A free series of progressive guitar lessons created with the beginner in mind. Very useful!
http://guitar.about.com/library/blguitarlessonarchive.htm

A very simple article on learning how to play the guitar targeted at kids. Contains various helpful links on how to play the guitar.
http://www.kidsturncentral.com/topics/music/guitar.htm

A large set of original, categorized guitar lessons. After reading and completing a lesson, you may choose to rate the lesson, post a question pertaining to the lesson or answer others’ questions.
http://www.guitarseek.com/lessons.php3

A humongous directory of guitar-related resources and links.
http://www.guitarnoise.com

Online guitar lessons everything you need to be a monster guitar player.
http://www.zentao.com/guitar/guitar-lessons.html

Guitar lessons, theory, and instruction. Chord diagrams, charts, and fingerings. Reviewed in Rolling Stone and Yahoo! Internet Life Magazines.
http://www.guitarlessonworld.com/

Another site that offers lessons in guitars free.
http://www.guitarplayerworld.com/

A beginners guitar guide to online guitar lessons, private guitar lessons, DVD’s, guide books and more!
http://www.guitarzonline.com/

If you’re not progressing in your guitar learning as well as you hoped, you can check out paid guitar lessons. A great one I’m using is Jamorama, which is IMHO, one of the best value for money packages around. Check out my Jamorama review, which includes my personal experience and screenshots.

Learning how to play the guitar can be made easier with the help of good instructional guitar books and videos. You can read or watch whenever you have time, and as many times as you like. Here I’ll showcase just a few of the better guitar books and videos, and even some CD-ROMS.

Guitar Pro 6

Guitar Pro 6 is easy to setup, and gives you a complete range of tools to building musical arrangements, without requiring additional hardware. It’s well-designed so that even beginners will have no problems. All of the commonly used music notation symbols can be found in Guitar Pro 6, such as glissando and tremolo symbols.

Finding tabs online in Guitar Pro’s .GP6 format is also easy, and when you download someone else’s tab, you can edit it – by changing tunings, keys or correcting any errors. Guitar Pro 6 is an excellent software for creating and editing guitar tabs, especially at its price!

Get Guitar Pro 6!

eMedia Guitar Method

Guitar teachers are great, but expensive (at least $25 per lesson). The eMedia Guitar Method program is great because you learn the guitar at your own pace. The great thing is that I am learning the guitar and having fun doing so, which is the point for me. Click here for my eMedia Guitar Method review.

Get eMedia Guitar Method!

Music Theory for Guitarists: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask

Just reading through the first chapter will tell you that this is an invaluable asset to any guitar player. Learn the proper way to think about what you’re playing, and learn much more about guitars. Kolb covers everything starting with basic fretboard layout, and goes to tuning, and even in the later chapters, still makes music theory approachable for guitarists at any level!

The accompanying CD illustrates all manner of chord progressions, and provides helpful points regarding improvisation and writing harmony. Highly Recommended.

Get Music Theory for Guitarists!

Guitar Fretboard Workbook

If you’re looking for a guitar book that can communicate an understanding of music and the fretboard to you, then this is it. The book has a structured lesson plan that brings you progressively from simple to advanced. It definitely helps guitarists understand the scales and visualize the fretboard more easily.

One of the good thing that this guitar book does is it introduces an innovative method to learn the fretboard – by patterns! Other guitar books can provide explanations that are overwhelming, but this book is great in its explanations, and connects everything for you perfectly, instead of YOU having to piece things together yourself.

Get Guitar Fretboard Workbook!

This guide will probably be more than what most beginners require, so bookmark this page for easy reference, and return to it as often as you’d like to increase your knowledge and learn more about guitar tabs. Eventually, you’ll know enough about guitar playing and guitar tabs to write your own tabs.

Guitar Tab Basics

Guitar tab is a shortform method for showing you how to play the guitar. Usually, guitar tabs are for six-string guitars, but guitar tabs for twelve-string guitars can also be found. Guitar tabs are simplified graphics showing you which strings and at which frets to play. In fact, guitar tabs make it so easy to play the guitar that you can even pick up a guitar and play the right sounds without even knowing what notes they are.

However, the drawbacks of guitar tabs are that they do not show you how long to hold a note, or how fast to play a passage.

If you look at a guitar tab, try to see it as a simplified graphical representation of a standard, right-handed, six-string guitar. Each line corresponds to each string on the guitar See it as the guitar with its neck to your left, and its body to your right, like this:

Each line, or string, has its note displayed on the tab as well. The high-e string is at the top of the tab, and the low-E string is at the bottom. There are no restrictions for the maximum length of a tab sideways, but most people keep it short enough so that it does not wrap on a webpage.

e----------------------------------------------------------
B----------------------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------
D----------------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------

How To Read Guitar Tabs (Sample Guitar Tabs Provided)

By going through these tutorials based on the following guitar tab samples, you’d be able to go off and learn guitar tab reading by yourself. In the first example, you’ll see that there is a number 3 on the A string. This just means to play the 3rd fret of the 5th string.

e----------------------------------------------------------
B----------------------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------
D----------------------------------------------------------
A-----3----------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------

In the previous example, only one string is played. However, when multiple strings are needed, such as when you’re playing the A chord, then you’ll find that the tab will look something like this:

e----------------------------------------------------------
B------3---------------------------------------------------
G------3---------------------------------------------------
D------3---------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------------------------

Sometimes, you’ll get chords that require you to not strum the low-E, or A strings. When this happens, the guitar tab will have an x on the string, like in this case:

e----------------------------------------------------------
B------1---------------------------------------------------
G----------------------------------------------------------
D------2---------------------------------------------------
A------3---------------------------------------------------
E------X---------------------------------------------------

Advantages of Guitar Tabs

Guitar tabs lets you know exactly where to place your fingers. For people who aren’t musically trained, or for casual guitarists, tabs are great because there’s no need to figure out the notes or string names. You just have to look at the guitar tab, place your fingers correctly, and start playing!

No special or additional software is needed to read, modify, or write guitar tabs. Any web browser would be able to view guitar tabs without the need of extra plug-ins, and any text editors will allow you to write your own guitar tabs.

Disadvantages of Guitar Tabs

There are no standards for writing guitar tabs. People write guitar tabs loosely based on what others have done in the past before. However, because of this, soemtimes you have to sift through various versions of guitar tabs to find a good one that you can ready and understand. With music notation, you get all the standard information such as key, time signature, tempo, loudness, and style. With guitar tabs, the author may put them in as additional information if you’re lucky, but this isn’t typical of most guitar tabs.

Guitar tabs can’t show strumming patterns or the duration of notes. How long do you hold the chord and notes? Most of the time, you’ll need to hear someone else play the song before in order to know how to properly play the song according to the guitar tab.

Now Go And Play The Guitar!

That’s it. Guitar tabs are simple, and they’re meant to be simple. You might come across guitar tabs with strange, unfamiliar symbols, but you should find explanations for them on the guitar tab itself.

Playing the guitar has its own set of rules and you need to follow them to become an expert player. Playing guitar is not hard and you will have to put some interest and learn it. While learning guitar you may feel that sensation of being a popular guitarist one day but you should remember that even the masters of guitar started with basics one day.

Before starting to play guitar you should know how the guitar is constructed. You should have the idea of various body parts of an average guitar. All of these parts of the guitar form to make a excellent device that help your create magical tunes. Chords, scales, fingering, etc. are the few terms that you will come across while learning the guitar. But first let’s see how Guitar is made:

Basically, guitar is a long wooden piece with a string attached to it. It follows a simple science by creating music when the chords are stretched in harmony. But a guitar is much more than a simple piece of wood.

A normal guitar’s body is made up of a large wooden piece. The thinned part of the guitar that is joined with the body is called the neck. A bridge is located on the body of the guitar where a hole is created. A single string of guitar is binded at the bridge and the pegs which is located at the head of the guitar. The head of the guitar is present at the end of the neck and is not connected with the body. Besides these, small pieces of metal are inscribed on the long neck on different intervals.

These metal pieces are called frets and when a player presses the strings into the frets, then the guitar creates different pitches and music at different places. All of the frets make a different pitch and sound differently. These frets are the most important part of the guitar as they are creating the whole music which made using a guitar.

The way you hold a guitar also depends on the type and melody of the song you choose. For a right handed person, you can hold your guitar on right hand making your right hand the strumming one. You have to hold the guitar in a way that your hand rests on the string above the hole. In this way, your left hand will be holding the neck of the guitar. But if you are a left handed then you should just reverse the order.

Holding the guitar and knowing its body parts are simply the basic. A guitar has much more things to be learned which you will find in following series. Learning guitar is not just a time pass or to matter of interest, it will make you relationship with this amazing device that creates harmonic music too.

What are guitar tabs (or guitar tablature), and why are they so important in learning how to play the guitar?

Guitar tabs are actually musical notation that use letters and symbols that represent the musical direction. Guitar tabs are unique because they make use of musical direction instead of the usual musical notes. Guitar tabs are actually a very ancient system, dating back many, many years.

When using guitar tabs, the vertical lines represent the actual strings of the instrument, the horizontal lines of guitar tabs represent the frets, and the dots on a guitar tab represent the position that the fingers should be in.

Check out some of the better sites that offer free guitar tabs here:

Your #1 source for guitar tabs, bass tabs & chords. Comprehensive tabs archive with over 70000+ of tabs! http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/
Thousands of guitar tab, bass tab, drum tab, keyboard tab (piano tab), power tab, and lyrics for thousands of bands. New tabs daily. http://www.taborama.com/
Extensive 100000+ guitar tabs archive, bass tabs, drum tabs, keyboard & guitar lessons. http://www.tabcrawler.com/
A complete guitar tabs site with Olga search, chords,lessons,utilites, and scales. http://www.worldguitar.com/
#1 source for guitar tablature online. They have guitar tabs for songs by your favorite bands. http://www.guitartabs.com/
Search over 60000 songs. Find guitar and bass tabs tablature tab. Search by song title or artist. Submit and Request files. http://www.guitartabs.cc/
Over 200 video songs lessons and tabs. Video-tabs.com combines quality video lessons served up by YouTube with accurate easy-to-print tabs so that you can more easily learn your favorite songs. http://www.video-tabs.com/

All this may be overwhelming for the beginner though. I know, because I’ve been through the exact same process. What I discovered was that a well-structured guitar course that shows you what to do step-by-step is essential to helping you learn how to play the guitar and take advantage of all these online guitar resources.

I’m using a guitar lesson packaged called Jamorama, which is IMHO, one of the best value for money packages around. Check out my review on Jamorama, which includes my personal experience and screenshots.