Guitar Lessons & Materials

Beginner

Tuning…
Seating/Holding
Picking
Finger Picking
Fretting
Practice Tips
Practice Q&A
Warm-up Tips

Play NOW! :
Electric / Acoustic

Music reading 101
TAB reading 101
Utilise Guitar Pro

Play NOW+!:
Electric / Acoustic

Welcome Beginners!

When you're just starting an instrument it can be quite daunting, but don't be intimidated, help is at hand!

The topics on the left are the core materials that beginning guitar players of any style should try to absorb, to best prepare for the intermediate phase and beyond. It is a carefully organised mixture of materials and videos of my own creation, along with others I’ve sourced from free and reputable online guitar/music teachers who have been kind enough to share their work with the world.

If you’re itching to make music with your guitar right away, do jump directly to the ‘Play Now!’ sections if you can’t wait, but I strongly encourage you to go through the ‘Tuning’ Tutorial video first - it only takes 10 minutes and will make your first attempts at playing sound much better!

*You may ask at this point: Do I have to read music to play the guitar?
The short answer is no, you don’t, and many great and famous player’s can’t either. You’ll be able to utilise most of the material on this site without reading music if you want to.
However, when you’re beginning guitar, it is also the best time to learn to read proper sheet music and the benefits are many, as summarised below:

Music reading makes understanding music theory much easier, and both reading and theory lead to better understanding of the instrument you play.
Music reading allows you to communicate efficiently with a much wider variety of musicians in a universal language.
Once you start to get the hang of it, which happens sooner than you might think, you can play a much wider variety of material at any given time, as the pressure for memorisation is not all on your capacity to remember songs from start to finish. Even without being a great ‘sight reader’, casual familiarity with how the pieces of music you play look in their printed form will help greatly in remembering how to play them.
If you progress to studying music with any serious intent at school or university in future, the ability to read music is an essential component that you’ll need to understand.
Contrary to what some people believe, practicing sight reading actually helps with improvisation if both are worked on regularly. Sight-reading music forces you to develop instantaneous fret/note familiarity, thus making it easier to choose appropriate notes for the key or chord you're playing over when improvising, so you're not overly locked into scale patterns.
If you become a professional guitar player in future, the ability to read music will make you much more versatile and employable.
Practicing sight-reading is really, really good for your brain - use it or lose it!

It is with the above in mind that I encourage all my beginning students to learn and practice music-reading regularly.

That being said, I do not try to force it on anyone, and the musical pieces and technique exercises in this website are presented in TAB as well as traditional sheet music, and of course verbally in many of the videos too.

And with that I urge you to begin your journey with the guitar, the most satisfying and rewarding instrument of them all - persevere and it will change your life!