How to Find Guitar Lessons Online
When you first start learning how to play the guitar you will generally stick with the lesson plan, whether it be with a private guitar tutor, guitar books or an online system like Jamorama. Eventually though, you’ll have a desire to expand beyond the written material and start learning songs you are familiar with. That’s a great thing and means your learning is moving up to the next level.
So what’s the best way to start learning new songs? Why online of course! The good news is that virtually every popular song ever written has a guitar lesson done by someone online. Now mind you, they’re not all of equal value. There are some pretty awful renditions by some pretty awful guitar players, but there are also some really good guitar instructions that can really help you progress your playing. Plus it’s kind of cool to be able to play something your friends recognize.
You’ll generally find two different types of guitar lessons
- general lessons
- specific songs
In the general lessons category you’ll find things like ‘easy beginner songs for guitar’ or ‘easy blues riffs for guitar’. In the specific songs category you kind find just about any song ever written put into a lesson. Here’s how to go about finding them.
YouTube – always start with YouTube, that’s where you will find 90%+ of everything you’ll need to find guitar lessons. Don’t worry about acoustic versus electric at this time, you can use either type of guitar for most beginner lessons.
General Lessons – use search phrases (in YouTube) such as ‘easy songs for guitar’ or ‘beginner guitar songs’. With these very general phrases you’re going to get a lot of junk, but there are some gems buried in there as well. Look at the title of the video to see what catches your eye. Look at the number of views that each video has, the cream generally rises to the top and the better lessons eventually start to dominate views. Look at the artist, or creator of the video. Over time you’ll see patterns of the same artist showing up time and again. When you find someone you like, remember that artist because they are usually consistent in the quality of their lessons. One of my favorites is Justin Sandercoe, but there are a lot of them out there, find someone you like. Look at the length of the video, most decent lessons will be around 7 to 9 minutes long. You’re not going to learn much in a 2 minute video.
Specific Songs – use search phrases such as ‘runaway train soul asylum guitar lesson’. If you know the original artist of the song if helps to use it in the search phrase. Or if a different artist covered the song use their name in the search phrase because the lesson could be different. When searching for specific songs be aware that nearly every lesson is the lesson artists own interpretation of the song. They most probably picked it up by listening to the song and transposing the melody, or by learning it from someone else they know, so their interpretation may or may not match the original artist’s version exactly. But that’s OK. Many of the lessons have a simplified version of the song, and for our purposes of learning songs at the beginning of your guitar playing career that’s perfectly acceptable. In most cases you won’t even know the difference. Another factor to consider is that most guitar lessons for specific songs will be rhythm guitar only. It’s a lot more rare to find a lead guitar part. That’s not to say you can’t try, but don’t be disappointed if you can’t find many lead parts. One more time though, that is really not a big problem because you will probably be concentrating on the rhythm parts anyway at this stage of your learning.
For any online guitar lessons you watch, pay attention to make sure the lesson artist takes the time to show you the strumming pattern or picking pattern as well as the note fingering on the fingerboard. A good lesson will show you close ups of the fingering on the fingerboard and close ups of the picking pattern if it is a finger picking style song.
If you’re unsure about the chords or notes being played you can usually find a guitar tab to supplement the lesson. Some lesson artists even have the tabs on their websites. We’ll get into guitar tabs, where to find them and how to use them in a future discussion.
