Free Online Guitar Lessons For Beginners And Beyond
Ready to Learn to Play Guitar?
Playing the guitar is a lot fun, mostly because once you’ve had even just a few lessons you can start to pick up familiar songs and start to play along. But where do you start? As with most things, the information is available on the Internet, but finding it and organizing it into a logical sequence can be a real challenge. This is where online guitar lessons can really be helpful.
There are a number of good online guitar learning programs available, but if your just getting started learning to play guitar it can be hard to know what to look for. This is where free online guitar lessons can be a great way to get the feel of a particular guitar learning course. Jamorama is one such course and I’ll provide a link with more information at the end of this article.
Free online guitar lessons are great for getting started, but they’re not going to take you very far. Ideally, you’ll go through the free lessons at the end of which you’ll have a better idea of what the full course will be like and if it is a good fit for you. With that in mind it is important to try to select your free online guitar lessons based on what the full guitar learning course offers. The following are some things that I think are important to look for in online guitar lessons.
Hand Strength and Agility Tips
Not a huge one, as it will happen naturally over time, but tips/drills for building hand strength and agility are helpful. When you first start learning to play guitar your hands will feel very clumsy and get tired/sore quickly. This will be most noticeable in your fret hand as it has to contort into new shapes to play chords, but also you may notice it in your strumming hand (for example after prolonged palm muting). This is something Jamorama talks about and I think it is useful to note.
Chord Progressions
Obviously you want to learn chords, but knowing chords and no chord progressions is like knowing lots of words in the dictionary but not knowing any of the grammar rules to put them together into a sentence. By learning various chord progressions you will be able to combine the chords you learn into music.
How to Read Guitar Tablature
Much of the of the music you find on the Internet is written in ‘tab’ so learning how to read and write it is a great way to expand your ability to learn new songs. If you are able read and play from chord sheets and tab sheets, you will be able to find and learn nearly and song you like by searching the Internet.
Strumming Patterns and Techniques
Strumming may not be a subject you think of right away when you think about learning to play guitar, but how you play a chords is just as important as what chords you play. From picking, to muting, to hammering-on or pulling-off, there are many different guitar strumming techniques that each create an very unique sounds.
Guitar Buying Tips
Not directly related to learning to play guitar online, but definitely useful information when you are looking to buy a new instrument for the first time. The physical quality of a guitar is directly related to the quality of sound it produces, therefore I definitely suggest you spend a bit more and get a good quality guitar. And if you’re going to spend any significant amount, you’ll want all the advice you can find.
Ear Training
Being about to read music is very important, but along with that is the need to able to know whether you’re playing something correctly simply by listening to how it sounds. You need to be able to hear when a string is out of tune or that you just played a chord slightly wrong. This is another one of those things that will come over time, but if your online guitar lessons can help train your ears, it can be very beneficial.
Hard Copy
This probably isn’t a big one, but in my opinion, it’s a good indication for an online guitar learning system to have a hard copy version for offline use. Not only does this make it possible to get the same instruction when you’re not connected to the Internet, but to me it says that the product is liked well enough that the publishers are willing to put forth the extra time, effort, and money produce a physical product.
Hopefully those few thoughts are enough to help you move in the right direction. I mentioned Jamorama in a couple of places and here’s why. Jamorama covers all the items mentioned in this article and has received many rave reviews. I recommend that you start your search for free online guitar lessons by heading over to the Jamorama site and give it a look. Jamorama offers a 6 lesson free trial that will give some great instruction and give you a look at their guitar learning system.
