Course: A beginner’s guide to learning guitar

This free course takes you from never having held a guitar to playing your first songs, in about twelve weeks of short, regular practice. It’s for complete beginners and for anyone in their first three months who wants a clear path.

You’ll learn the parts of the guitar, how to tune it, how to read chord boxes and tab, your first nine chords, how to strum in time, a little music reading and the major scale. Then you’ll put it together in four songs: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Ode to Joy, The Hanging Tree and a simplified Moonlight Sonata.

Each lesson has a short video from a teacher we trust, our own diagrams, and practice tools you can use right in the page: a tuner, a metronome, playable chord boxes, a strumming trainer, a chord-change timer and a tab player. Short quizzes check you’re ready to move on, and you’ll get a certificate at the end.

What you need

• Any guitar: acoustic, classical or electric (with an amplifier or headphones).
• A few medium picks (0.6 to 0.8 mm).
• 15 to 20 minutes a day. Little and often beats one long session a week.