Learn to play guitar online

These days, there are such a multitude of sites offering guitar lessons that it’s hard to know where to start. There are free sites and paid sites, sites that offer streaming video lessons, sites that offer lesson downloads, sites that only offer tabbed and textual information on modes and scales, etc. Then you have YouTube with tons of guitar lessons available to watch. Some sites are dedicated to a particular style of play, while others offer a wide range of teaching styles and methods. Where to start with this somewhat daunting online set if you want to learn to play the guitar.

Well personally, learning scales never helped me. How bored can you get? And music theory didn’t get me going either. Yawn. But I’ll tell you what motivated me. Songs. You know. Music. My dad’s record collection – ELO, The Beatles, Neil Young, etc … Songs on the radio – ‘Oh, I love this song’ … That’s what you want to do with the guitar, right? Do you play those songs that you love? Who is going to want to hear you play the mixolydian (no idea what that is) or the G minor scale around the campfire? Nobody, unless they’re some kind of Joe Satriani fan. After a couple of beers, we all want to sing our favorite songs. Well that’s my experience anyway. We want to forget our problems and have a good song.

So, I started playing guitar just learning the songs that I liked. I only listened to records and selected the melody by ear. Songbooks are good too. The ones that give you a picture of the chords along with the words so you can look and copy without having to read music. Sometimes he would look at the tab, but it was quite tedious for me to baffle him. Therefore, I advise you to think about the songs that you love and start learning to play the simplest initially. Without a doubt, the best way to learn to play the guitar is to have a live teacher to teach you. Nothing can replace a teacher who can say ‘ok, play along’ or ‘switch now’ or reach out and put your wrinkled, spider-like fingers in the right places. However, we cannot all afford a living human teacher in person. I’d say the best are the video guitar lessons and learning with a teacher via Skype.

In a guitar video lesson (especially if the teacher has thought about the camera angles correctly), you can see and hear what the player is doing and just copy. You’re not just trying to figure it out from one page, which is much more difficult. You may also have a better idea of ​​timing a video lesson than a page. On the downside, you don’t get comments from a video and you can’t ask a video questions.

Lessons via Skype have the advantage that the teacher can hear what you are playing and comment, although they are hampered by the fact that they cannot simply reach out and put their fingers in the correct places. Also, you can’t play an improv track with a teacher via Skype, and sometimes the picture and sound lag a bit or the call may drop.

So to summarize. If you can’t afford a real, live teacher, the next best things are video guitar lessons or lessons via Skype. You can check out my song guitar lessons to get started.