When you decide that you want to learn to play guitar you are starting out on a journey. Every day you need to continue and you need to be able to practice and experiment without the help of a teacher who is being paid to keep you on track, correct your mistakes and reassure you when you are feeling like you are getting nowhere in your guitar playing. So you need some tools that you can get from the internet for free and you need to remember to use these tools, otherwise you will find your guitar playing getting stale or stopping altogether.Let’s start with the next best thing to having a teacher helping you. Guitar forums. There are lots of them on the net, some specializing in particular guitar playing styles, some with boards for focusing on aspects of guitar that need special attention. The members of guitar forums are a mix of newbies and seasoned guitarists. They all have one thing in common in that they have been where you are now. They know the difficulties of learning the basics of guitar and they are more than willing to help new guitarists get over the first bumps on the road.

Forums are driven by member participation, so once you join, you will find that there is a place for newcomers to introduce themselves. You would usually go to that thread and write a little about yourself and then visit the other threads to see what the forum has to offer you.

The next thing you need to do is find yourself some videos to watch on sites like YouTube. To take advantage of the enormous number of guitar video lessons available for free on the internet, you need to be very focused on what style of music you want to play. Have a list of songs and start looking for videos that teach you to play them. As you go along you will also get to know the names of some guitar playing techniques that you need to learn and you should look for video lessons on these. There is no guitar technique that is really hard to learn; they all just take practice. The thing is though, explaining how to do them is not too easy. With learning to play guitar a video is worth a thousand words.

As you get to become clear on what kind of guitar music you want to play, you can do internet searches for tabs and chords for your favorite songs. There are many sites that archive free guitar tabs and you will have no trouble finding and downloading the material you need to get you started on playing. One thing to remember is that sometimes when a guitarist posts a video on YouTube he will provide a link to his own site where he has made tabs available for you, so check out the info printed alongside the video.

The rest of the tools you need are bits of software that are essential for helping you learn to play guitar. You can get free metronomes and guitar tuners from the internet. You just download them for free and install them. If you do a search for them the first results you get are usually the big software download sites, so you should have no problems with viruses or spyware. There are also guitar tab editors that you can get for free or on a trial basis. Some of the trials are unlimited timewise but some of the features are disabled.

Tab editors enable you to read the tabs and hear the tablature as MIDI files. GuitarPro is a good one that is free and you will find many GuitarPro files for songs and instrumental pieces in all guitar genres.