Top Guitar Books for Beginners and Beyond in 2022 appeared first on TheGuitarLesson.com, a site filled with unconfined online guitar lessons for beginners.
Learning to play the guitar from beginner guitar books is still huge in 2022, despite the availability of the increasingly modern form of learning guitar, online video tutorials.
The "learn guitar books" (both sensory and electric) are here to stay since thousands of guitar lesson books are stuff sold every day.
For this reason, I thought I would buy, read, review and compare a couple of these books and see how they perform.
The ones I ordered were not at random but rather chosen from the top seller lists of online bookstores.
This ways that these sought-after books should be the weightier beginner guitar books out there...
Or the ones with the weightier marketing ????
I am a guitar teacher of 20 years and a tech junkie, and I prefer to steer people towards online video lessons. I believe that with the multimedia technologies of the 21st century, video guitar lessons are the most efficient way of teaching yourself guitar. I'll add some recommendations for video lessons after the typesetting reviews, in specimen you want to see that side of learning guitar as well.
Best beginner guitar books in 2022
Now the moment you've been waiting for, here are my reviews of the most popular guitar learning books.
I will requite you my recommendations on which ones are weightier afterward.
Guitar Exercises for Beginners: 10x Your Guitar Skills in 10 Minutes a Day by Guitar Head
One of the biggest challenges newbie guitar players are tasked with is practicing on their own. The problem is that they don't know what & how to practice, so they end up doodling around, playing things they once know, or just not practicing enough.
This is why I like the Guitar Exercises for Beginners book. It provides an wordplay to this problem and guides beginners in the right direction.
The typesetting presents 100 exercises all beginner guitar players need to work on to whop their guitar technique. The exercises start from the early beginner level and increase in difficulty naturally, just as a beginner player gets better, day-by-day. The tragedian does a good job in explaining the right and wrong ways to practice, and how long each exercise should be carried out.
Each exercise is misogynist as an audio file on theguitarhead.com, so you can hear what you are supposed to play. I think this is very important for learning music and is a must-have full-length of any serious guitar typesetting in 2022.
This exercise typesetting has very good reviews on Amazon. It has a 4.5 star stereotype rating from the 1,100 people that rated it. 89% of customers gave it 4 or 5 stars.
I recommend this typesetting as a complimentary daily exercise book to alimony your practice sessions regular and efficient as you learn to play. It is well-nigh 140 pages long, and by the end of it, you will have a solid grasp of the nuts of playing guitar.
Here are a few pages from the paperback version of this book:
Guitar for Dummies by Mark Phillips and Jon Chappell
The 4th edition of Guitar for Dummies (released fresh for 2016) is an scrutinizingly 400-page monster that will surely have you lighting your guitar steamed surpassing finishing the typesetting ????
With this new edition, they scrapped the DVD from the previous version, and introduced online video and audio clips, as a supplement to the book's teachings. They didn't take it overboard though, with just 85 videos and 95 audio tracks, but at least it's a step in the right direction. You can't learn music by just reading well-nigh it, you need well-marked tools.
Reading through the Guitar for Dummies book, it is unveiled that unlike the Teach Yourself to Play Guitar typesetting above, this one is not meant solely for beginners. It has lots of info and theory, that would be useful for the intermediate-level guitarist. Beyond teaching the basics, this typesetting goes into the particulars of variegated genres as well.
Having been just released, this new edition doesn't have any reviews yet at the time of this writing. The previous 3rd edition had 79% 4 and 5-star reviews from customers. All in all, if you want to stick with learning from a guitar book, this would be my recommendation.
Here are a few pages from this typesetting as well:
Teach Yourself to Play Guitar: A Quick and Easy Introduction for Beginners
This paperback is the best selling learn guitar typesetting on Amazon.com, selling for just unelevated $6 at the moment. It does not include a CD or any form of multimedia.
It is a very short typesetting of only 47 pages, and it covers the very nuts of what you would need to learn to start playing guitar. Sort of like a hit-and-run guitar primer.
You could say that the typesetting does what it promises, presents the beginner guitarist with an introduction to the guitar. It is aimed at well-constructed beginners and stops at the beginner level. It does not include any plane remotely ramified theoretical lessons.
The typesetting has plenty of diagrams, which will be helpful to beginners. I won't go into detail on the word-for-word contents of the book, you can see that in the table of contents in the picture gallery below.
The reviews by other readers are often positive, with 78% of readers giving it 4 or 5 stars.
After reading through Teach Yourself to Play Guitar, my opinion is that if you are giving a guitar as a souvenir to someone, this might be an OK book to trailblaze that. If you wanted to spend a bit more, or are looking for a typesetting for yourself, I would go with the 2nd typesetting reviewed below, the Guitar for Dummies book. It has online video and audio demos, and hearing what you should be playing helps when learning music... ????
Here are a few pages from this book:
Hal Leonard Guitar Method by Will Schmid and Greg Koch
This is probably the most famous of all of the guitar learning books and comes with a price tag of virtually $13 right now.
This Hal Leonard guitar typesetting is unquestionably a series of 3 books, each virtually 50 pages, and it comes with 3 supplemental CDs which you can refer to during the chapters. I would recommend this typesetting to younger students (under 20). It is ultra simplistic, which can be nice in some instances, but a bit boring in others.
It moreover has an overwhelming value of sheet music in it. These music sheets indulge you to practice what is stuff taught in the given chapter, which is nice, but going through the books, I felt there was a lot left unexplained. This was probably a result of them trying to simplify things as much as possible, but this unquestionably leaves holes in the padawan guitarist's knowledge.
Another negative I found was that this typesetting focuses increasingly on traditional music notation, and places guitar tablature into the background. As a guitar teacher, I believe that tabs are the next weightier thing to sliced specie since it makes learning much easier for beginner guitarists. And since learning the guitar is hard, anything that makes it simpler is increasingly than welcome. On the other hand, if you want to learn to read standard music notation, this will be the way to go for you.
The lesson curriculum is not really my style, but all teachers vary. It focuses too soon on too much theory, and I believe in getting my students playing and having fun, thereby develop a love for the instrument quickly, rather than indulging in theoretical studies.
This book has really good reviews, with a whopping 90% of them 4 or 5 stars. Wow!
Here are a few pages from the Hal Leonard book:
How to Play the Guitar by Roger Evans
This typesetting was first published in the 1990s and used to be one of the most popular learn guitar books. It is selling for virtually $10 at the moment.
It does not include a CD or any form of multimedia, which is a major turnoff. It moreover has way too much text and not unbearable graphics. Because of these factors, I do not recommend this typesetting at all.
It focuses on sensory guitar, so those of you specifically looking to learn the electric, will need to alimony on looking.
There is a lot of info in the typesetting though, it covers pretty much every detail of what a guitar student will be looking for (how to buy a guitar, fundamental guitar techniques, music theory basics).
The structure of the lessons is good, it varies between guitar technical stuff and theory as you progress, meaning that you won't get bored of any single topic, and you'll have a endangerment to try out the theoretical shit one step at a time. It's a shame they never made newer editions of this typesetting with increasingly graphics and supplemental audio-video tools.
The written reviews are pretty positive as well, with 85% of readers giving it 4 or 5 stars.
Reading the written reviews of this beginner's guitar book, I get the impression that most people who wrote the reviews are not too far withal in the typesetting though. Here is one of the most useful reviews:
...At the end of reading I knew a little bit well-nigh a lot of variegated guitar techniques, but I certainly didn't finger like I knew everything I needed to play guitar well.
I would recommend spending the money on some lessons, when I finally tapped lanugo and started taking lessons, I learned increasingly in a week then I did from reading the whole book...
And finally, here are a few pages from the Roger Evans typesetting as well:
Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson
Guitar Aerobics was first published in 2007. It is a unique kind of guitar book, as it gives you 1 exercise to siphon out every single day of the year. The exercises start out with vital drills and progress into harder licks.
What kind of exercises can you expect? Each day of the week, you get a variegated type of exercise to alimony things varied and interesting: Monday: Alternate picking, Tuesday: String skipping, Wednesday: String bending, Thursday: Arpeggios, Friday: Sweep picking, Saturday: Legato, Sunday: Rhythm.
This typesetting isn't specifically for beginner guitar players, as it isn't a coursebook. Nevertheless, it makes for a great supplementary book to a beginner's guitar studies.
The exercises in Guitar Aerobics start out with beginner drills, and progress to harder and harder licks without a few hundred days ???? Yes, a few hundred days. Remember, the typesetting provides 1 exercise a day. It pushed your limits each and every day in victual steps, and without 365 days, you will definitely be a largest guitar player than you are today.
You have to spend time with each exercise though, you can't just rush through things. You won't be worldly-wise to play all of the exercises up to speed on day 1, so you should revisit them then and then until you get them perfected.
The typesetting urges you to use the metronome and increase your BPM as you can.
The reason I like the concept overdue this guitar typesetting is that it forces the student to pick up the guitar every single day. The only way to progress at the guitar is to practice regularly, and by its nature, this 1 exercise per day typesetting sets out to do just that.
The typesetting has an audio file for each exercise, as well as valuables tracks to play withal with. These can be accessed through the Hal Leonard publishing company's website.
Customer reviews of this typesetting are overwhelmingly positive, with an average 4.2-star rating without hundreds of reviews.
If you're interested in seeing a few pages of the Guitar Aerobics book, here you go:
Music Theory for Guitarists by Tom Kolb
If you've been learning to play guitar for a while, you will have undoubtedly heard references to music theory shit that you didn't understand.
This is a typesetting meant to fill these holes in your knowledge. The full title is Music Theory for Guitarists: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask, by the way, it was originally published in 2005.
Learning music theory is not important for beginner guitarists, but without reaching an intermediate level, learning well-nigh music theory really helps in putting it all together. It covers pretty much everything a guitarist needs to know with respect to music theory.
The typesetting starts out with the fretboard, key signatures, intervals, and continues on to teach well-nigh scales, chords construction, key centers. Towards the end, it teaches modes and modal harmony, chord substitution, and reharmonization as well.
What I really liked well-nigh the typesetting is that it has quizzes to get you to test your knowledge. Also, there are well-nigh 100 audio tracks demonstrating what is stuff taught, which is very important in learning music.
After garnering hundreds of reviews, it scores an stereotype of 4.3 stars, which is impressive from a typesetting well-nigh theory. Other books tent the subject don't score so upper since music theory is sometimes presented in a wearisome tone.
If you think you are ready to swoop into the world of guitar theory, here are a few pages from Music Theory for Guitarists:
Teach Yourself Visually by Charles Kim
This typesetting is not one of the most popular ones on Amazon, but I wanted to include it in this list of the weightier guitar books considering it is one of the largest ones out there.
This one is sort of like the Guitar for Dummies book. It touches on just well-nigh everything guitar-related, from vital chords and techniques, all the way to how to purchase an amp. The tragedian wanted to squeeze every bit of info into this book, so some chapters are a bit short.
The newest edition of Teach Yourself Visually moreover includes a CD with 100 tracks. This, of course, doesn't really cut it nowadays, when everything is online. I don't plane have a CD player anymore...
This is a nice typesetting to have on your shelf, in specimen you need to refer to something quickly. It's not suitable for outright learning guitar as a sole resource though.
Customer reviews of this typesetting are positive, with an average 4-star rating.
Here are a few pages from the Teach Yourself Visually Book, but if you hop over to Amazon, you can view many increasingly pages from the book:
What should be covered by a guitar typesetting for beginners?
During my 15 years of teaching private students, I've ripened a very specific program that I teach to people who are new to the guitar.
I've found through trial and error that this works in familiarizing my students thoroughly with the guitar and keeps them motivated at the same time.
If you are a beginner, here are the subjects you should be looking for when choosing a guitar book:
- General guitar torso (acoustic vs electric, parts of the guitar, strings, tuning)
- Holding the guitar properly
- First simple 3 string chords and simple strumming
- Simple yet popular songs to strum
- Simple melodies of famous songs on 2 strings, then 4 strings, then 6 strings
- Full beginner chords (A, Am, C, D, E, Em, F, G)
- Chord waffly through learning songs
- Keys & why specific chords sound good in a chord progression
- More songs
Additionally, there are a few things I focus on with my students:
- Emphasis on learning real songs as soon as possible
- Sprinkling in light guitar music theory when applicable
- Practicing rhythm and timing
So this is the subject matter that should be covered by a typesetting written for beginner guitarists.
If a beginner typesetting doesn't imbricate these subjects, then it will leave gaps in your knowledge, or not offer unbearable motivation to alimony on practicing.
If the typesetting has increasingly subjects, that's great, it ways that it was written not just for beginners, increasingly wide guitarists as well.
If you are looking for a guitar teaching typesetting aimed at children, the ones on this list will not do. Here is a good post on guitar books for kids though: https://guitareuroshop.com/lesson-reviews/guitar-books-for-kids/
My conclusion without reading the top guitar books
In conclusion, after reviewing the most popular beginner guitar books on the internet, I still think the book should be the supplement to learning guitar, with the primary learning tool stuff video lessons.
The world has evolved, and there are better, easier, beginner-friendly methods nowadays, which are much increasingly suitable for learning music. Without all, music is an well-marked art, you need to hear it. And seeing the teacher's hands move withal the guitar is nice as well ????
Of course, you will have to read at some points of your guitar studies (ie.: guitar theory, modal studies, etc.), but that's not beginner stuff anymore. That's why it's nice to have a typesetting as well, to be worldly-wise to read up on the details of something you're interested in.
I recommend the Guitar for Dummies typesetting for this since it holds a lot of valuable info.
As a complementary book, Guitar Exercises for Beginners is a good daily exercise typesetting for beginners, that pairs well with an online guitar undertow or private lessons.
Also, the Guitar Aerobics typesetting can be useful in a similar way to intermediate players.
If you want me to make a video review of these guitar books as well, let me know in the comments section below.
Recommended video lessons
Before ownership a guitar book, I would wholeheartedly recommend that you squint at some video guitar lessons first. It makes things so much easier than learning from books.
The 2 biggest sites offering high-quality, well-structured video guitar courses are:
They are very similar, but I recorded a video comparing the two sites, trammels it out if you are considering video lessons.
