Guitar Courses on Book and CD/Audio

There are countless guitar books out there and some are better than others (For electric guitar see the Rockschool books and for acoustic guitar, see the RGT Acoustic Guitar books). The limitations of guitar tablature in gaining a feel for the timing over which the notes should be played on your guitar (even when the musical notation appears above the tab) can be overcome by actually being able to hear how each of the bars should be played. Guitar courses in books and CD form can be a really powerful method of learning to play guitar. Once newbie guitarists get over their fear of guitar tab, this method can produce excellent results, which is why guitar magazines (most of which come packed with guitar tab and also a CD (and sometimes even a DVD) or online access to digital audio files) now employ a similar method.

Rockschool Guitar Courses

The Rockschool books are set out in a series of Grades (“debut” to Grade 8) in guitar or acoustic guitar flavours.

Discover More Here:

Rockschool Guitar Books – Grades Debut to 8
Rockschool Acoustic Books – Grades Debut to 8

Registry of Guitar Tutors Acoustic Guitar Course

The RGT Acoustic Guitar Playing series is another structured course produced by the Registry of Guitar Tutors and follows the guitar grades 1-8 as described for the Rockschool course above, but for acoustic guitar. The books are available from musicroom.com who have this to say about the course:

“This book is part of a series that forms an expertly structured and comprehensive method of studying acoustic guitar; it has been compiled by the Registry Of Guitar Tutors – the world’s leading authority on guitar education.”

Discover more about the books in this course here:

Registry of Guitar Tutors – Acoustic Guitar Grades

Learn Songs to Strum Along To

If you simply want to have the chords to let you strum along with many popular songs, then the Big Guitar Chord Songbook range is perfect for you. These books which cover most musical genres including classic rock, acoustic, blues, country and even Britpop as well as musical decades from the fifties through the nineties, to present day. Each book contains as many as 80 songs complete with chord boxes and lyrics. There are no CDs with these books so it helps if you own the songs already to let you hear how they sounded originally and perhaps play along with them.

For the new to intermediate guitarists, this series will teach how chord progressions are used in real songs and will teach many more chords in addition to those of the CAGED system described in the Guitar Basics of Guitar Savvy. The downside is that readers will have to work out for themselves how the finger positions in the chord changes should be made; I actually consider this to be a good thing because it encourages you guitar newbies to work out these things for yourself, which can only improve your fretboard knowledge and increase your chord arsenal.