Between work, family, friends and school fitting in time for practicing a new skill has become more of a challenge. Online courses for education have become increasingly popular over the last decade for this very reason, and for an aspiring guitar player this might be the only way to squeeze in time to learn.

Free Online Guitar Lessons

The internet offers a wealth of online guitar tutorials, a great deal of which are free. Are the free online guitar lessons just as good as lessons you would pay for? That may be a matter of personal opinion but the old adage “you get what you pay for” speaks volumes about free online guitar lessons.

The average free online guitar lesson begins with the instructor teaching you how to hold a guitar. Next they explain the strings and the frets, very quickly. Then they will typically dive right in to showing you how to strum a few chords. So far so good, but most of them will not teach you a thing about musical theory, notes, chords and other concepts that you should know.

These lessons are fine if you want to learn enough guitar to memorize a few songs to play for a family gathering, but you will probably never jam along with a song on the radio at will if this is how you were taught.

These courses teach guitar like a parrot is “taught” to speak. Parrots learn to talk by mimicking human voice. Parrots do not understand what they are saying when they talk, they simply copy the sounds that they hear. This is not how you want to learn to play guitar.

Play as You Practice

Let there be no confusion, I am not saying free online guitar lessons are no good. I have come across several free guitar lessons that were very informative from well meaning musicians trying to help out their fellow man. My problem with these courses is that they start out teaching you a few basics and jump right into playing.

It is true that guitar is not a spectators sport so it is good to promote playing while learning, but they skipped some elementary steps and dove in a little too quickly for your average beginner. For someone with any prior guitar knowledge this would be no problem at all, but for an absolute beginner, this can be very confusing, frustrating and damaging to your guitar playing ability.

How Do You Learn?

So how do you find a solid free online guitar lesson that will help you achieve your guitar goals? Do your research. Watch several free online videos to get a feel for the teachers, their methods, their curriculum and your ability to follow what they are saying. We all learn differently and prefer certain teaching styles. Some people learn better visually, seeing what they are learning helps solidify the information in their brain. Others are perfectly content to read a book and let their mind fill in the blanks.

For the guitar in particular, learning visually is a requirement. Concepts that would take you less than five minutes to learn with a visual example would require a teacher to write a whole book on the subject. In this aspect, free online guitar lessons are all good in the sense that they all provide video.

Do Free Online Guitar Lessons Work?

In all honesty, my best advice is to take free courses with a grain of salt. There is a great deal of guitar instruction in most of these lessons, but they usually jump around a bit skipping over key details. This can be confusing and frustrating for the absolute beginner.

The worlds greatest musician may not be the worlds greatest teacher. I would suggest eventually finding an instructor or course that you have to pay for, and using the free lessons as practice or review of what you have learned. This is a great way to track your progress.

Try TABS Guitar

You do not necessarily have to be a whiz with music notation and theory to play the guitar. There are other methods such as TABs guitar. TABs will get you playing the guitar rather quickly, but for the beginner that would like to be considered an advanced player eventually, even a small amount of education on standard music notation and musical theory makes a world of difference. This more well rounded approach to playing guitar is better suited to playing and writing your own music.

If you learn to play guitar with an inexperienced guitar teacher who does not have a good grasp of teaching the guitar you will be fighting an uphill struggle that most novice guitar players lose. You will most likely end up feeling like you are doing something wrong when in all actuality your lessons were poorly constructed and less than user friendly.

Learning to play guitar may not be rocket science, but it is a new skill that requires lots of practice and lots of patience. You will encounter enough frustrations learning from a great teacher, do not set yourself up for added difficulty. The lack of lesson structure and choppy content could be the breaking point from you becoming a great guitar player, or quitting from sheer aggravation.

Did you know that 65% of beginning guitar students quit within 2 months? Why? Lessons or a teacher that didn’t work for them. Find the best guitar lessons that will work for you with a video guitar lessons review.

For the top rated online guitar lessons check out Guitar Superstars.

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The advantages of online guitar lessons are in their versatility. You can find lessons using tablature, lessons on video, tutorials on power chords and improvisation, all right there on your computer. The thing with free guitar lessons is you have to put the package together yourself. It is best to find, if you can, lessons that are in a series that takes you through a learning process rather than an unconnected bunch of lessons bookmarked from different sources.

Usually the beginner guitarist finds the biggest hurdle right at the start. Tuning the guitar. Your lessons will eventually show you how to tune the guitar by ear but at the very beginning you will need some kind of electronic guitar tuner and a brief tutorial on how to use it. Do not worry, it is not rocket surgery. You can pick up a guitar tuner at a music store, but they are easy enough to find online for free.

Now we come to where some kind of series or package of free lessons is needed. You see, you will need to learn a little music theory before you start learning chords and playing songs from tabs. You will, for example, need to know about things like triads and octaves. Also some explanation of how as you work your way up the neck of the guitar the same notes recur at differing pitches.

Chord progressions are a major part of your guitar lesson experience, so you need to get a thorough understanding of scales and their relationship to chords with examples of the common chord progressions. By this time you will be actually playing the guitar so your lessons should include some material on how to hold the instrument and use of the plectrum.

So much guitar music is available in tablature form now that learning to read sheet music is practically unnecessary. Your online guitar lessons will introduce you to guitar tabs and how to read them. Once again, they might look scary but they are very simple to learn. You will probably be able to find some free guitar lesson videos which show you how to read tabs if you are more comfortable learning that way. Just do a search on some of the video sites. Online video lessons will help your progress by giving you the opportunity to see a guitar teacher playing slowly and up close, but do not forget to look for a guitar forum to get your specific questions answered.

If you can’t find a set of guitar lessons which suit you, you might need to do a web search for the individual components. The main things you should be searching for are: “free online guitar lessons” “free guitar tabs” “basic guitar chords” “beginner guitar tabs” and “guitar forums”. There is a wealth of free guitar lesson material online, so make the most of it!

Ricky Sharples has been playing guitar his whole life, and is presently engaged in building a blog called Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free. Ricky’s blog features free tools, lessons and resources for guitarists of all ages and stages. Ricky updates the blog regularly so if you are interested in learning to play guitar there will be an enormous variety of tip, tools and tutorials for you.

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Guitar Lessons- Private Instructor or Online?

The traditional way of learning guitar is by taking private lessons from a guitar teacher. The student typically meets with the instructor once a week for 30 minutes at a cost of about $15-25 per week. This is certainly a great option, and perhaps the best way to learn to play: under the personal guidance of a dedicated teacher. However, in many cases private lessons are not a good option due to the time, cost, and transportation factors involved.

The good news for guitar players is that there is a wide range of alternatives to private instruction. Guitar lesson and instructional books have been a mainstay for years. Technology developments then brought us lessons in the form of videotapes and DVDs, as well as multimedia software programs to run on the PC.

Today, widespread access to the internet has caused a major revolution in guitar instruction methods and availability. Now an abundance (some might say over-abundance!) of information on various guitar lesson choices is available in minutes through your favorite search engine. The array of choices is staggering, ranging from free online guitar lessons, to high-end distance learning guitar instruction leading to a certificate from Berklee College of Music,

Aside from better visibility into the options, there have also been tremendous advances in the technology used to develop and deliver the instructional material. Interactive video lessons in which the student controls the pace of learning and the tempo of the material are a good example of this. Online guitar lessons and products can be accessed immediately on the Web, either on-demand or downloaded to the local PC. This gives great flexibility on when and where to learn.

Guitar Lessons Options

Aside from private lessons, there are three basic formats of guitar lessons and instructional material.

Books- If you’re on a budget and like the idea of the portability of a book, this may be the way to go for you. Books often come with a CD to provide audio tracks. Typical Cost: $15-25

Video-based lessons- In my experience, pure video-based lessons are a good “icing on the cake” to help you learn, but not typically a good foundational guitar lesson program. They often lack supporting learning materials needed to be effective for baseline learning.

Multimedia Online Lessons- The Web, plus advances in the technology for creating learning material such as video, has really opened the door to some great multimedia guitar lesson programs.. These can be delivered and accessed on several ways: downloaded for use on your PC; accessed directly from your PC with a live web connection, or as a physical CD/DVD that you run on your PC.

Sorting through the many options can be made easier with information dedicated to this topic on various guitar websites, such as this online guitar lessons guide.

Wrap-up

For those wanting to learn to play guitar, or to play better, there is no better time than now to take advantage to the available online guitar lesson and learning options. The realm of guitar instruction is certainly one that has benefited from the Internet!

Look for the next article in this series:
“Guitar Lesson Tips: 10 Keys to Choosing the Right Guitar Lesson”

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“Basic Guitar Chords: “How to Easily Master the Guitar Chords You Must Know”

“Guitar Chord Diagrams: An Essential Tool for Learing to Play the Guitar”

Copyright 2005 Peter Bussey of http://www.guitar-players-toolbox.com
This article can be reprinted freely online, as long as the entire article and the resource box, with hyperlnks, are included.

Peter Bussey has been an avid guitar player for over 10 years. In 2004 he became Editor of The Guitar Players Toolbox, a website dedicated to helping advancing guitar players improve with practical tools, tips, and information. Visit http://www.guitar-players-toolbox.com for a variety of free, practical resources on guitar lessons, guitar chords, guitar chord charts, song chords, and more.

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