Jam Babble

If you take a stroll through your local music store I’m sure you’ll find a dozen different learn to play guitar dvds. Most of these are geared towards specific styles of guitar playing such as jazz, blues or metal.

Sure there will be a few dvd’s geared towards beginners, but they won’t be a complete course. It’s the nature of the self study guitar world, there just aren’t a lot of products that take you from a complete newb all the way through to being a half decent acoustic or electric guitar player.

That is until now.

I want to introduce you to what I feel is the best guitar lessons dvd program available. I posted a video of two of this program on my blog before so for anyone who’s followed my posts this might not come as a surprise.

The best dvd program I feel is Learn and Master Guitar by Legacy Learning Systems.

This course truly is a complete program that takes you from learning to hold, tune and strum the guitar right up to learning genre specific skills for jazz and blues.

Of course it doesn’t claim to make it happen over night. It takes time for you to practice and learn the skills it teaches along the way, but the key is that everything is in there.

A true beginner probably would find there is more then 1 years worth of material on the 20 DVD’s that come with the new expanded program. While a more intermediate player might make it though the content in 6-8 months.

How ever at the $150 price point it’s a steal no matter if you’re just picking up a guitar for the first time or have been playing for a couple of years on your own.

The instructor, Steve Krenz, is top notch and recognized in the music industry as being one of the best teachers in Nashville. He has toured across the US with some big names and also done studio and session work for artists around Nashville.

I could go on and on about this program (I own a copy), but I don’t want to over hype it. I suggest you visit this site, it talks more about the complete guitar lesson dvd course pack.

This post is inspired by something I read this morning at another blog I follow often ZenHabits.net. Today’s post was about “the only way to become great at something” and it immediately reminded me of when I first started playing guitar.

When I first started all I could think about was when would I be able to play well enough to piece a song or two together. Once I reached that point the speed with which I learned new material and new concepts slowed down greatly.

As a beginner guitar player we learn a lot in a short period of time. We learn chords, positioning, strumming patterns and more. How ever once we learn these things our development begins to slow. We’ve satisfied our initial goal of being able to play some songs on the guitar we know. Of course our journey as a guitar player shouldn’t stop there, we should continue to grow.

The post I read this morning talks about taking 6-10 years to become great at something depending on how hard you work at it. I think I believe this. I haven’t worked as hard at becoming a better guitar player over the last couple of years and because of this haven’t really progressed.

What can you take from this as a beginner guitar player?

Well if you’re just starting out I’d suggest you get the best guitar lessons product you can find, with as much content as possible. Forget anything that promises to teach you guitar in a weekend or over night. These are basically nothing but out right lies and fibs. No one has become a great guitar player over night and even the greats are learning new techniques and material each year.

Once you’ve got a good guitar lesson course or signed up for some private lessons commit to learning. I don’t mean going to the lessons but immerse yourself in the process of becoming a good guitar player. Practice, look for new ideas and techniques online. Get together with friends that play, really do all you can to push yourself as a guitar player.

To become great you must never stop learning. When we stop learning we become ignorant and stagnant. The guitar is a wonderful instrument and you have the ability to become a great player, just never give up!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with guitar tab, it’s basically a simple version of musical notation for guitar players. In a nut shell when you’re looking at a tab for a song the lines you’re seeing correspond to the strings on your guitar, and the numbers you see on each line are the equivalent of the fret you must play on your guitar.

Tab can be used to show you an arpeggio, chord or a lead guitar piece.

Why learn Guitar Tabs?

Learning to read music if you haven’t learned to play any instrument before isn’t the easiest. It’s even more difficult if you’ve taught yourself a bit of guitar, but have never taken any formal lessons. Learning to read tabs will allow you to learn to play new songs and advance your skills without have to learn advanced music reading.

Of course, to really strengthen your skills learning to read music should be something you’ll want to do. I’ve read that something like well over half of the worlds best guitar players cannot read music it does come in handy especially if you want to play with a band or become a professional studio musician.

Where can you start

There’s a video below you can watch in a few minutes that will get you started on how to read tablature. It’s basic, but it will get you pointed in the right direction.

Next I’d suggest you Google a few of your favourite songs and look for a tabbed version of the tune. So let’s say you were looking for an Eric Clapton tune… go a head and google “Eric Clapton Layla tab” without the quotes. You’ll get a few results.

Here are some of the top tab sites I’d suggest visiting:

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/
http://www.911tabs.com/
http://www.azchords.com/
http://www.guitaretab.com/

Each of these sites has a HUGE library of songs sorted by artist and then song to choose from. If you’re interested in learning more about how to read music I suggest you take a few minutes to check out these guitar lesson dvds. This program is great for beginners or someone who has started to teach them selves how to play guitar.

Here’s the Beginner Guitar Tab Video