IGX

Recently picked up the guitar and I've been plugging away at a few books. Making OK progress I guess, but just following along in a book is boring as hell. I work a weird retail schedule and money is pretty tight, so I can't afford private lessons. I have way more fun noodling around figuring out songs from either TABs or what sheet music I can read so far. Also like youtube vids of guys showing how they play particular pieces.

Is there any value to online lessons? There's a few sites that seem legit. The one that keeps popping up is
http://www.jamplay.com

I've never done online lessons.

Start trying to play along with music, not as note for note copying as the goal but like you were sitting in with the band.

This is a way to play "You".

Shiiiiit. I'm not even good enough to do that yet. All I could do is maybe pick out a couple of chords they're playing and strum along.
I'm starting from ground zero here.

http://justinguitar.com

Those lessons are well regarded, and free, and the ones I've seen have been pretty good.

Guitar's good in that once you learn the basic open chords (there's about five of them, and their minor and 7th etc variations) and bar chords, you are able to play 90% of most pop songs.

There's nothing wrong with using tutorial vids and TAB to learn songs when you are a beginner. Once you've built up a reasonable database of songs in your repertoire, start to try to work out songs yourself, as 90% of pop/rock songs are just variations on the same themes.

Seriously check out www.artistworks.com. They do online subscription lessons with name players in different genres- lots of short lessons that progress in logical steps. The big plus though, is that you can send in a video for free and the instructor will respond with a personal video of a response to your clip of what to do. You can do this over and over. All the student videos and responses are in a big archive so you can see all the student/teacher exchanges.

I'm doing the school of Mandolin with Mike Marshall. He's one of the top 10 mandolinists in the country. Paul Gilbert does the rock guitar lessons. The guys doing these lessons seem really well selected for both skill and ability to teach from what I've seen. It's not at all just "famous guy demonstrates a lick". $90 you can try a school out for 3 months. $240 for a year if you pay up front.

Fuck, I need to stop slacking and really practice again! Been lazy lately.

Learn a handful of chords like the count mentioned. Work on your strum patterns and start paying attention to how the music "moves" (these are the chord progressions. That will get you up to speed quickly in terms of being able to play stuff you like and enjoy the instrument. Look at these guys:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ[/youtube]

In the meantime, do your lessons, finger practice, tab, and whatever other stuff until you find out the direction you want to go.

Thanks Count. That site looks like exactly what I'm after. I really like how he shows you how to structure practice time and the drills for each section.