Whether you learn to read conventional music notation or guitar tab there will be a learning curve where all these marks on the page will become less comprehensible the longer you study them, and then you turn the corner and reading music will be as easy breathing.

The physical skills you need will be chord fingerings, strumming patterns and up and down picking. And, of course, the dreaded barre chord. To get you through this learning process you need clear and concise lessons. At the moment we are living in guitar learning paradise because we not only have written guitar lessons but also thousands of free guitar lesson videos.

The guitar can be found in classical music, country, rock, blues, jazz and mixtures of all of the above. Every guitar style has distinctive techniques and probably makes use of a narrow range of chords and scales.

Online guitar lessons give you access to the many elements of guitar playing. Free chord charts, tabs for instrumentals and songs, videos demonstrating how to place your fingers to make chords and tutorials on plectrum picking and finger picking are some of the diverse methods of teaching guitar playing.

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So, if you are going to play guitar solos you are going to have to be at the top of your game, not only as a guitar player but also as a composer. You need to know how to base your solo around the key the song is in. There have, of course been exceptions to this rule – the solo in Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible is an obvious example – but if you are going to go wild when you play guitar solos, at least START conservative.

One technical aspect you should be on top of when you learn how to play guitar solos is scales. Not only do you need to know them, you need to be able to play them. The physical aspect to playing scales is your alternate picking. You need to practice slowly and work up your speed as a result of your practice sessions. Never TRY to play fast. It just wears you out and instills bad playing habits.

Your picking should also work across all the strings on the guitar. When you are practicing your scales, play from the sixth to the first string and back again. If you are finding that you are faltering when you are changing from one string to the next, slow down and see how you are changing from string to string. What are you doing wrong?

Find existing songs that contain solos and learn them note for note. Not just the solos but all the chords too. There are classic songs that contain great solos and riffs, but also go for songs that present a challenge. Don’t be afraid of taking time off to learn new chords or new techniques.

There are some great guitar players who tend to be a little on the busy side. But there are also guitarists whose guitar solos are quite simple. If you are composing solo, take a few notes from the song’s melody and try to find a musical statement. This is where learning solos from other songs is good training. If you have learnt other guitarists’ solos, you have, to some extent, got into the habit of playing licks. A lick is little musical statement, and if you have a bunch of stock licks at your disposal, you can recycle them to make your own guitar solos.

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Guitar tabs are a quick way of learning where to put your fingers in order to play a song or finger a chord. Guitar song sheet music is more comprehensive language that not only tells you where to put your fingers but also where the notes you are playing fit into the full range of notes available on the guitar plus the time signature of the piece.

The understanding of a guitar song that you gain from sheet music allows you to get inside the music and improve on the existing arrangement, add instrumental solos or make the song fit more into your personal style. If you learn from tabs it will take many run-throughs of the song to reach the same intimate understanding that one sight-reading will give an experienced sheet music reader.

Sheet music for guitar songs and instrumental pieces takes more time to learn but the time used is an investment in your future as a guitar player. While guitar tab will give you the basic information needed to play a song in a short space of time, the ability to read sheet music gives you much more of an edge. If you research the question of how to learn your guitar song – sheet music or tab, you will find many guitarists will tell you stories of missing out on work with bands because they can’t read sheet music.

The thing with sheet music for guitar songs is that it is very confronting for people when they are considering learning to read it. The beginner guitar player wants to start playing. To show their friends how well they can play. It is natural for a novice to consider the short route of learning to read guitar tabs over the unknown territory of learning what the little black dots mean and the musical theory that goes along with it.

Learning to read guitar song sheet music can be seen as a series of steps. First, there’s understanding that there are only seven notes to learn. Next, you learn the six notes found on the open strings of the guitar. Once you have learnt these bits of info plus the C major scale in the first position, only about a week will have gone by and you will be on your way to a full understanding of guitar music.

After a year as a sheet music reading guitar player you will have an enormous advantage over a guitarist who started at the same time as you but who chose to only learn tabs and chord charts.

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The guitarnoise.com online guitar lessons are more oriented towards learning how to play songs on the guitar. You might need to have done a little homework at about.com before you take these lessons on, even though they are not aimed at the advanced guitarist. Apart from lessons devoted to songs like “What A Wonderful World” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” there are lessons on specific aspects of learning guitar, like one finger chords and chord melody.

guitarplayerworld.com has probably the most comprehensive free guitar lessons online available for beginners. The lesson titles for the course are: Beginner Lessons, Guitar Chords, Lead Guitar Scales, Guitar Techniques, Ear Training, Guitar Articles, Songwriting, Learn Blues Guitar, Kids Guitar Lessons, Learn Guitar Songs. The beginner guitar lessons are broken into stages titled: Lesson 1: Parts of the guitar, Lesson 2: How to read tabs, Lesson 3: Understanding the fretboard, Lesson 4: Open Chords, Lesson 5: Barre Chords, Lesson 6: Basic Guitar Strumming Patterns, Lesson 7: Simple Chord Progressions, Lesson 8: Playing With a Guitar Pick, Lesson 9: Music Intervals, Lesson 10: Guitar Warm Up Exercises, Lesson 11: Guitar Practice Plan, Lesson 12: How to Change Guitar Strings, Lesson 13: How to Tune the Guitar, Lesson 14: Secrets of Using A Metronome for Guitar Practice, Lesson 15: Easy Guitar Songs to Learn. The songs in the easy guitar songs section are: House Of The Rising Sun, by the Animals, Freebird by Lynrd Skynrd, Knockin On Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan/Guns n Roses, For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield and Sympathy For Devil by The Rolling Stones.

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One way of playing a double stop is to play two adjacent strings at the same time. Another way is to play two strings that are not next to each other by strumming with your plectrum and muting the string in the middle. Or you can put your pick between your teeth and pluck the two strings you want to play.

Here is a C major scale played up the fretboard on the first and second strings using double-stops:

e–0–1–3–5–7—8–10–12—————–|

B–1–3–5–6–8–10–12–13—————–|

G——————————————–|

D——————————————–|

A——————————————–|

E——————————————–|

And here is the same scale played in the open position across the fretboard:

e———————–0———————|

B————–0–1–3–1———————|

G——–0–2–0–2–4————————|

D–2–3–2–3———————————|

A–3–5—————————————|

E———————————————|

Here is a video showing you how to play double-stops:

This lesson on Guitar Diads or Double Stops has some tabs for double-stop exercises.

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First, make a folder in your bookmarks to keep your guitar lesson links in. You are certain to find some sites that you need to visit more than once, so keep the links all in one place and just separate them into folders like “Videos”, “Theory”, “Fingerstyle”, “Tabs” or however you prefer to classify the elements of your guitar learning. You could make one folder for video lessons and subfolders for genres if you are learning to play more than one guitar style.

When you are searching for guitar lessons or information on how to play guitar, be as specific as possible. Many people phrase their internet searches in the form of questions like, “how can I learn to play guitar for free?” If you use this form of searching you will get results containing the words “learn”, “play”, “guitar” and “free”. Words like “to”, “I”, “for”, “and” are commonly used words that are not included in search results.

A more effective way to search is to ask yourself what it is you want exactly. If you want free guitar lessons, you type the phrase into Google and you get millions of pages that contain the words “free”, “guitar” and “lessons”. The first few pages will contain results that are relevant to your search but as you progress down the page you might find pages that contain the words but do not have anything to do with what you are looking for. For instance, you could find a news report saying, “a flock of zebras escaped from the zoo today so that they could run free, play the guitar and take surfing lessons“.

To get more focused results you can type the same phrase into the Google search box but inside quotation marks: “free guitar lessons”. This will give you a bunch of pages that actually contain the phrase you are looking for.

Also, when you are using Google to search, take a look at the bottom of the page of search results. You will find a list of search terms that are related to the term you typed in. These will contain more useful results. And don’t forget to use the “more” link at the top of the search page. This will give you blogs and group discussions to search through. Here is an example of a guitar lessons blog called Free Beginners Guitar Lessons

YouTube is a great source of free guitar lessons. There are amateur guitarists showing what they have learnt for the benefit of beginners and there are guitar teachers using free video guitar lessons as an intro to their paid guitar lessons.

The same principle applies to YouTube as for Google: you get different results if you type “guitar lessons” from what you get if you type guitar lessons without quotes. The search box at YouTube actually tries to help you with what you are looking for by dropping down a list of popular searches that contain the words you are typing in. So, if I type in “guitar lessons” a list of phrases like, “guitar lessons for beginners” and “guitar lessons acoustic” will drop down for me to select them if they are closer to what I am looking for.

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The more we get to know the way our bodies, minds and feelings work, the more efficient we are at learning new skills. But there are some areas of learning that we need help with. One of these areas is muscle memory. The idea that the body learns movements from repetition is commonly used in many areas of life. But the fact that the more relaxed our muscles are and the more attentive we are when we practice routine movements does not readily jump out at us. The concept of muscle memory is available to us through books and websites.

The basic idea goes like this: you learn a posture or series of movements such as a chord fingering; you then put your fingers in the chord position and take them away and put them back again, returning to the chord position many times until your fingers simply take their places whenever they are needed to. Of course, the way we practice chord shapes is to learn a few chord shapes at first and practice moving from one to the other.

The thing about muscle memory is that our muscles record things that our minds don’t notice. If we are tense in the jaw when we play a barre chord, then that tension will appear as part of taking the chord. If we hold our breath when we play a scale, or grunt every time we make a mistake, those things gradually become habits and it usually takes someone else to draw our attention to it. So a part of learning the movements necessary to play the guitar is attention to how precise and relaxed we are when we learn new chord shapes and scales.

Here are some tips on how to learn chord changes from greenguitarguy.com

“Visualize. Before playing, close your eyes for a second and visualize the chords you’re going to be playing. See where your fingers are going to go and see yourself moving from chord to chord gracefully and economically. Do this for a minute before practicing the song.

Find a ’sliding’ finger. A sliding finger is finger which stays on the same string during the chord change. For example, switching from E to D involves sliding the first finger up the G string from fret 1 to fret 2. So there’s no need to lift the finger off the string. This is great news for us lazy guitarists! Sliding fingers are most useful when moving from a high to a low fretting position or vice versa.”

Here is an article on How To Practice by Rod Hampton, a guitar teacher from Seattle.

The video shows a very simple exercise for training your fingers to play designated frets:

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