The main advantages of choosing to learn guitar online are convenience and cost. You can schedule your lessons around the time you have available and avoid having to travel to the location of a tutor every day. You also save a lot of money based on the fact that you are not paying for individual attention of a one-on-one tutor.
In fact, you can learn quickly with an online tutor as you might with an online or disk-based language tutor. Of course, some online guitar courses are better than others and so you might want to take a bit of time and care in choosing the best one for you. That said, a steady schedule and an efficient tutor coupled with a fast Internet connection will make the learning process both rapid and enjoyable.
You can choose between online lessons from an established guitar school or specialized instruction from tutors on the social networks like FaceBook and My Space. My recommendation is to pay for lessons from an established, online school because you will get consistent, rapid results from carefully tested video modules. There are "free" lessons online but, as the old saying says, "You get what you pay for."
There are also online "master" classes where you can learn innovative techniques and improvisations. You can choose between pre-taped tested lessons or two-way interaction with a class. If you attend an online class, you will probably have to have a web cam and wear a headset with a microphone.
The main advantage of going the class route is the fact that you get feedback and progress monitoring by a professional tutor at a fraction of the cost of private lessons. As you are, no doubt, aware, practice makes perfect. Regular practice of at least 20 minutes a day is a must if you are to be a successful guitar student.
In the beginning, you will be devoting most of your practice time to learning chords and scales. While this is nowhere near as much fun as playing songs, it is a necessary precursor to that. You will learn the C, A, G, E and D chords and then branch out into variations of those basic chords.
Learning to play the guitar can be a bit painful at first. You need to learn to press down on the frets with the ends of your fingers (not the pads) and until you build calluses, the strings may feel like steel cables pushing into the ends of your fingers.
Where you press is very important to the sound you will be creating. If you hear a buzzing noise included in the sound of the note, that's your clue that you are not pressing down in exactly the right place. As I said, practice makes perfect, so stay with it though the hard part and you will earn yourself the gift of a lifetime: musical self-expression.
? 2011 Robert M. Gillespie, Jr.
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