You’ve decided to learn how to play guitar. Maybe you’re doing it to pursue your dreams of rock stardom or maybe you just want to have a new hobby. Strum a few chords by the campfire or melt faces at the local all-ages hardcore show. For those about to rock, we salute you with the best guitar books for beginners.
One of the very first things you will play is either an open C or open G in standard tuning. These are chords and serve as the very fundamental unit of song construction. Getting a new player up and running with a few chords they can strum is one of the first sign posts on the way to playing.
It’s pretty rewarding to get that G to ring out clearly. That said, the greatest guitar masters use moveable chord forms to construct thoughtful lead work and intricate guitar lines.
Simply put, intimate knowledge of all the chords will serve you at every point in your playing career. To that end, here are 500 chords across 253 pages in a sturdy little book that will lie flat on a table or music stand. I have it and consider it an invaluable resource. For even more, there’s the Guitar Chord Bible: 500 More Chords.
According to Wikipedia, a grimoire is a magical text that instructs the user “…how to perform magical spells, charms and divination, and how to invoke supernatural entities…” In order to summon your own supernatural creations, this guitar-focused text compiles a vast selection of exercises that will help you connect patterns across the entire guitar neck.
One of the tricky parts about teaching yourself to play is knowing what to focus on. As I said, I strongly encourage you to start by learning as many chords as possible because even tunefully outlining them through a progression will help you keep up in just about any setting. But that’s a pretty broad ask.
This book is laser-focused on what modern guitarists need to know to best express themselves. Each of the 200 exercises comes with an audio track to help you learn how to listen, too. Though there are no shortcuts to greatness, consider this a quick-start guide that will help you know where to look.
If you’ve ever stepped foot into a music store, you’ve seen a Hal Leonard book. They’re iconic in the annals of guitar-learning lore. They’re not the hippest or the most accessible, but they nevertheless remain key fixtures. This compendium combines the three books of the method into one.
Just about everything you need to know is in here somewhere, though it’s commonly said that an instructor is needed to parse the flow of information. Still, it’s a great reference and if it makes sense to you out of the gate, there’s the potential to learn a lot from this classic tome.
If the Complete Technique book is good for quick starts, this would be the bullet train. Another Hal Leonard selection, this is a trim 48 pages for teaching you how to hold a guitar for the first time. Tuning up, easy chords, and strumming.
If you got a guitar on Friday, use this to put together your first three-chord jam by Monday. Will it sound good? No, no, it will not. But you’ll have started, which is key. Some of the other books on this list are dense with both concepts and pages, which might delay your starting. Don’t let that happen.
Establishing a guitar school in New York requires competing with the highest concentration of possible distractions. This book follows a step-by-step method for identifying the essentials, but also details practice plans and highlights how to practice.
Everyone will keep shouting about how you’ll need to practice hours upon hours a day to become even a serviceable guitarist, but advice on just how will be scarce. I took lessons for years and even I don’t remember how my teacher told me to practice.
This book will lead you through a progression from the absolute basics to complicated song construction. My only quibble with this book is that it suggests that A minor is the saddest chord, when it is, in fact, D minor.
While the books above will pretty much translate to any style, I can’t help but be biased toward rock electric guitar, since that’s what I’ve played for half my life. Usually that means riffing with the help of a pick. Learning how to fingerpick will serve you well, far outstripping the relatively pedestrian world of flatpicking.
Whether you use it to move on to fingerstyle guitar or integrate it into a hybrid technique, mastering the right hand in this finite way will make you a better player. In addition to the progressive book, you can download the song samples, which are enriched with the ability to slow them down, change keys, and set looping points to help you master parts one at at time.
I keep coming back to this point because it’s absolutely essential: learn how to solo over chords. I don’t mean simple chord arpeggiating, even though that has its place, too. If you can follow the chord changes with smooth, soulful playing, you will never be fenced in. You can drop into any style, any band, and any situation.
Most of us get stuck playing a given scale pattern for years before something shakes us up. Make this the foundation of your learning with this book.
It’s yet another Hal Leonard book (that guy really wanted you to learn to play), with the same audio perks as the guide above. This guide is perhaps a little over the head of most beginners, but if you grapple with it early, the rewards could be considerable. Fourteen scales across 96 pages means this isn’t an enormous volume of information to digest, so give it a whirl.
Playing guitar is an exercise in memorization. There’s really no way around it. You have to remember stuff, and the primary thing you have to remember is where notes are on the fretboard.
Eventually, muscle and ear memory will kick in and the remembering will get easier, but for the first little while, every time you play guitar, it’s like a pop quiz. It’s not fun to memorize something by brute force, but it pays dividends.
This book teaches you how to visualize the notes, which will lead quickly to remembering them. Once you know where the notes are, forming chords becomes easier, which leads to fluid playing in any position. At the very least, if you can identify your root notes, you can bail yourself out of trouble at any time. That skill for resolution serves you in improvisation and the random jams that will provide much of your growth.
When in doubt, reach for the Dummies guide. These standardized, annotated guides have taught countless people to do countless things that were once over their respective heads.
Like the Hal Leonard complete guide above, this massive, 648 page door stop includes six different sub-books, including three basics volumes and three genre-specific guides. It’s the everything-to-everyone approach. It might be overwhelming, but at least you’ll have everything you need in one place.
One of the hardest parts of learning guitar is knowing what to know. Music theory is a massive subject that you could make the focus of your whole life, but that won’t help you if you never learn how to play.
This book breaks the essentials down into 12 chapters, relating them directly to guitar and allowing you to understand your favorite songs faster and even start writing some of your own with confidence. In 107 pages, you’ll get the basics about why certain chords sound good when strung together and how to accompany them. The sooner you get these basics down, the easier playing will be, which will in turn make practice easier.
Virtually all guitar playing relies on moveable chord forms and scales which require you to know where the relevant notes are for each key. Most guitar teachers will start with chord forms so you can learn the basics of posture and still play something that sounds good. However, you can take the opposite approach and fast-track learning where every note on the fretboard is first, applying the forms you’ll learn later.
When you know where your target fret is, you can easily move through searing solos that link various scale positions all along the neck. Over the course of a very digestible 56 pages, you’ll learn tips and tricks for committing these notes to memory very quickly and in the process end up knowing more about the fretboard than a lot of seasoned professionals.
Muscle memory makes up a huge amount of guitar playing and a great deal of that is proper conditioning. You’ll need to be able to stretch and change positions with absolute economy of motion to be your best at the guitar.
Since you’ll never, ever reach a place with your playing where you won’t need to practice to stay sharp, this book will start life with you as a teaching guide, walking you through 52 weeks of daily exercises. Then, it will become a handy reference you can pull out when you’re not sure what exercise to do that day. This will pay dividends for hand strength, speed, and overall dexerity, all of which form the basis of technique.
Obviously, it’s in no way required to learn how to read music to play guitar. Eddie Van Halen never did and it worked out okay for him. Still, if you want to unlock much of music theory, dig into your favorite songs, and fully understand your instrument, it’s a pretty good idea.
This book focuses on teaching guitar players how to read music in standard guitar notation, which can in turn help you understand why you’re playing what you’re playing and help you write songs of your own. When you learn how to sight read music, practice will become easier and more fun, since you can pick up any book of sheet music and play a tune you know and love within minutes.
Take it from me, a guy who partially learned how to play guitar on bowing late-70s Sigma: learning how to play on a guitar in poor repair is very frustrating. At first, you absolutely want the experts to take care of it for you, but a setup costs about $50 and will eventually get annoying to pay for.
This book will teach you everything you need to know about guitar maintenance and repair over 366 pages. Taking weeks off of practice because your guitar is acting up could be detrimental to your progress, so use this book to fix it quickly and get back to playing.
And yes, eventually you can use it to fuss over putting new Lollar pickups in that old Strat copy.
