Back when I started playing guitar there weren’t that many places you could look for guitar resources. You could either find a local teacher, teach yourself from books and magazines, work it all out by ear, or get together with friends and put your heads together. The beginning guitarist in digital age, however, is truly overwhelmed with options and resources. This is a double-edged sword as on the one hand you have all the resources you could dream of at your fingertips, and on the other hand, there are so many options that you really don’t know where to start. Don’t worry though, there are some great beginner guitar courses on the Udemy platform, and best of all they’re free! Let’s check them out.
If you haven’t taken a course on Udemy before, it’s basically a platform that combines all types of media such as video, documents and audio tracks into a seamless course lead by an instructor that you can take at your own pace; and it certainly beats trawling YouTube for tidbits of relevant information. Many of the instructors featured here have some excellent paid courses which you can check out here, but here are their free ones especially for beginners.
1. The Total Beginner’s Guitar Course
Michael Palmisano is a GIT graduate and has spent the last 15 years as a working musician, teaching over 50,000 students both on and offline. This free course is geared towards people who have either never played or haven’t picked it up in a long time and covers all the basics from buying your first guitar and tuning it, your first chords, strumming and power chords, right up to basic rock techniques and even some music theory. Rated 4.5 out of 5 with over 7,000 students enrolled. Check out the course here.
2. Free Beginner Electric Guitar Lessons
If you’ve just bought yourself an electric guitar, then this course by Chris Liepe covers your first chords, reading tab, the dreaded barre chords, an intro to scales, strumming, intervals and triads and much more. This course sets you up nicely for rock and blues electric playing and contains an amazing 90 lessons, which is an incredible amount of quality content for the price of FREE! The course has a 4.5 rating with almost 100,000 students enrolled. Check it out here.
3. Getting Started with Playing Guitar
This course, by Erich Andreas, provides a great overview for anyone starting out on guitar. While it’s not as in-depth as some of the previous courses, you may like Erich’s approach which concentrates on getting off on the right foot and establishing a firm method for understanding music. The course has a 4.4 rating with over 43,000 students enrolled. Check it out here.
4. Acoustic Guitar Basics
If you’ve chosen to concentrate on the acoustic guitar rather than its electric counterpart, you’ll enjoy Acoustic Guitar Basics as it’s aimed at getting you strumming, playing popular songs, reading chord diagrams and using a capo. The course instructor is multi-instrumentalist and fully-qualified music teacher Francis Long. The course has a 4.2 rating with over 13,000 students enrolled. Check it out here.
5. Guitar Crash Course (No Experience Necessary)
This course does kind of throw you in at the deep end, but this works for some people, and if you’re thinking of making a serious hobby or career out of playing guitar, you should probably get used to it from the outset. What I like about this course is that it teaches you to read sheet music as oppose to tab, the importance of training your ear, learning to express yourself as well as how to accompany other musicians. This is a great course and packs in a lot of useful information, especially for anyone who’s planning to be in it for the long-run. Check it out here.
What you have here are five different approaches to starting out on guitar, and the great thing is that all the courses are FREE, so you can find out what works for you without wasting too much time or money.
