It is a great time to be alive for guitar players of all hues in this day and age. Not only has it become easier to find supreme quality guitars at affordable prices, but you can also acquire a ton of free resources on the web to hone your guitar playing skills. Yes, we are talking about the panacea that is some of the best free online guitar lessons which are just a click away if sought correctly.
However, the bad news is that there’s an abundant choice to sift through when it comes to selecting the best free guitar lessons on the Internet. To add to your woes, the quality of each lesson varies steeply. After all, in the era of YouTube any random “guitar maestro” can plug in their guitar, and throw up a “guitar lesson” video recorded with a cheap webcam and edited with a free YouTube video editor.
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But, you cannot always find the right chords, riffs, solos or “tabs” of every song that you are looking for on YouTube or even Reddit. Also, even if you somehow manage to find one, that doesn’t always guarantee a quality tutorial or accurate tab!
Granted, there are many talented guitarists on YouTube, but most of them charge a nominal fee for online guitar instructions through their website, app, or via Bandcamp. But, can everyone afford those lessons? No, right? So how does one find a decent source for best free online guitar lessons for beginners and kids?
The answer is quite simple:
If you are seeking full guitar tabs, chord tablature, or accompanying YouTube video tutorials, you ought to check out our roundup of 7 great websites that deliver the perfect sonic punch and cover almost all aspects of learning guitar online, especially for beginner guitarists. Most importantly, you can teach yourself very easily through these sites.
Free Online Guitar Lessons: Are they ideal for an Electric or Acoustic Guitar?
“Which guitar would be great for learning how to play music, Acoustic or Electric?”
Beginners often have this question running in the back of their minds before they plunge right in their guitar learning sojourn. The same age-old cliche: acoustic or electric guitar? The answer is a bit difficult because it depends on a number of factors.
Ideally “both” sounds more plausible than “it doesn’t really matter!” Why? All the famous guitar gods/virtuosos started out their learning process with different guitars, so you can’t really discern a pattern here.
Some argue that learning on an acoustic guitar is better because of its hard fretboard which makes pressing down on the strings tougher. One needs to exert more strength for barre chords in the absence of any amp/effects/distortion to make up for sloppy playing.
However, others are of the view that playing an electric guitar without plugging it into an amp can also come in handy for “silent” practices and you can still hear your notes being played.
Why Choosing The Best Free Online Guitar Lessons Is Important For Novices and Kids?
Learning the ropes of a guitar is a tricky endeavour. If you want to teach yourself and quickly learn playing along to your favourite tunes, tabs become essential. Plus, they not only help you develop a musical ear, but train you to read music as well.
Sometimes, discerning really lengthy solos with heaps of arpeggios, sweep picking, or songs with distorted power chords or octave chords by ear can dissuade newbies from learning a song. That’s where free online guitar instructions come in handy!
Remember, it is common for guitar players to get stuck in a rut, hit plateaus, and lose motivation in the sheer absence of a guide/teacher/mentor. With a steady wealth of free lessons and PDF tabs at your disposal all the time, you can easily teach yourself the nuances of a song rather quickly without shelling out any money.
So, are you ready to find the websites that offer the best free online guitar lessons and teach yourself some really cool tricks? Let’s get started-:
7 Websites That Provide The Best Free Online Guitar Lessons For Beginners and Kids
The numero uno choice for imparting the best free online guitar lessons for beginners, Songsterr.com is a steady source for those trying to find tabs for any song. With a catalogue of over 500,000 songs, guitar aficionados are surely in for a treat. Songsterr works on the lines of Guitar Pro and Power Tab, which is what makes it unique considering its FREE!
True to its tagline “Guitar Tabs With Rhythm” you can play leads over rhythm track playback and learn the intricate passages in a song easily. In fact, Songsterr works likes a charm on both Windows and Mac and wouldn’t bug you with pesky Adobe Flash Player installation pop-ups.
Moreover, thanks to a massive archive of tabs covering all the standard fare such as Nirvana, Oasis, Guns ‘N Roses, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, and Green Day, et al. you wouldn’t be disappointed one bit.
In fact, if you are into metal and its various sub-genres, there is good news in the offing for you as well.
You can expect to find precise tabs of all those blistering solos, fast-paced guitar chugs, and complex riffs that define a brutal tune in a jiffy! What’s more — the tabs are put up by users which can also be modified/uploaded by others as per their own interpretations.
Overall, Songsterr comes in handy for those who don’t want to use resource hogging DAWs, PDF tabs or other software for learning to play guitar in tempo and correct time.
Ultimate-guitar.com started out as one the first pioneers in the free online tablature ecosystem. It is, without a doubt, still one of the biggest tablature websites on the internet with over 1.1 million tabs. As soon as a new song comes out from a rock or metal band, chances are you might find its PDF like tab first on Ultimate-Guitar.
Not to mention, Ultimate-Guitar is replete with several renditions of user-submitted tabs of the same song so that beginners can choose on their own and get a new perspective to a song.
How?
Thanks to Ultimate-Guitar’s five-star community rating system, you can easily home in on a PDF like guitar tab which is the most accurate sounding version.
That is, a tab with a 5-star rating and maximum votes is the best one and you can always reference it.
Moreover, you can also view an accompanying YouTube video for most tabs to get a drift of the notes. All in all, Ultimate-Guitar is one of the best free online guitar lessons repository that can impart quality PDF like tutorials.
911Tabs is not your run-of-the-mill guitar tabs website, in fact it is a comprehensive repository of all the guitar tabs lingering around on the web. Moreover, the cool thing that separates 911tabs.com from other websites that impart some of the best free online guitar lessons is that it scrapes the webpages of every tab website, and returns a cohesive list of various tabs (including PDF) to you.
For instance, if the version of “Live Forever” by Oasis on Ultimate-Guitar is not to your liking, visit 911tabs, search the song to reveal the most relevant page comprising tabs from every tablature website there is.
Yes, it can be a tad overwhelming at times, but it saves your time spent visiting each site one by one.
Run by a one-man army, JustinGuitar has been around for a while and provides great guitar lessons to budding guitarists. In fact, JustinGuitar is all about video lessons, which are not just useful, but beautifully structured as well.
You can also find carefully crafted courses aimed at different genres and difficulty levels as well. Of course, compared with most tab-based sites, the sheer number of tabs might be too less.
Also, the production value isn’t as top-notch as on some paid sites, but who cares as long as the educational value is remarkable most of the time?
Following on the heels of Ultimate-Guitar, GuitareTab.com is another incredible tablature site that provides guitar tabs and chords in PDF sheet form as well as accompanying YouTube videos (for some songs). It is a great tool in your arsenal, in the off chance, you don’t find the tab for a particular song you are looking for on Ultimate-Guitar.
In fact, at first glance, you might get the feeling that GuitareTab.com is a downright clone of Ultimate-Guitar. However, that’s not the case. Why? Because the interface is quite different, and second off its homepage throws up a list of the popular/top rated tabs at a given day.
Also, it boasts tabs of around 200,000 songs, which is an impressive figure, but marginally less than Ultimate-Guitar’s collection.
There used to be a time when Guitar Pro was the be all and end all insofar as quality guitar tabs were concerned. The power centre changed as soon as Songsterr hopped in with its rhythm based playback tabs as the perfect free alternative. However, Guitar Pro still remains a viable program for accessing nearly accurate tabs that can be exported in PDF.
All you need is a Guitar Pro software (any version) for an endless supply of tabs. All in all, it is a more robust version of Power Tab when it comes to playback capabilities and reading and composing tabs.
Also, you don’t have to always fork out a premium for Guitar Pro, since it comes bundled in as a freeware with many guitar effects processors, and DAWs. Heck, you can even get it for free online by grabbing the cracked version, which isn’t recommended.
In terms of user experience, Chordbook.com is second to none when it comes to providing best free online guitar lessons to beginners and kids. Thanks to its interactive interface complemented by a nifty guitar chord and scale generator & finder, you can teach yourself to play your favourite songs in no time.
What’s more, Chordbook used to be a Flash based website some years back, but they recently converted their website to HTML5, which means you can look up for tabs on your smartphones as well.
And…that’s a wrap! So, did you like our roundup of the websites that provide some of the best free online guitar lessons for beginners and kids? Did we miss out on any great websites that you know of? Sound off in the comments.
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