Surf and strum: learning guitar on the Web

By CNN Interactive Associate Producer Jenna Milly

(CNN) -- If you can click a mouse, you can strum a guitar. Learning to play a musical instrument without a teacher comes easy on the Internet, where self-taught guitar students can follow a string of information on beginning lessons, learning major chords and scales, finding notes for songs and playing in different mediums. I am living proof that you can learn how to strum a tune with the help of these online tutorials.

Picking through the Web: novice lessons abound

Guitar Lessons Online is a practical beginners' guide for those who want to learn acoustic guitar, but know little or nothing about music or technical terms. This self-teach lesson guide explains elementary guitar, basic chords and finger placement in six short lessons.

Lesson One invites beginners with, "As you can see, a guitar has 6 strings." For those students unfamiliar with reading tablature (musical notation for stringed instruments) or understanding scales, this site approaches the art of learning elementary guitar with creative style and wit.

Fine tuning: intermediate players learn theory

Although many people can teach themselves guitar by strumming along with songs on the radio, learning theory can help students understand the fundamentals of music. Music 101 -- Guitar teaches beginning guitar with an intense focus on vocabulary and theory.

For example, this site teaches the chromatic scale, helping students familiarize themselves with terms like half step, octave, sharp and flat. A detailed lesson guide with diagrams and graphics is also useful for those who are easily confused by tricky finger placement and advanced chords. The handy javascript fretboard is a search engine that can identify notes based on finger positions -- great for those "how do I play that?" questions.

Smoking fingers: challenges for advanced students

The monthly magazine, Guitar Player Online, has a lesson section including different sessions, reviews and notational symbols. Learning notational symbols can be beneficial for advanced students interested in reading sheet music for classical guitar. This site also offers easy access to a long list of archived lessons written by experienced virtuosos. Some of the instructions include sound files, and the lessons are marked in both tablature and traditional notation.

Another more advanced search for chords can be found at Guitar Haven Online. This site has a search engine called "chord finder," which displays the schematics for each selected chord using detailed tablature graphics. The Guitar Haven lesson page offers instruction in picking and strumming, playing the blues, coordinating right- and left-hand techniques and mastering polychords and pentatonic patterns.

Song search: finding favorites tunes

Olga Net, which stands for On-Line Guitar Archive, is a massive database that purports to have 30,000 songs on file. It would take a lifetime to learn every song at this site, but first you must learn how to read tablature, the most common form of guitar music on the Web. The Olga.net's guide to reading tablature is a lengthy and thorough explanation of this technique.

Another search engine includes The Music Database, which offers individual musician and title searches. Guitar dot Net has an extensive chord archive accompanied by musical anecdotes and spoofed chord history. For the more physically expressive player, Punk Guitar Archive posts tablature for punk, ska and hard-core music lovers.

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