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Where's the best place on the web to find acoustic guitar lessons?

There are thousands of places on the web where you can find acoustic guitar lessons. Where's the best?

In the early days of the Internet (I'm showing my age here), finding acoustic guitar lessons was fairly straightforward. You either jumped onto your favourite search engine (anyone remember when that wasn't Google?) and searched for the name of the song you wanted to learn plus 'tab' and were pointed towards a handful of sites, each of which contained different tab for the song you wanted.

If you wanted proper, structured lessons with exercises, scales, and modes, tough they didn't exist. And let's not even talk about video lessons in those days (there weren't any).

Now, the problem is completely the opposite, there are thousands of places to find acoustic guitar lessons online. The most obvious is YouTube. 

YouTube acoustic guitar lessons

I'm a huge fan of YouTube, both as a source of great music and live performances, and lessons, including acoustic guitar lessons. There are some awesome teachers – I'm sure you have your favourites.

It's not perfect, though. YouTube is great for one off lessons of specific songs, but it's less good for structured lessons that will help you improve technique, or learn new skills or gain new knowledge. It's not impossible to do that on YouTube, with careful use of playlists, but most teachers don't do it.

Better options?

Sites like JamPlay and Guitar Tricks, however do exactly that - they structure mini-courses in genre and technique, so you can focus on new skills. They cost more than YouTube, obviously (how do you compete with free?) but they offer a lot for the money. As well as structured lessons, both sites have top notch production values, which means you can play videos at full screen without any loss of quality. And both have supplementary material, like tab charts, scale and chord charts, and a metronome.

JamPlay also has an iPad app, which is really cool and allows you to watch lessons on your iPad and even stream them to an Apple TV, if you have one.

So, if you just want to learn individual songs, YouTube is great. But for structured acoustic guitar lessons, check out JamPlay, Guitar Tricks, or one of the other paid-for guitar lessons sites. Many have free trials so you can try before you buy.

Acoustic guitar image by Nguyen-Anh Lee