Guitar Resources

I’ve been playing guitar and teaching music for a long long time.  And there’s a lot of noise out there in the instructional world.  Let me help you cut through that noise by giving you the resources that I use regularly and know you can benefit from too.

Tabs and Songs
Ultimate-Guitar.com – A fantastic repository of zillions of song tabs and chords.

Online Guitar Learning
Less Is More Guitar and The 30-Day Guitar Challenge – 30DGC will get you playing 3 complete songs in 30 days and, more importantly, get you in the habit of playing guitar every day.  LIMG then takes you the rest of the way with 22 lessons built on principles of accelerated learning and skill mastery.
Jamorama – A fantastic step by step guitar course that takes you from beginner to advanced concepts.  Loads of personal help.  They’ve taught over 200,000 students.

Guitar DVDs
Gibson’s Learn and Master Guitar – Gibson doesn’t just throw their name on anything.  In fact, this set received the Player’s Choice Gold Award for Best Instructional Material in Acoustic Guitar Magazine.  This 25-disc set contains 40 hours of instruction (beginning to advanced) on 20 DVDs plus 5 jam-along CDs, a 100+ page instruction book, and unlimited help on their student support site.

Guitar Learning Books
Mel Bay Modern Guitar Method – This is a fantastic book for guitar fundamentals.  I used to use it with all of my private students.
Modern Method For Guitar – Published by the Berklee School of Music.  More hardcore than Mel Bay, but very useful.
The Advancing Guitarist – This is a bizarre book.  I call it “Zen and the Art of Guitar”.  Definitely not for beginners.  But if you feel like you’re in a rut, playing the same stuff over and over, and you want to some exercises and tricks to break you out, I highly recommend checking this one out.
Monster Scales and Modes – A fun book full of bizarre and exotic guitar scales.
The Christopher Parkening Guitar Method – This is THE book for learning fingerstyle guitar.

Other Guitar Learning Tools
Riffmaster Pro – Slowdown any song without changing the pitch to hear what’s actually being played so you can learn it easier

Great Guitar Gear
Musicians Friend – A HUGE selection of gear and tons of good sales on the guitar gear you’re after.
Sweetwater Music – These guys have some of the most knowledgeable sales people around.  They know everything about every piece of gear.  If you need some hand-holding, they’re a great resource.

Music Listening
Spotify – They’ve got a free plan that plays ads between some song or you can upgrade for ad-free and mobile access.

Smartphone Apps
Gibson’s Learn and Master Guitar (Free) – Includes a chord dictionary, tuner, and metronome

Other Musical Pursuits
Rocket Piano – One of the best piano learning systems available.
SingORama – May as well sing while you’re strumming that guitar!  I’m going through this program myself and learning a lot.


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