Unlike YouTube videos, guitar books generally follow a logical and complete course of instruction so that one chapter builds on the next.
This is powerful. It makes you learn in a faster and more robust way.
So having one or more of our favourite books below will enable you to build your abilities methodically and also jump straight to the skills that inspired you to pick up the guitar in the first place.
Six of the best guitar methods have been reviewed here for you, and which one you choose depends on how you are most comfortable learning.
Four of the guitar books for beginners in this article contain excellent reference materials, so you can look things up as you need them, and they can also help you structure your practice.
Ok let’s dive into the list!
The Hal Leonard method has been around for years, and it is one of the most popular guitar books for beginners.
With or without an instructor, you can use this book as an absolute beginner. It includes access to online audio, so you can check your progress as you go along.
What’s included?
After introducing basic guitar anatomy, this book introduces chords in usable sequences, so that after learning the first two chords, you can begin playing songs.
The book also covers rhythm in greater detail than some of the other recommended guitar books for beginners. Rhythm is a notoriously difficult musical concept to learn from scratch, and this book will help you to read and play rhythmic notation.
So there’s lots of positives here, but some negatives for new musicians. That doesn’t mean you can’t persevere, however!
Horrible title, great book. This is one of the best guitar books for beginners because although it is a complete reference guide to the guitar, it goes through learning the material in a sequence that results in a satisfying playing experience as the first goal.
Teach Yourself Visually Guitar is both a step-by-step guide to playing acoustic or electric guitar and an accessible reference guide. The current edition comes with an audio CD, but the next edition of the book will have online audio.
This book contains extensive photos and graphics, modeling everything you need to know in order to play, as well as a chord glossary.
Teach Yourself Visually Guitar stands out as a guitar book for beginners because after introducing guitar selection, tuning, and posture, it shows you three easy essential chords that work together in songs.
This allows you to pick up your guitar and begin strumming right away.
The book follows up the practical information with the underlying music theory, so that you can go through it multiple times to deepen your understanding of how music works.
✅ Stop struggling. Start making music.
✅ Learn beginner-friendly versions of every chord .
This is our most popular guide and it will improve your chord ability quickly! 😎
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Guitar All-In-One for Dummies is a compendium of the “Guitar for Dummies” series and will keep you busy pursuing your musical interests for a long time.
This book is accompanied by online video and audio, so once you find what you are interested in learning, there is plenty of extra material to support your practice.
What sets this book apart from the others is its sheer size. It has information you need whether you have not yet bought a guitar or you have been playing for some time and need to reach your next level of playing.
This book appeals to the beginning guitarist who wants to try everything – blues, rock, classical, and even a little bit of jazz. There are complete chapters on techniques and tones for each different style.
Although the amount of content in this book is staggering, it is presented with the basics first and will help you find your direction on the guitar.
The opposite of Guitar All-In-One for Dummies is ‘Teach Yourself to Play Guitar: A Quick and Easy Introduction for Beginners’.
This book is geared specifically toward the absolute guitar beginner with no prior musical experience, so you can pick it up at the same time as your guitar.
‘Teach Yourself to Play Guitar’ contains no supplementary audio and relies on text explanations of photos and graphics to get you started.
As one Amazon reviewer said, if you know nothing about guitars, this is the book for you. It will not be the last guitar book for beginners that you read, but it’s a good choice as the first.
What sets ‘Teach Yourself Guitar: A Quick and Easy Introduction for Beginners’ apart from all the other books is its concise presentation of the minimum amount of information you need to pick up a guitar and begin playing.
This book is a more expansive guide to guitar for the absolute beginner than ‘Teach Yourself Guitar’, and a good read.
There is no accompanying online audio; however, readers are directed to a YouTube channel for video of the lessons in the book.
‘Guitar for Absolute Beginners’ stands out from the rest of the books in this article for the quality of its writing. It is engaging and inspirational, and the descriptions are encouraging and easy to use.
Each chapter of the book simulates a lesson plan, including anecdotes and clear instructions on what to do with your guitar, and reading it feels like sitting in a guitar class with a thoughtful and funny teacher.
This is the guitar book for beginners who would like to follow a book from start to finish and accomplish the lessons in the book as you go along. There is also a second book in the series ready for you when you would like to progress further.
‘The Idiot’s Guides: Playing Guitar’ is a thorough guitar book for beginners, with plenty of information about the instrument as well as how to play it.
The book has accompanying online audio, and as with some of the other books in this article, it has symbols placed where the audio materials are available.
Idiot’s Guides are known for presenting material to absolute beginners in a friendly and accessible way, which a surprising number of beginner books fail to do.
As a guitar book for beginners this stands out from the rest when it comes to teaching rhythm.
Any musician in any of your future bands will tell you that rhythm is the most important thing, and the ‘Idiot’s Guides: Playing Guitar’ has you covered. It is emphasized early and often.
Like ‘Teach Yourself Guitar’ and ‘Guitar for Absolute Beginners’, this book does not take you beyond the beginning phase of playing guitar, allowing you to learn skills in an easy sequence.
It does, however, have plenty of material in the back for additional techniques and music theory.
‘Guitar Aerobics’ is not a complete guitar method, but it’s a very useful and friendly practice companion.
The accompanying audio serves as a metronome to help you develop your rhythm skills as well as demonstrating the daily exercise.
When assessing guitar books for beginners, we like to think in practical terms and in this regard this book would be most useful.
Although some of the method books like ‘Teach Yourself Visually’ and ‘Guitar for Absolute Beginners’ discuss practice, ‘Guitar Aerobics’ supplements those books by telling you exactly what to do to build a particular skill.
The exercises in the book are short enough to learn and memorize, and each day’s exercise focuses on a different technical skill to add variety to your practice.
This is the book for you when your practice time is limited and you want to accomplish one thing on the guitar.
The Guitar Grimoire is also not a complete method. It is, however, a densely-packed book of exercises to help you develop your playing in any direction.
The author, Adam Kadmon, has written a series of Guitar Grimoire books, many of which are suitable for more advanced players.
This book is not written specifically for beginners, but the individual exercises can be done by beginners who are interested in building dexterity, technique, and stamina.
There is no accompanying audio, but the book itself is written in tablature, so once you can read tablature, it is easy for a guitar beginner to use. There is also a DVD that is available.
‘The Guitar Grimoire’ exercise book is exhaustive. If you have burned through the ‘Guitar Aerobics’ book and want more, with this book you will be able to begin playing exercises just a bit beyond your current technical abilities.
It will be the last guitar exercise book you will need for a long, long time.
The entire Grimoire series is for the beginner who is very interested in playing lead guitar.
This guitar book for beginners, while not a complete method in itself, is an excellent supplement to any method. The method books cover what and when to play, and this book covers how to play.
Joseph Alexander, one of the authors, is a guitar instructor and a prolific author of guides. Tim Pettingale is a jazz guitarist and writer of jazz guitar books.
‘Complete Technique for Modern Guitar’ contains 200 exercises that are designed to help you play with more precise timing and dexterity.
The accompanying audio is included for downloading so you can hear what the exercise should sound like and play along.
This book is an outstanding resource for training yourself to go beyond the simple ability to play notes and chords on the guitar.
If you are teaching yourself how to play the guitar and you want greater satisfaction in how you sound, ‘Complete Technique for Modern Guitar’ is the book for you.
Although the method books in this article all contain chord glossaries of different sizes, a chord encyclopedia is an essential guitar book for beginners because it helps grow your chord vocabulary.
In that event, the ‘Guitar Chord Bible’ is your friend. You can look up a version of that chord that is easy for you to play.
The ‘Guitar Chord Bible’ is a complete manual of diagrams for any chord you will come across as a beginning guitar player, as well as more advanced chords and voicings.
This guitar book for beginners is a particularly good reference because it arranges the chords chromatically, with several diagrams for each, and also has a section at the end for particular chord configurations in different styles of music.
All this learning is great, but how do I play some songs?
There are more guitar songbooks than can be counted, and they vary widely in the level of experience required and the quality of the transcriptions.
There are guitar books for beginners that compile songs by your favorite artist. One of the best and most easily usable series of books is ‘The Little Black Songbook’.
You get the idea!
Guitar books for beginners are a great foundation, and you’ll find lots of complementary material here on our site.
Alternative explanations can help you understand better because they allow you to see the same thing from multiple ‘angles’.
Here are just some of the free online lessons you may enjoy:
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