Learning to Play Guitar Links

Learning to play a guitar can be a lot of fun or complete frustration. As in all learning, everybody has their own particular way they learn best. People may learn by having a personal instructor. Some people may learn by just listening. Some people may learn my memorization. Whatever learning process works best is the process a person should pursue. Learning to play a guitar is no different. Fortunately, the internet provides many of these learning tools at your finger tips. It’s just a matter of knowing where to find them. Moreover, finding the tools you need for free. Sure the old saying may be true, “you get what you pay for”, but with a little work you can find some good stuff. In this article I have assembled a few sites with resources that will help a beginning or a novice guitar player develop their skills independently and at their own pace.

I hadn’t played a guitar in over 30 years and I knew it was going to be a while before I would actual be good enough, or want to play in front of people. Lessons were a must, but frankly I’m not into the one on one instructor thing. For me, I prefer; experimentation, research, varied instruction, examples, and lots of practice. I turned to the internet for help and I found a few great sites that have free lessons for beginner and novice players. The following web site has some great text lessons that will help you with the basics.

This next site offers video lessons at a cost. But this company has a couple of very good free lessons.

The particular lesson that I used was Blackbird by the Beatles. The lesson has an instructor that walks you through the whole song step by step. The video and its content are of very good quality.

I had a little trouble following one part of the lesson that was demonstrating a picking pattern. So I turn to another resource. This site sells the official sheet music for many songs. It also sells digital sheet music that can be played as Midi. However, the company also offers a download (free) that plays the digital music so you can see and follow a song one note at a time. The downloaded player has an application that shows finger positioning on an animated guitar as the song is played. Besides the finger positioning, you can also see what string, fret, and picking action is being played. The company gives you the first digitized page of the sheet music as a free sample. In my case, the part of Blackbird I didn’t understand was on the first page. The animation was extremely helpful. The following link is to the page that has the digital sheet music.

You will need to download the software that plays it. It is called guitar Guru. It’s free and I had no problem installing or running it. After you get the software running, just click on the digital music link for the song. Remember the first page of the sheet music is a free sample, if you want the rest of the music you will need to pay for it. Don’t worry, there is no trickery involved. You can use the sample as many times as you want, there’s no catch. Well, I haven’t found one. I have bought sheet music from this company and I have been pleased with their product and service.

I also found good sites that have free music sheets with guitar chords and lyrics. If you search and can actually find an official band website you might find posted music there. This is a link to The Band’s website and the chord/lyrics for “Chest Fever”.

 Another site that I have found offers free tabulated chord, and lyric sheet music. The music may not be a perfect representation of a particular song because the music is an interpretation. I have found the songs to be accurate and easy to follow.

 This link gets you to “Cowgirl in the Sand” by Neil Young.

 Next is a site that has a collection of concert videos. This is another nice tool to help with learning to play a song. You can get a taste of the way the artist plays it, and you can get some entertainment at the same time. Beware that some of these recordings may be from a few years ago and the quality of video may not be very good.

 This link gets you to The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”

There are more sites like these on the internet. You only need to take some time to find them.

These are some of the sites that I found. They have been very useful and fun.

Enjoy.