3 Outstanding Resources for Learning the Guitar Online

Here is a list of some of the best guitar-learning online resources out there:

1. LearningGuitarNow.com

If you want to play like Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Johnny Winter, BB Winter, or Dickey Betts, well, LearningGuitarNow just might be the best resource for you!

A goldmine for blues guitarists, LearningGuitarNow is a guitar lessons website which is solely aimed at blues and slide guitarists, and is therefore suited more to the intermediate and advanced players as opposed to beginners. While it does have a Beginner’s Guitar eBook, which is a $19.97 purchase, most of the stuff on the website is made up of ‘slide and blues guitar lessons for the advancing guitarists’, as the website says.

All of the lessons on the website are video-based (video podcasts) and all videos are hosted on Youtube. Lessons are broadly split into two categories – free and premium lessons.

The free lessons include 64 video podcasts (and counting) on blues and slide guitar, with each lesson of course being video-based. These lessons will teach you the blues and slide guitar the way Clapton, Allman and Trucks used to play. Once again, the lessons are really aimed at people who have proficient and have a good command over their guitar-playing skills.

Apart from videocasts, free lessons also include articles on recording your guitar, tutorials (consisting of articles and blog posts) on learning to develop a blues/slide guitar tone, and also some free blues backing tracks – with full band instrumentation.

We then move on to the premium lessons. These premium lessons includes stuff like blues guitar lesson packs, slide guitar lesson packs, and full courses teaching you how to play blues and slide guitar, complete with DVD sets.

I suggest heading directly to Lessons Guide under Premium Lessons in order to see a list of all the DVD-based premium lessons. These lessons have been divided into 4 broad categories – (i) a Blues bundle based on 16 DVDs which includes all of the blues lessons, (ii) a Master Slide bundle on 14-DVDs which of course has all the slide lessons, and (iii) a ‘Play Like’ 6-DVD pack (which includes lessons on playing like blues great such as Eric Clapton, Dickey Betts and BB King).

But there’s more – you can even purchase the ‘Everything Bundle’, which as the name implies, is the entire collection of DVD lessons on blues and slide guitar – a massive 52 hours of lessons, among other goodies!

You can also purchase individual DVDs if you’re looking for something specific, or if you’re looking for a particular lessons, instead of the complete course.

DVD lessons will set you back by anywhere between $20 - $400, and also come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You have the choice of purchasing physical DVDs which will be shipped to your doorstep, or you can download files directly on your computer if you have a fast-enough internet connection.

2. JamPlay.com

A feature packed website, JamPlay is a great resource for aspiring guitar players, and musicians who are looking to improve and enhance their skills. They claim to be ‘offering the best guitar learning website’ out there, and from what I’ve seen, it’s not far from the truth!

The website is quite literally a goldmine. Features include (i) a community made up of just under 200,000 guitarists, (ii) in excess of 2000 guitar lessons on playing jazz, rock, country or death metal, all in HD, (iii) more than 50 professional guitar instructors to choose from, each specializing in specific genres which allows you to choose according to the genre you might be interested to learn

We first look at the lessons – which have been divided into categories according to proficiency, genre and songs. Yes, you can even choose from a list of songs to learn from! You can also choose to learn specific skills such as speed, lead, music reading, theory and improv, song writing, rhythm and ear training. Furthermore, you can even learn a style, which is essentially learning different genres – blues, rock, country, jazz, folk, r&b, and classical, to name just a few.

Other features include stuff like interactive games which aid an aspiring guitarist with fretboard memorization, music notation, note identification and pitch recognition, as well as access to comprehensive chord, scale, lick & riff, and jamtrack libraries.

All things considered, JamPlay has got to be one of the best guitar learning websites out there. Membership is pretty cheap at 20 bucks-a-month, and yearly access costs $139.95. These are prices for access to the goodies available on the JamPlay website. You can even opt for DVD-based lessons as well as in-person lessons which cost around $40 per hour. 

Jamplay offers interactive online guitar lessons – both via text chat as well as through webcam – for 10 hours daily. I have nothing but good things to say about JamPlay, it is such a feature-rich resource and one of its stand-out aspects is that it has something for everyone. Regardless of what kind of a guitarists or guitar player you are, I strongly recommend getting the yearly JamPlay membership as it has to be one of the best value-for-money guitar-based websites out there.

(PS. Alternatively, I also suggest going through this detailed and in-depth review of JamPlay as well)

3. JustinGuitar.com

JustinGuitar is the brainchild of a London-based musician Justin Sandercoe, an accomplished and experienced guitar teacher for many years now, a singer-songwriter, and a performance artist who has also toured and performed with many musicians from all over the world.

The first thing that stands out about Justin’s guitar-learning website is the fact that everything on it is totally free. Yes, there are over 500 lessons on the website, all of which are free, unlike many of the other resources out there. There are free lessons on basic skills, lessons which allow you to work on your technique, chords, rhythms, scales and arpeggios, to name a few.

You can also choose to learn songs (such as Killing Me Softly, Working Class Hero, Hallelujah and more), solos, riffs and licks. Alternatively, you can look at lessons according to several genres – rock & metal, blues, folk, and jazz.

As I mentioned earlier, everything you come across on the website is free of cost (apart from the stuff on the online store, more on that in a bit). Howe Justin manages to keep all lessons free is pretty simple – he uses a donations-based system which he calls the ‘honour system’. This means that essentially anyone who can afford to make a donation on the website can do so, allowing Justin to be able to charge nothing for the lessons. Alternatively, you can head over to the online store, where you can purchase stuff like eBooks and DVDs on playing the guitar, and a wide range of accessories like JustinGuitar-branded tees and mugs. You can also buy Justin’s album ‘Small Town Eyes’ from here.

JustinGuitar is one of the best free guitar-learning resource out there. I highly recommend you check it out – because its good and it’s a free – and I strongly urge everyone to donate whatever they can on the website, so that the lessons remain free for everyone.