Private lessons would be the best way to go if you can find a good teacher but that’s hard unless you happen to be surrounded by fabulous music schools.

There are a lot of not-so-great teachers out there – mostly because musical education overall isn’t so great – way too many people are self taught and they don’t even have many of the basics right.

I’ve found video lessons to be a good cost effective alternative. You were nervous about that $200 cost, but that would only buy you 8 half hour private lessons. You won’t get far with that.

I tried several of the video programs and the best by far is Scotty West’s Absolutely Understand Guitar. Scotty is a great teacher and his program is very well organized and complete.

You can even call or email if you have questions and talk to Scotty directly. Learn and Master Guitar was good for some things (and they sure are everywhere on the ‘net these days…) but L&M didn’t provide the real understanding that I was looking for.

I’m in a band now and writing my own music thanks to Scotty.

Good luck with your guitar. Here’s the link

http://www.absolutelyunderstandguitar.com

JWIII

PS: There’s something on YouTube that will give you a taste of what Scotty’s all about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25PpbC0cvw&feature=channel_page
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really, i play guitar, if u want to learn, find someone to take lessons from (old fashioned i know, but it works) and on the side use something like http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ to boost your learning. (that site has tabs and chords for TONS and TONS of songs).

In no way can it replace a good teacher, but for just learning songs u like, it cant be beat.

If you just wanna learn how to play stuff you like, not caring about really progressing properly, use something like ultimate guitar alone.

if you want to learn how to play properly and have it sound right and in proper form, so you can advance to more difficult stuff with less headaches later on, find a good person to take lessons from.
(and spice it up by learing stuff you like along the way using ultimate guitar)

but i would by no means suggest the teach yourself from a book method, it can be done, by all means it can be done well, but most likely you’ll end up developing bad habits and improper form that will hamper you later on.
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personal experience

(and think about it, if hypothetically, you were going to plumb your house, by yourself, would you trust you simply reading a book or watching a movie on how to do it, or would you take a course and learn how to do it right so later on it would work, same thing here, learn right so you don have to fix mistakes later on that could have been avoided)

Check it out, theres over 13000 video lessons, live chat with teachers, virtual bands, all genres, best part is you can check all the vids out for free. To get the actual lesson with back track, tabs, and commentary, you have to pay the; $19 for one month, $29 for 3 months, $90 for 1 year. Its worth it, and it updates daily, adding like 20 vids a day. So it will last longer than those dvd things. Good luck, and message me if you need anything or need more info.
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