This beginner guitar course is designed as a systematic and comprehensive method to get you off to a running start. This course provides you with all the tools necessary to progress as a guitarist and musician. Every guitar lesson is specifically designed to introduce the beginning guitarist to the essential core concepts, skills and the musical language.

This Beginner Guitar Course Covers:

• The Basics - Parts of the guitar, names of the strings, tuning, picking technique, fundamentals of fingerstyle, the musical alphabet, the names of the notes, keys, time and more. Every lesson is designed to give you what you need to start making sounds while providing an understanding of the sounds you are making.
• Chords - learning the most important chords in open position as well as how to group them musically - complete with technical tips. This goes well beyond the chord picture books which can lead to roadblocks in your future development. We carefully examine how to change chords using examples that build on solid technical principals that will allow for simpler, more comfortable and logical chord transitions.
• Scales - how to play and begin to understand major, minor, pentatonic and blues scales and their sounds. After all, music is made up of sounds and it is those sounds that lead us to wanting to recreate and perform them. Learn to recognize and identify what those sounds are while teaching your fingers how to get around the fretboard at the same time.
• Rhythm - In this beginner guitar course you'll learn how to play and conceptualize rhythm while thinking of the right hand as the percussive instrument. The right hand is the drum and we begin to separate that drum from the left hand and study it separately in order to build a strong sense of connecting rhythm with time and harmony.
• Melodies - how to play some simple melodies by ear both by reading music notation and by simply expressing melodies that we have lodged in our internal melodic memory . This is the best and most productive way to develop strong and educated ears that point your fingers in the right direction.
• Musical Language - developing and understanding the key concepts of the musical language so you can communicate with others and so you can memorize and repeat what you are doing in other keys . The language of music is very similar to learning any new language. Every language communicates ideas and music does the same thing. When we learn to identify sounds and functions and give them names we are learning a language that has a vocabulary that we can share with others.

This beginner guitar course begins by building a strong foundation not only for your technique but also for understanding the language of music as it applies to the guitar. The understanding you will develop in this course will allow you to continue to develop as a player and creative musician while beginning to provide you with the necessary language you will need to communicate with other players.

To begin this beginner guitar course, simply choose a lesson. Remember that many lessons have play along tracks which you can find simply by scrolling down the page. You can also find all of our play along tracks for guitar at our jam station.