In addition to our own staff instructors, we also added several total beginners to our review panel in order to get both teacher and student perspectives on the quality of these courses.

Here is a quick summary of our findings, as well as links to the full reviews.  We've also condensed everything into a course comparison chart to help simplify things even further.  Best wishes with your studies, and we hope this helps! 

Learn & Master Guitar is the high end of guitar training courses.  Honestly, if you are serious about learning to play guitar and you don't have access to a private instructor, this would be the next best thing.  The material is presented on ten DVDs, five play-along CDs, and a rather detailed lesson book.  It's easy to follow and guides students from the very basics all the way through advanced techniques for playing guitar in a variety of genres.

Rating:  Five Stars 
Read our Complete Review       

There are a lot of new "e-courses" coming out that attempt to allow you to take guitar lessons from your computer.  The majority of "e-courses" we tested were pretty much worthless, but Jamorama was a notable exception.  The instruction was at least decent, and the price is low.  It still requires that you practice your guitar in front of a computer every day, however, which our testers found to be awkward and cumbersome.  However, if Learn & Master Guitar is out of your price range, and you don't mind practicing along with a computer, Jamorama may be worth looking at.

Rating:  Three & Half Stars 
Complete Review 

Guitar Tutor Pro is another downloadable "e-course."  We did not like it as much as Jamorama, particularly because it didn't include any video clips, which we considered a major downside.  It's very inexpensive, however, so it may be worth looking at if you're on an extremely limited budget.

Rating:  Two & Half Stars 
Full Review 

As teachers, we did not like this product at all, but several of our student testers did, so it only seemed fair to mention it.  It's not really a guitar training course, per se, as it does not teach the fundamentals of playing guitar at all.  Instead it simply shows you precisely how to play fifty songs from their list in a straight forward, paint-by-numbers kind of approach.

Rating:  Two Stars 
Full Review 

How to Play Guitar by Roger Evans is a traditional-style guitar instruction book.  Obviously, it does not have the advantage of using audio and video examples, but if you prefer to learn from a book, this is one of our favorites (although there are many good ones available).  The educational quality is first class and there are plenty of good pictures and diagrams to help explain things.  You can find the book just about anywhere, but we recommend Amazon.com.

Rating:  Three Stars