten years they have benefitted massively from wannabe guitarists who can't afford private guitar lessons and who otherwise would not have picked up a guitar. The guitar has long been an instrument where people have enjoyed 'teaching themselves' but with online guitar lessons beginners can now learn faster, better and cheaper. Online guitar lessons offer beginners so many benefits that private lessons will never be able to supply. This hub is an overview of many of the packages on the market, links to ecah of their sites and with a few video tutorials to get you going.

Over the last ten years there have been many online guitar products launched, all are in big competition with each other - it is a massive business. Along with that there are many different methods of learning the guitar, there are the the methods of learning the guitar from a book, learning from a DVD or taking the online route and probably the most popular.

I am of the strong opinion that learning the guitar online is the best method for playing the guitar for both beginners and guitarists of all stages - I still do it now after nearly twenty years of playing. For this reason I will only be writing about online products, I will not be discussing books or DVD's - maybe another day but unlikely! The biggest reason above anything is that it is cheaper and more versatile.

The question that you need to ask yourself is how much money do I have to spend on guitar lessons? Of every online guitar lesson product that I have reviewed and researched (and there are a lot) I have never seen any that will come to more than $200 per year - now compare that to a private tutor - it is equivilant to approximately 10 lessons! I will break down each option that you have into a price bracket and you can review what best suits you.

There are three main options here.

• The biggest and most popular is YouTube. You Tube is full to the rafters of guitarists teaching you songs and showing you how to play your CAGED chords. Online Guitar Lesson companies use it as a great advertising outlet and so would I if I were them! There is a great wealth of knowledge here and you should take full advantage of it. There is a big downside to this though, it involves you searching through video after video and trying to find exactly what you need, many people don't title their video correctly so even after you find what you need - it may not be quite right! It does have its place, I personally use it when I want to learn a song. Recently I have been learning the Jack Johnson song Taylor. I had most of it but couldn't quite get the intro, so I went online and sure enough there were several tutorials on there for me to follow - perfect! There are even other guitarists versions of the same song to give me something to aspire to. This is were and when you should use You Tube.
• Online Guitar Lesson companies such as Guitar Tricks provide 24 video lessons absolutely free and if you sign up for a free no obligation profile then you get another 24 video lessons. That totals a lot of professional guitar video lessons for absolutely nothing. The videos are targetted at a variety of different styles so you are guaranteed to find exactly what you are after.
• Juston Sandercoe offers completely free online guitar lessons which can be found here. Justin is an amazing guitarist who built this site up whilst he toured. The benefits of this site are that he covers a wide array of lessons from beginners to advanced but the downside is that you wont find the quantity of videos that you would find at a site like Guitar Tricks. It is still far better than private lessons in my opinion.

This is the middle of the road - ideally suited for those guitarists who don't think that free lessons are good enough but are not sure which way to spend their money. My advice here would be to take a look around a few of the sites that offer free subscriptions as these sites can offer a free trial period and sites like Guitar Tricks offer a monthly subscription which you can continue the following month or invest into the yearly option. The monthly subscription does not give you the full access that a full subscription does.

I can only advise you not to invest in 4 or 5 private lessons with this money or an expensive book or DVD. It is far more cost effective to subscribe to guitar tricks for the month for a tenth of the price....

This is a very luxurious position to be in. In my opion there is only one thing to do and that is to take up your free lessons at an Online Guitar Lesson Site, take up a months subscription (if available one that site), and then subscribe to them for the full year. I would say that if you practised a few hours a week for a full twelve months you would have no need to renew that membership the following year. Many sites are so good that most guitarists renew anyway just because of the resources available to them such as a community forum and an almost endless supply of lessons. Such websites that offer these services are:

• Guitar Tricks
• Jamplay
• Jamorama

During your years subscription it is a great opportunity to use YouTube to look for alternative songs to play too.

I will include a brief section on changing your guitar string. This will benefit any completely new guitarists who may have no strings or only are a string short. It is well worth changing the strings on your guitar every few months, failure to do this only makes the strings sound dead and as such your guitar playing sound worse!

The electric guitar string that I have included will work for all electric guitars. The model in this case is a Fender Guitar, but whether you are using a Gibson or a replica of the stratocaster guitar it doesn't matter - stick to this method and you will do fine.

Most acoustic guitars are designed in exactly the same way so I have included a video from Jason Sandercoe on how to change a guitar string. Obviously in this video he only changes the G string but the process is exactly the same for all stings on the guitar.

Once the strings are attached please view view the below section on tuning the guitar correctly, both these sections will take a little practice but are VITAL in learning and playing the guitar

The first step that you should take when learning the guitar is to make sure your guitar is tuned correctly. For most beginners this can often be the hardest thing about learning and stops people learning before they have begun because you can be doing everything correctly but if your guitar isn't tuned correctly then you it wont sound right! It is the most essential part of playing the guitar, but don't worry about getting it right straight away it is like most things, it takes time to be able to tune a guitar correctly - especially by ear. I think it took me nearly six months to do it, the only person I knew who played the guitar was my friends dad and so I went round his house every other night with my guitar and asked him to tune it. In the end he got so sick of me that he made me a cassette tape to work from! Now with the birth of the internet you have no need to do that. I have included two videos in this article which will help you tune your guitar.

The video entitled 'Guitar Tuner' is a simply the six strings being played on the guitar, your aim is to get your strings to sound the same as this. For reference your strings are E (lowest note and thickest string)/A/D/G/B/E (highest note and thinnest string).

The second video entitled 'Tuning Your Guitar Manually - An Explanation' is a neat little video explanation of how you tune your guitar by hand. Take a look at this video as it is worth knowing for later on in your 'guitar life!'.

Another big obstacle that guitar students find is the ability to understand the chord diagram that is provided to you with all guitar chord books. Below is a video from You Tube which explains how to read a guitar chord chart. I think it is brilliant, so take a look at this and move on to the below video on learning your first chords, below that is a video on learning your first three songs.

With the above lessons I hope that you have had a good introduction into learning the basics of the guitar and there have been some useful links and information along the way to point you in the direction of a professional online guitar lesson company,

The video to the right is a tutorial to learn 3 songs with three easy chords. This is a great example of how easy it is learn great songs ust by knowing your Caged Chords. You don't need to be playing for a long period of time, you don't need to be an expert, you can play simple songs with limited knowledge. If you practice these songs and you play them well - you will look better than a guitarist who knows 20 chords and 20 songs - but doesn't play them so well.

Here are variety of links that you may find useful when researching online guitar lessons for beginners or links.

• Online Guitar Lessons For Beginners. This article provides you with a variety of links to different tutorials. Some may find it useful. It provides a wide range of links that teach you everything from chords to scales and progressions.
• YourGuitar is a blog providing you with details on all things related to learning the guitar. You will find links to various topics such as tuning the guitar, guitar software, online guitar lessons for beginner software, ideal songs to learn etc.
• Jamorama is an online guitar lesson site that provides you with a wide variety of guitar lessons. It is ever increasing in popularity and the quality of the material is very good. Do I think it is as good as Jamplay or Guitar Tricks? Not yet, but it is getting there. It does also provide free lessons.
• The Caged Chords article that I have written gives you a very good basis and explanation of the best place to start when learning the guitar.
• Why You Should Learn The Guitar Online is another article giving you the benefits of learning the guitar online with a wide variety of links to help you make your decision.
• Learn how to play electric guitar is a hub written by Andrew Webber. It is a great hub which gives you an overview of learning the electric guitar. As I mentioned, there is no difference between playing the acoustic guitar and the electric guitar - the are just suited for different types of music.