The Best Free Resources for Learning Guitar
Pictured: Marty Schwartz of Marty Music and James Levin of Elmore Pedal Co. Marty is hands down one of the best guitar instructors on YouTube, making learning fun, accessible, and inspiring for everyone from absolute beginners to seasoned players.
Learning guitar does not require a big budget. Between free YouTube channels, free chord and tab sites, and free tuner apps, a beginner can put together almost everything they need without spending anything beyond the cost of the guitar itself. The challenge is not a shortage of free material. It is sorting through an overwhelming amount of it to find the resources that are actually worth your time. Here are the ones that hold up.
Free structured courses
JustinGuitar
JustinGuitar.com offers a complete, structured beginner course for free, built around progressive stages rather than a scattered pile of individual videos. It is one of the most widely recommended free resources for new guitarists because it follows a defined curriculum from your very first chord through more advanced technique, which solves the biggest problem with learning from random videos: knowing what to learn next.
Free YouTube channels worth following
YouTube has thousands of guitar teachers, but a handful have built a reputation for clear, consistent lessons.
Marty Music
Run by guitarist Marty Schwartz, Marty Music has built a large following around approachable, song-based lessons that break down how to actually play familiar tunes, not just isolated exercises.
Andertons Music Co
Andertons is a family-run music store in Guildford, England with a YouTube channel that has grown to more than a million subscribers. Alongside gear demos, the channel features genuine playing tips and lessons from working musicians.
When you pick a channel to follow, look for the same things no matter who the teacher is: clear shots of both the fretting hand and picking hand, a logical lesson order, and slow demonstrations before full-speed playing. We cover this in more detail in how to learn guitar using YouTube.
Free chords and tabs
Ultimate Guitar
Ultimate Guitar is a long-running chords and tabs website and app with a huge, searchable library covering essentially any song you would want to learn. The app also includes a built-in player, tuner, and metronome, which means one free download covers several of the tools a beginner needs in a single place.
Free tuner and metronome apps
GuitarTuna
GuitarTuna, from Yousician, is a free tuner app with chord and tab libraries built in. It listens through your phone's microphone and shows you how close each string is to being in tune, which is a reliable way to tune up before a free lesson if you do not already have a clip-on tuner.
A dedicated clip-on tuner and metronome is still worth owning once you are past the very beginning, since it tunes faster and does not depend on your phone's microphone picking up the sound cleanly in a noisy room, but a free app is a perfectly good place to start.
Free tools built into the videos you are already watching
Some of the most useful free resources are not separate apps at all. YouTube has playback speed controls built in, so you can slow a lesson down to half speed or three quarters speed without changing its pitch, which is how most people actually learn a fast riff correctly. Many lessons are also broken into chapters, so you can jump straight to the section you are working on instead of scrubbing through the whole video, and you can save lessons you are following into your own playlist to keep track of what comes next. We go deeper on slowing lessons down in how to slow down guitar lessons without changing their pitch.
The one gap free resources do not fill
None of the free teachers, chord sites, or tuner apps above solve a problem that shows up in almost every practice session: reaching for your phone, trackpad, or remote to pause, rewind, or slow down the lesson you are following, then getting your hands back into playing position. Over a half-hour session, that adds up to a lot of lost repetition.
The Elmore Pedal is a wireless Bluetooth foot pedal built to solve exactly that. It pairs with iPad, iPhone, Mac, or PC and lets you play, pause, rewind, fast forward, slow down, and speed up any of the free lessons above with a tap of your toe, so your hands never leave the guitar. It is not a guitar effects pedal and it has no effect on your tone. It is simply a hands-free remote for whatever free lesson, chord site, or video you already have open.
Putting it together
A completely free starting setup looks something like this: JustinGuitar's beginner course for structure, Marty Music or Andertons for song-based lessons, Ultimate Guitar for chords and tabs, and GuitarTuna to keep your guitar in tune. Add a hands-free pedal once you are ready to stop interrupting your own repetition, and you have a practice setup that costs nothing beyond the guitar itself until you decide what is worth upgrading.
Frequently asked questions
Can I learn guitar completely for free?
Yes. Free resources such as JustinGuitar's structured course, YouTube channels like Marty Music and Andertons, and free apps like Ultimate Guitar and GuitarTuna cover nearly everything a beginner needs. Many guitarists have learned to a high level using free resources alone.
What is the best free website to learn guitar chords?
Ultimate Guitar has one of the largest free libraries of chords and tabs available, along with a built-in tuner and metronome in its app.
Do I need to pay for a tuner?
No. Free apps such as GuitarTuna work well for tuning using your phone's microphone. A dedicated clip-on tuner is a worthwhile upgrade later, but it is not required to get started.