Left-Hand Conditioning Exercises and Worksheets
Your biggest problem as a beginner is getting a level of comfort in your fretting hand. This series of still exercises has helped hundreds of beginners to learn chords and scales quickly. I list it first because it is the single most important thing you can do as a first step. Tension in the left hand is the main reason people quit - don't be a statistic.

The Beginner's Guitar CD-ROM # 1 (Online Version)
Video clips, diagrams and large tablature show you what to do. The Beginner's Guitar Method shows you the building blocks of music in terms of shapes and sounds. Order through this site.

Open Chords
Diagrams for 14 open chords. A word of advice: hold these chord shapes with your left hand, you don't have to play anything with your right. Don't worry about what they sound like at first. Give yourself a month to just practice the shapes. If you're a small person, you may need some time to develop strength and get used to stretching your hand. If you're a big person, you may need some time to learn to place your fingers so they only touch one string at a time. Practice the shapes for a while, don't worry about the sound at first.

Free Download - Read Tablature For Guitar
Tablature is a simple shorthand for telling you the order of notes in a song. Tablature isn't much help for fingerings. To understand fingerings, learn the chord and scale shapes shown on this site. You can learn the basics of tablature here, now, for free. Read about it here, or you can download a demonstration with videos.

Free Download - Open E Minor Pentatonic Scale - Old Version
This inlcudes all of the exercises in Chapter 2 of The Beginner's Guitar Method. The pentatonic scale is important in all pop music styles. You hear this scale all the time in the music you listen to. (This is the older version of this lesson - revised on the latest CD and download version.)

Technical notes: [1] Video and music files are included in the download, so you don't have to be online to use them. [2] Downloads are Zip files in EXE format. The self-extracting EXE files contain no programs, even though Windows warns you that you are downloading a program. The EXE format is used so that files can arrange themselves into folders and subfolders (created by the EXE). This is necessary in order for the presentation to work properly. [3] No downloads from this site ever contain tracking software, cookies, spyware, adware etc. [4] Downloaded lessons do not effect your program files, registry, desktop, Start Menu or any other settings. For more on EXEs, and how to download - Click Here.

Free Download - Drum Beats
4/4 Rock beats and 6/8 blues beats at different tempos (speeds). Real drums on MP3. You can convert to WAV and burn to audio CD.

Free Download - Standard Tuning Notes
Lets you tune your guitar by ear. It's a good idea to coarse tune by ear and fine tune using an electronic tuner. The problem with coarse tuning with a tuner is that your tuner may track the wrong note, one not even close to the one you're trying to tune. Also, read 'Using Your Electronic Tuner.' Your cheap tuner may work better than you think. Tuner secrets even the pros don't know. (I work with these guys, I know.)

The 'Amazing Slow Downer' from Roni Music
This is the only product I endorse on this site. I receive no money for this (or even a Christmas card for that matter - and I send these people hundreds of dollars in business). The ASD is the ultimate session training tool. It lets you learn a song on CD (or WAV or MP3) in short sections, at slow speed. Think of it as 'training wheels for your guitar.'

A full working version of the ASD is $40. A trial version is available free from their website. Allows you to slow down or speed up a track, without effecting the pitch. Speed and pitch are controlled independently. You can also set 'start' and 'end' points to create continuous loops, then save loops as WAV files that can be burned to CD. The sound resolution is very good. Very Cool!

Free Tablature On The Web
There are thousands of guitar tabs available on the internet. Most of the tabs are pretty good, but they're not all accurate. If it sounds wrong, it's probably the tab, not you. A few popular tablature sites are:
     Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) - www.olga.net
     Guitar Tabs - www.guitartabs.cc
     Tab Robot - www.tabrobot.com


$1.00 MP3 Download Sites
Napster is now a legal site. Dollar music downloads are everywhere now. Even Walmart has gotten in on the act. But it's not like the old days. Music files from these sites contain security features to prevent unauthorized copying. To use your downloads with the 'Amazing Slow Downer,' you will have to make an audio CD copy first. The download site will have instructions on how to burn CDs of their songs.

Put It All Together
This means you can get the song online for a dollar, possibly get the tab for free, and learn it in short, slow sections using the 'Amazing Slow Downer.' Today's beginners have access to resources that we couldn't have dreamt of in the days of LP records, and before the internet.