Nowadays, this is how most people start their guitar journey: they find a cheap guitar, and then head online to YouTube.  Once there, they’ll learn a few chords. Unsure what to do with those chords, they look up a lesson teaching a song they’d like to play. There, they basically copy what the teacher shows them (sometimes the teachers don’t even talk – just play), and that is how the monkey-see, monkey-do approach to guitar develops. They start fiddling around with their fingers, trying to make them do what they want them to do. Pretty soon, their fingers are sore, and because they’re not making solid progress in making music, they get discouraged.

Even if this hasn’t happened to you, I’ve seen it happen often enough to know it is a very common problem. People learn a few chords, or part of a song, but they haven’t actually learned to play the guitar.

There’s a difference between learning to play the guitar, and simply replicating what someone else is doing on the guitar. Simon says, monkey-see, monkey-do, it’s all the same thing. Most beginners have only ever learned what some chords are. They’ve no idea on timing, or how the fretboard works, or how music theory applies to the guitar. They can’t take the first song, and then go and play a different one, so the only way to learn another song is to go find another lesson, and do monkey-see, monkey-do all over again. If you can’t communicate with the language of music (theory), then you’ve got no way of interpreting what is happening. In other words, you’re not really learning to play the guitar.

Time is precious, so you want to be sure that you’re spending your time on what matters, as opposed to whatever happens to cross your path. You need a structured path to success, not a haphazard, winding road.

Many beginners think that if they constantly seek out some new trick to learn on their guitar, then learning will remain interesting and fun. The sad reality is though, that because they’re darting around all over the place, the basics never get covered, and they’re left with more holes in their guitar education than a pile of Swiss cheese!

My job is to teach you the guitar by keeping it interesting, not in the old boring music teacher style that eliminates all the fun. Sure, I’ll teach you lots of cool tricks on your guitar, but we’ll do that in a methodical manner that will build you a solid foundation. As we move forward, I think you’ll find that you truly enjoy seeing how all those ‘guitar tricks’ actually fit into the bigger picture!

Let me tell you a story about a guy I know. We’ll call him George.

George picked up the guitar a couple years ago, and since that time he’s learned about a dozen chords. The highlight of his week is when he gets together with a group of friends to jam. They all haul out their acoustic guitars, sit around a table at the local pub, and go through a list of songs they enjoy. Frank is the leader of the group, and truth be told, he’s the only one that can really play. George, along with the others, basically just follows along with what Frank is doing.

Because Frank is the only one that can make it all the way through a song without having to stop to hunt for a chord, or to correct a finger position, the group sounds pretty funny – every now and then one of the guitars drops off for a bar while someone scrambles to get to the right chord. Even when they’re all playing, strums will be all over the place, and there’s not much sense of being “tight” as a group. Part of the problem is that when Frank changes chords, it takes a beat or two for the rest to see what he’s done, and catch up.

At the end of every jam session, Frank always asked George: “so when you are you going to learn to actually play that thing?”

And George knew exactly what Frank meant too. You see, Frank is the one that figures out the chords for new songs the group wants to play, and Frank is the one that figures out how to strum along with the rhythm so it actually ends up sounding like how it is supposed to. The rest of the group – my friend George included – wait for Frank to figure it out, and then they copy him. There’s that monkey-see, monkey-do approach I mentioned earlier!

George can play the chords, but he can’t play the guitar. He can’t confidently play through a song all on his own; he’s basically parroting what he sees others do. All he really knows is the chords of the guitar, but he doesn’t understand how musically it all comes together.

It was George’s quest to finally figure out how to play that led him to me…

Is there a wrong way to play guitar? Most people think that as long as you can play, you’ve learned the right way.

Not in my books.

You see, one person’s definition of “able to play guitar” can be very different from another. A beginner will look at another beginner and think “yeah, he can really play that thing!” On the other hand, a more experienced player who knows what he is doing, can easily spot other players who really know how to play, from the ones who can make people think they know how to play.

Let me use an analogy to illustrate what I mean here. I could take any person out of a random crowd, give them a wrench, then point to the bolt on my car that needs to be tightened, and they could do that for me. In the guitar world, that is like learning how to copy a chord progression, or a riff, or even an entire song.

But what if I then told that random person that my fuel pump needed to be changed. Could they do it? Not likely – not unless they really knew what they were doing.

It’s exactly the same on guitar.

A person can look like they know how to play, but if they have not truly learned… if they have not truly understood how the guitar works, and how music works, they will not be able to solve problems on their own.

Worse yet, if you get one of those people teaching you how to play, it’s like the blind leading the blind…

Let’s look at another example, from the world of cooking.

When you are confident with cooking, you can move away from the recipe to create your own, because you are comfortable with your skills and what you know works well together. If you’re not confident, you’ll stick precisely to the recipe. You have to know which ingredients work together to make your own recipe. Following a recipe is not the same as knowing how to cook.

In the same way, being able to copy how others play a song on guitar is not the same as having the tools and knowledge needed to learn it on your own, or to create your own ideas for chord progressions!

That is what I strive to produce in my students: the ability to understand their instrument, to understand music, and of course, the ability to really play the thing! I don’t want to produce a bunch of copycats who rely on me for their next move. A player who understands what they’re doing will be a far more fulfilled, motivated, and yes – a better player as a result.

Furthermore, you’ll be surprised just how much material we cover in the course before we even pick up a guitar. In fact, by the time you pick up the guitar for the first time in the course, you will already have a sense of confidence that you know how it works, and by this time, you’ll be anticipating making some music!

To keep it fun and enjoyable for you, everything you’ll learn in the course is anchored to songs. That way, every new skill and technique you learn will be instantly applied.

If you’ve played guitar for any amount of time, and you’re still reading this page, then chances are you know there’s something missing and you want to improve on it. Perhaps you know a bunch of chords, but you’re frustrated by not really knowing what to do with them. Perhaps you recognize that you’ve been playing ‘monkey-see, monkey-do’ with your guitar, and that the time has come to learn how to think for yourself on the guitar. Maybe your guitar education looks like that pile of Swiss cheese, and you can’t see how one thing on guitar connects to another…

Whatever the reason is, this course is for you.

Have you ever watched pro sports? Whenever an athlete at a high level becomes disappointed with his or her performance, what do they do? Inevitably, they head back to the basics. They know that something, somewhere, is missing at a basic level, and if only they can correct that, they’ll be back in the game.

Maybe it is just the one piece of the puzzle that keeps them from getting the whole picture…

The same is true on guitar.

I call this The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar and that’s for good reason. You’ll find I dig into things in a level of detail that other teachers don’t even touch. Most beginner courses tend to leave you with more questions than answers after you’ve gone through them. A mistake many teachers make is that they forget the elementary level of the person they’re talking to. They can come off as condescending or even disrespectful, or else they just leave key factors out. They assume you’ll pick certain things up by osmosis somehow, just as you go along.

I don’t assume anything, and I will make sure you learn everything you need to know.

You may be questioning what direction to take or what you need to learn on the guitar. Perhaps you’ve had other people offer their own advice as to how you should learn. With respect to those, I’ve taught over 5000 students one on one over the last 40+ years, and from that experience, I know what you need to learn. In one on one teaching, I’ve come up against every conceivable question a beginner can possibly ask about the guitar, and I’ve also learned which ones are most common and most important.

Sure, you can buy a basic guitar book or a cheap DVD for $10 on Amazon, but what are you actually going to learn from that? Not much more than you could learn on YouTube for free. Maybe you’ll just be left with more questions than answers. In fact, some courses can even do more damage than good, because they set you off into the wrong direction.

Remember, truly learning to play the guitar is very different to picking up a guitar and strumming a chord.

For whatever reason, it seems that most beginners tend to start first with an acoustic guitar. In my view, it makes no difference if you want to learn on an acoustic or an electric; however I taught the bulk of this course on the acoustic guitar in an effort to be as relevant as possible to those learning on an acoustic. That’s why I’ve called it the The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar.

That said, all of the things we’ll cover on the acoustic guitar apply directly to the electric guitar as well. Electric players need to learn the exact same chords, strum patterns, rhythms, theory and scales as acoustic players do! The main difference comes in learning to deal with the tone and feel of the electric. The electric guitar is much more sensitive than the acoustic, and there are a few special techniques required to learn how to handle that sensitivity.

Because of that, I decided to record a special two-hour bonus lesson where I deal specifically with these electric guitar related questions. With this bonus included, the course is indeed appropriate for both acoustic and electric beginner guitar players.

With that said, I also have another beginner course that focuses specifically on electric blues. If that style of music appeals to you, you could start there instead.

If you’ve ever met anyone who has run a marathon, they’ll tell you it’s not something you can just decide to do one day. It takes time to train and build up to the point where you can do that. Without training in shorter distances first, it just won’t happen. You must have appropriate expectations.

The exact same is true on the guitar.

Don’t think you’re going to go from zero to hero overnight! Everyone learns at different paces, but everyone has to go through the same stages to get there. Regardless of how long it takes you to go through this course, you will be building a solid foundation that will serve you well in all your future playing.

If you’ve already invested money into your guitar, isn’t it right to do the most you can, to get the most out of it? If so, there’s a second investment you need to make for that to happen: time.

If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

If you were take private guitar lessons from me, you’d find we jam out a lot of songs together. Why? Because that’s what music is all about! No one learns the guitar to play notes – they learn to play songs, and to make music. As such, I learned long ago that people learn quickest when they’re making music, and playing songs they like.

In The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar you’ll learn how to play eight different popular songs. I put a lot of thought into which songs I wanted to teach you, and each one is chosen specifically because I’ll use it to teach you some new thing on your guitar. At the end of the course, you will be able to play these songs on your own – and sound good doing it!

Everything you learn in this course will build on itself. Right after I teach you your first few chords, we’ll begin applying those to a song. We’ll start with a super simple strum pattern that you’ll be sure to grasp quickly. At the beginning, you won’t be able to play the songs properly right off the bat, but I will show you very simple ways of getting started, and then bit by bit we will add more chords, and then more complicated strums, until you’re finally able to master the song. Along the way, you’ll be truly learning what goes into each additional skill that I teach you.

These are the songs we’ll be learning:

Please note that no original tracks, lyrics, or complete written music are included. We’ll look at the songs in short chunks, and I’ll teach you an interpretation of it, and give you everything you need to put it all together on your own.

I’ve taught more than 5000 guitar players one-on-one over the last 40+ years, and during that time I’ve come across every kind of learning style imaginable. No student is exactly like another, and I’ve discovered that the best approach is to actually use multiple approaches. In one on one lessons, I always write out notes for my students, in addition to explaining and demonstrating. It is this combination of techniques that really helps people learn quickly and deeply.

I’ve applied that same approach to teaching in a course, as I would to my one-on-one students. In The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar you’ll get a complete 120+ page course book along with more than 17 hours of video instruction.

This book isn’t simply a collection of tabs to help with the video (like what most other video courses provide), but instead you’ll actually find the theory and concepts we talk about explained and even diagrammed in detail. Sure, I’ve included tabs for everything, but there’s so much more than that as well. If you follow along in the book as you go through the course, you’ll find it really complements and helps confirm the things you’re learning!

By being able to both read and hear what I’m teaching, I guarantee you will be able to learn the guitar much quicker than otherwise.

If you order the DVD version of the course, you’ll get a hardcopy of the book along with the DVDs. If you choose the download option instead, you’ll be able to download the PDF of the book and print it out yourself, or just use it on your computer.

If you’re left handed, you don’t have a thing to worry about – I’ve got you covered! Not being left handed myself, I can’t teach the entire course left handed, but I’ve taken the time to explain in there how you can easily make the necessary adjustments in your mind, so that you can take advantage of what I’m teaching you. Whenever there is something that impacts a leftie a bit differently, I’ll be sure to point that out.

One of only negatives of teaching via a prepared course in this way, is that I can’t actually see your hand, and therefore I can’t tell you specifically how to adjust it if you’re having problems. However, I’ve run into so many students over the years who play in different ways, I’m able to cover many of the problems in technique that you’re likely to encounter.

That’s why I’ve called this course the Definitive Guide… because it is so detailed, and nothing is left out!

The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar is 17 hours of video instruction – that’s 8 DVDs worth of hard-hitting content. Plus, don’t forget the 120 page book that comes with it! Below you’ll find a breakdown of the main points in each of the major sections of the course.

If you’re hesitant about purchasing online, that’s okay – I understand. In fact, that’s why I stand behind all my guitar lessons with a 100% Risk-Free “No Weasel Clauses” Satisfaction Guarantee.

My guarantee states that if for any reason you’re not completely satisfied with the guitar lesson, I’ll give you a complete refund within 60 days of purchase, with no hassles.

This completely eliminates the risk on your part – you’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain by trying The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar!

In this 8 DVD, 17 hour video course, The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar, you will gain:

The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar is a 17-hour lesson designed specifically for the beginner guitar player. We will cover every important aspect of playing the guitar, so that you develop a strong musical foundation that will enable you to grow far into the future. 

Are you ready to become a Riff Ninja like me, and take your guitar playing to levels that you never before dreamed possible?

Keep on Rockin’

PS: The Definitive Beginner’s Guide To Acoustic Guitar lesson will teach you how to play the guitar, from the ground up, the right way. This course is ideal for the pure beginner, as well as for frustrated players who have put down their guitar, for whatever reason.

PS. If for any reason you’re not satisfied, you’re protected by my 100% Risk-Free Satisfaction Guarantee for a full 60 days.

PS. Both the DVD and the Instant Access version include the same lesson material: the main video lesson, as well as the bonus book. The DVD version includes download access, with the additional convenience of having everything on DVD as well.