Everybody has at some time dreamt of learning to play the guitar. For one thing, it has found its way into so many different styles of music that whatever your musical preferences, you can find some guitar music to suit them. There are guitar teachers everywhere so, once you have decided that you want to be a guitar player, you can start learning to play as soon as possible.

There are certain aspects of guitar playing, like chord shapes and how to make them, that are common to all kinds of guitar playing. This means that any guitar teacher, no matter what style he teaches, can show you the basic principles of playing the guitar. Now that the internet has become a source of knowledge in all subject, you will have no trouble finding basic guitar lessons that you can make use of for free.

The differences between the different styles of guitar music are in the chords and scales that are used and also the right hand playing techniques. If you are playing an electric guitar, you can use a plectrum, your fingernails or a thumb pick and finger picks. The thumb- and finger picks are mostly used for Travis picking which is essentially a country music style of playing. You can also employ Travis picking techniques on steel or nylon string acoustic guitars. Steel string guitars tend to be a little hard on the nails so many fingerstyle players use picks. If you are playing a nylon string guitar you can choose whether to use finger picks or just the nails or flesh of your fingertips.

There are different chords, scales and playing techniques used for rock, jazz, country, pop and classical guitar so once you have learnt some basic open chords in the first position on the fretboard, you can start learning techniques specific to the style of music you want to play.

To start off your guitar playing you could type "free guitar lessons" into a search engine and you will find plenty of beginners courses to choose from. Video guitar lessons are by far the easiest to learn from because a person showing you where to put your fingers with you hearing the music as he plays it is a much deeper learning experience than reading words on a page.

So if you focus your search for free guitar lessons on a video archiving site like YouTube, you will be overwhelmed with video guitar lessons for beginners. Once you are past the beginner stage you can start searching again using terns associated with your genre. For instance you could type something like "jazz guitar scales" or "Flamenco guitar chords" or "power chords" into the search box on YouTube.

You can combine free video guitar lessons with other free guitar teaching materials like blank guitar fretboard diagrams, chord charts, guitar tuners and metronomes, all available for free to those willing to search for them.