Updated 11 Feb, 2012, 4:06 pm IST

Free Online Resources for Guitar Beginners

22 Aug, 2009, 9:00 am IST | Siddharth Bhatia

A list of guitar tutorial sites for beginners. Now you can play too!

It’s the easiest to pick up, and the toughest to master. In fact this is one instrument that can challenge and occupy like no other. Every genre of music uses it, right from romantic classics to heavy metal, and can be used as your weapon of choice to woo a certain someone. That’s right, the Guitar is so damn popular, at least 3 members of our team itself can play it, and many more from the organization. So you have picked one up for yourself, got it all tuned up and are craving to have a go at those strings, make some hardcore guitar solos. Here is a list of great FREE online resources to help you learn the instrument, one can go through without having a real teacher these days. Of course there is nothing like the stern voice of a Guitar teacher but steadily absorbing some good lessons from the internet will make you a good player. Take your pick, literally.

The first place to check is activeguitar.com, a straight up site that greets you with a matrix of links. The first thing to do is check their tuning section, and well, tune up! Then move on to the chords section, and learn the basic G, C, D etc. Check the circled links. This place should be really studied and, off course, patiently explored. The barre lesson will introduce you to your first herculean task along the course. Barre chords are difficult for any and every student. This place is still not so interactive when it comes to learning, and sometimes learning from paper is tough. Videos are the answer to this, and guitar learning some times needs videos in the beginning. The next site has them, and has loads of the stuff.

Guitarforbeginners is made by a superb guitarist. He puts up guitar lessons on a scheduled basis. The difficulty range moves sometimes into "heavy" territory, But Kirk, the website owner, shows interesting ways of playing basic chords and songs like Happy birthday and the like. You get MIDI files and tabbed out notes for a fee. Another very good video site is freeguitarvideos.com.

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This place is a friendly, simply laid out resource with the usual barre chords and stuff. The techniques for guitar playing such as hammer on, pull offs etc has to be learned through video, and this place has it all. Wholenote.com is a community driven site, with a plethora of lessons, with MIDI playback, something that is really useful for those fast licks.

Now the reason we start playing guitar is to play some cool songs, and try to play our favourite tunes. So whatever you musical preference, be it metal, alternative, or flamenco, chances are that you will have an idol, and some tracks of his /her that you simply must play. I sites recommended earlier were generic to learning theory and technique, bit none really showed you straight songs. But, that is the easy part. Once you have learned basic chords and some scales, there are literally lakhs of places that offer tablature, (commonly known as tabs) to show you how songs are played. Check 911tabs.com. Before you go on to tabs of your favorite songs, spend a good 3-4 months on basic lessons, don't jump in.

Ear training is important. If you have a good musical ear, you will not need tabs any more. You will be able to actually hear the chords out and just play them yourself. Check out this site, Good-ear.com,� for ear training. Enjoy!

Tags: Guitar , beginner guitar , Guitar videos , List of links