My Top 10 Guitar Learning Resources
One of the great things about guitar is that no matter how advanced and experienced you get, there’s always more to learn. Whether you’re trying to perfect a specific technique, or pick up a whole new genre, or study a certain player, there’s a seemingly endless list of teachers to help you meet your goals. It can take years to find one that “fits your brain”. This list consists of sources I personally have actually used, or currently use, and am not paid to endorse.
A disclaimer: if you use a resource or teacher that isn’t on the list, don’t take it personally. Again, this list is just trying to share what fit my brain for some specific purpose at some point. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
10. Jack Ruch
Jack Ruch has a YouTube channel and a Patreon, both of which I’ve used in the past. Jack is a really talented guitarist, with a very laid-back presence and an easy-going teaching style.
Jack covers a ton of different concepts. My favorites are when he illustrates a concept or a playing style by picking 3-4 solos or sections, either by the same artist, or by different artists illustrating the same concept. I’ve learned quite a lot from those videos, I think in part because it mirrors how I learned guitar: I learned by ear, learning solos note-for-note, and then maybe (or maybe not!) figuring out later why certain notes worked.
Jack’s catalog is pretty huge at this point, and it seems to cover almost any question I’ve ever had:
How do I work diminished sounds into my playing?
Jack is at his best when he’s helping to make some obscure music theory topic accessible and musical. I really enjoy his work and admire his ability to make almost anything seem very simple and approachable.
9. Shane Theriot
Shane Theriot is from Louisiana and reminds me of some of the folks I played & hung out with when I lived there. Shane has this strange sort of ability to explain something that, in reality, is pretty heavy, without ever sounding snobby, judgy, or self-congratulatory while doing it. Shane is a schooled guy, and he can (and occasionally does) take very quick detours to just briefly show any theory cops in the audience that he’s not clueless, but the “beret-required”-level theory isn’t really the point of anything he’s doing.
Shane’s tone is far more “let’s just hang and talk about this for a minute” than any other online instructor I’ve seen. In fact, some of his vids aren’t even instructional — he’s just sharing stories about being in the studio, what it’s like to be a musical director working with all kinds of other (super famous) guitarists, etc. So, in some ways, sometimes watching his videos feels a little like catching up with a buddy who is a working musician, doing the job every day.
The stories hooked me first, actually. I liked the stories, and then the videos where he filmed setting up guitarists for Live From Daryl’s House, and then filming a studio gig, and you hear him tell these other stories from the road or from when he didn’t get a gig or whatever and he slowly builds up all this credibility and you want to see whatever he has to show you on the guitar, too.
Shane also taught me the only exercise that has actually helped me be able to actually memorize the fretboard. Well… most of it — I’m still working on that, but his method works and I recommend it.
8. Alex Farran
Alex Farran is a more recent discovery that has quickly become a favorite. I think I found his YouTube channel maybe 6 months ago. What I love about it:
Alex is a talented player
Alex is a patient and clear explainer of complex things
There is a third thing that really stands out about the channel, though: Alex’s content manages to be really engaging without the “YouTube Channel Bro” antics: his videos don’t promote “this one weird trick”, or “you’re doing this all wrong” nonsense. Alex’s demeanor is very laid back and calm. I find him very easy to pay close attention to, and that makes learning from him much easier.
Alex specializes in the “vintage” music space of roots, blues, and jazz. He seems to be a real encyclopedia of these genres, too. For example, as a bit of a student of this type of music, I’m a little ashamed to say I’d never heard of Bill Doggett, who I learned about from Alex in a video about Billy Butler, who I’ve had a great time diving into since! Alex also instructs on quite a few Charlie Christian tunes & techniques. I was very happy to find a vid that covered the solo and the chords for Honeysuckle Rose, because those chords are all inversions I’m less familiar with, and they just feel like they’re going by so fast. They’re fun to learn & play.
7. Robert Baker
There are guitarists on YouTube that focus exclusively on “shred” playing. There are guitarists on YouTube that focus on 60’s classic blues-rock and how to bend notes. Then there’s Robert Baker, who is the teacher I wanted when I was a kid in the 80’s trying to work out both Jimmy Page-style stuff like the solo to “Living Loving Maid”, and the Van Halen solo in “Ice Cream Man”, and more baroque-influenced Randy Rhoads licks. I couldn’t even conceive of bringing home a VHS covering licks by all three of those guys!
Robert is, in my experience, a really rare combination of attributes to find in one human being:
He’s an excellent player
He’s an excellent teacher
Robert is so, so, so patient
He acknowledges that people are different & do things different ways
He often instructs on multiple different ways to get to a given goal
I could go on. While I was writing this, it occurred to me that Robert holds many “firsts” in my experience going down the YouTube-guitar rabbit hole. For just a couple of examples:
Robert was the first guitar teacher who I saw get into a room with another teacher who was teaching him how to improve his picking. The vulnerability here, and modeling the behavior that you’re never “done” with your learning, is just so crucially important.
Coincidentally also about picking, but Robert was the first online guitar teacher I ever heard point out his own picking style (“outside picking”) and acknowledge that it’s possible I might get better results with “inside picking”. Robert does this kind of thing in a lot of different contexts about a lot of different things, and it has sometimes really been valuable to me (like discovering that I’m an insider picker… er… mostly)
Robert was the first teacher I ever heard say “practice this every day, for five minutes, for a month”. Seemingly every teacher on the planet has 20 videos saying “do this every day”. From a learner’s perspective, this is useless, because if we did everything every teacher said to do “every day”, it would take more than a day to do all of that. More than once I’ve heard Robert put those boundaries around it, and it immediately clicked with me: “oh, he’s saying I can learn it if I do this for about a month every day for five minutes — I can do that”. Maybe this should’ve occurred to me naturally, but… it never did, so I appreciated that a lot.
Finally, I have to point out that Robert is not what I call a “stuff like that” teacher. You probably already know what I’m talking about: the teacher who does a decent job explaining a concept, then does a decent job giving a really dumbed-down example illustrating the concept, then says something like “so practice that, because at some point you’ll be able to do <face-melting shred lick>, and stuff like that”. Then it’s off to the next thing, while everyone screams at their laptops “WHAT THE $#!@ WAS THAT?!?” I will forever be a fan of Robert’s because, if he has ever done that, I have not been a witness to it.
6. Chelsea Constable
Chealsea Constable is such a great guitarist, and one of the first YouTubers I ever learned from. She apparently has a pretty incredible ear, and also the patience to meticulously break down solos note-by-note. Chelsea has covered some solos that are notoriously difficult, as well, like both solos in Clapton’s live “Crossroads” solos, and Van Halen’s “Eruption”, which she absolutely nails on a Gibson Firebird that sounds perfect for that song.
I’m not sure Chelsea is a fit for a complete beginner: she does not provide tablature for anything I’ve ever seen her do at all, and she doesn’t go through each note and say “ok, 5th fret on the D string, then 7th fret on the D string”. She just breaks the solo down into arbitrarily-sized sections that I guess feel right to her, and plays each one slowly. That’s it.
To me, the value is in the fact that Chelsea gets closer than most to getting the actual solos correct. YouTube is awash in “teachers” who don’t actually play the thing they’re teaching correctly. I guess nobody is perfect, including Chelsea, but she gets consistently closer to perfect on just about everything I’ve ever seen her do than anyone else I’ve found.
5. Jeff McErlain
If you’re a beginner, Jeff is awesome. If you’re intermediate, Jeff is awesome. If you’re advanced… Jeff is still awesome. In addition, Jeff just seems to be everywhere. I first saw him on JamPlay years ago. When JamPlay and TrueFire merged, I realized he had content on TrueFire as well. He’s on YouTube, both in his own videos and in several different cameos on other guitarists’ videos. He also has his own site.
What’s great about Jeff is that, no matter what you want to work on, and seemingly no matter what level, Jeff has covered it. So, when I was getting bored with my blues rhythm playing, Jeff was a huge help. When I was reverse-engineering my own solos, I stumbled across Jeff’s work on TrueFire around Blues Arpeggios and Chord Tone soloing and figured it out. When I was troubleshooting my picking, Jeff covered it. When I wanted to build more diminished-based vocabulary, Jeff was there.
What I like about Jeff is not just that he covers a lot of ground, but also that he’s creative, and that creativity is the core of how he teaches. He explains concepts, he charts out the fingerings of the scales or arpeggios or chords he’s using, and he’s patiently talking through how he’s thinking about those things, but at some point you realize that there’s also creativity; discovery, in what he’s teaching you. Like, yes, of course you can move up to the 5th fret to play that A minor pentatonic box, but… look… it’s actually right here — you don’t have to move anywhere, and here’s why that’s cool.
This ability to combine the foundational rudiments of a concept that is utterly practical with a healthy dose of “it’s not actually boring — it’s the core of this other creative and not-boring thing” is what I love about Jeff’s teaching.
Jeff just posted a video a couple of months ago that illustrates this exact thing really well. The video is called something like “Little Wing Is Boring”. Seems like a clickbait-y title, but as soon as he starts talking, anyone who has ever sat in on “Little Wing” at a jam can immediately relate. He goes on to explain how you can use more interesting chord voicings, possibly from other songs you already know, and link them together in creative ways that do not sound forced, contrived, showboat-y, etc. They work, and then he explains how and why they work.
Jeff’s work on both YouTube and TrueFire are great. I highly recommend him, especially for blues or blues-based concepts.
4. Adrian Woodward
Adrian is the teacher on the “Anyone Can Play Guitar” (ACPG) YouTube channel, which I really enjoy. Adrian explains things pretty slowly and patiently, which I sometimes lose patience for, but it’s different with ACPG because they assume more experience, or they point to another video that covers basics, so he’s going slow to explain the things that are challenging to a more experienced guitarist.
The channel covers a pretty wide range of genres, and different videos are targeted at different skill levels, so he covers a ton of ground that will be interesting to an awful lot of players. I’ve consumed mostly his jazz, theory, and practice-related content, because that’s the direction I happened to be pushing myself in when I found him. However, I’ve watched a couple of videos of his just because he was talking about a song I’d never heard of or a style I thought was interesting, and everything I’ve seen is pretty universally great, because:
Adrian is a more-than-competent player who is able to relay musical concepts through his playing very naturally and effectively.
Adrian focuses on getting you playing right now. It’s 1-2 minutes explaining what he’s covering in the video, maybe a few minutes of playing to show you something that, typically, he’s about to show you how to play, and then he gets right into it.
Adrian explains enough theory for you to get your head around what’s going on, and then gets back to playing. It’s a great balance if you know some theory (like basic chord shapes and intervals).
I also really like that Adrian does the whole job: I looked high & low for instruction covering a specific Charlie Christian solo, and Adrian was really the only one I found teaching the chords behind the solo, and not just the lines.
I only know Adrian’s YouTube channel, but he does also have a Patreon. He also has his own site. I strongly recommend checking out his work!
3. Eric Haugen
Eric Haugen is a schooled guitarist hailing out of Berklee who never lost the “music” in music education. While some schooled players seem to be focused more on the notes than the music, Eric is a really great balance of someone who plays really well, and can explain everything he’s doing in a way that’s accessible to basically everyone.
I found Eric via his “Jazz For Rockers” series on his YouTube channel, and then I also wound up diving into his artist studies, which is kind of accidentally how I learned guitar: I discovered that guitarists do a lot of the same things repeatedly across a lot of songs, so if I learned a bunch of, say, Led Zeppelin songs in a cluster, it would go faster because there would be commonalities, like a common key, or a common scale pattern, or even common licks. Eric Haugen has several artists that he’s done little mini-studies of, and some of them are people I didn’t even know about, like Marc Ribot, and I am very grateful for the introduction!
I’ve recently tried revisiting modes via Eric’s TrueFire course on modes. What I have learned is that learning modes is not like learning a I-IV-V. It’s going to take time, and I’m probably going to watch this course like 3-4 times before it really sinks in, but I’m confident that I’ll get there with the help of that course.
2. Tim Lerch
Tim’s playing is some of the coolest, prettiest, bluesiest, and soulful playing I’ve ever heard. If all you knew of Tim was his playing, you’d be thrilled to have found him. But his teaching is also really fantastic. For someone who is intermediate-advanced, and knows some basic theory (like, really basic — just intervals & chord tones), Tim’s courses on TrueFire, and some of his YouTube videos as well, meet you right where you are.
Tim’s playing and teaching strikes a really nice balance: I want to add a lot more color and be able to play on my own and relay a song to an audience using chords, but I don’t really care to play insane Joe Pass-style 2-chords-per-beat chordal melodies. I wouldn’t mind knowing the theory behind that stuff, and Tim might get us there, but I think the huge win in Tim’s videos and courses (at least, for me) is vocabulary. Even though Tim is playing, essentially, blues in his videos, and I am primarily a blues player, I have never played almost anything Tim plays in his videos! Being able to leverage the vocabulary in those videos as a means of jogging my memory on the theory is really great and saves probably months worth of hours-long, daily study and practice (though that’s still clearly going to be necessary).
Tim is the only teacher in this list whom I’ve watched and actually said “I want to play like that”. I recommend everything and anything he’s done, but his TrueFire course “Jazz Blues Pathways” is awesome. Also, the courses in the “Solo Jazz Pathways” series area excellent.
1. Steve Down
I have had an all-access pass on TrueFire for probably 7-8 years now, and I’m glad that I get access to so many great teachers on that platform, but I still find so much value in Steve’s teaching that I’ve been a subscriber to his Patreon for over 4 years now. Steve is a professional musician, both in the studio, and as a touring member of Joss Stone’s band (I believe he’s also the music director for the tour, but don’t quote me!). He’s also a music educator in guitar and music theory at The Academy of Music & Sound, which has locations in England and Scotland.
I found Steve on YouTube while looking for guitar lessons for Grant Green’s “Miss Ann’s Tempo”. I didn’t find it, but along the way stumbled across Steve’s breakdown of another favorite Grant Green tune: “Blues for Willarene”. The rest is history — I found his other YouTube videos, and from there found his Patreon and all of the other songs he did analysis and transcription of, and I’ve been on board ever since.
I’ll warn you: Steve doesn’t do very much hand-waving around what’s going on. Compared to most other online teachers you’ll find, Steve’s treatment might seem obsessive. He explains nearly every note he plays in the context of the song’s larger musical landscape. In fact, it’s not unusual to see Steve explain why multiple theories behind some note choice are plausible, but then conclude with his own opinion about what’s probably happening, based on his understanding and familiarity with that guitarist’s habits, vocabulary, patterns & norms, etc.
I have to admit that sometimes, but only sometimes, I lose patience with the obsessive explanations and just download the transcription and jump into things myself. Eventually my impatience gives way to wanting to actually understand what I’m playing, so I wind up going back to the video analysis of the song. I’m very happy to be able to put the various learning materials in whatever order suits me.
Steve’s whole Patreon is just breakdowns of songs, and as far as I can remember, they are all jazz tunes. Some of the tunes I pass on, either because I’m not a fan of the song, or because I’m just not there yet in terms of my capability. Steve chooses the songs by polling his subscribers with 3-4 choices, which are themselves usually based on subscriber feedback or what has drawn very high engagement in the past.
All of this to say that I highly recommend Steve’s work, both on Patreon and YouTube. I only wish I could study guitar full time so I could more readily digest his work and put it to use. I’ll get there, though!
Honorable Mention: Gracie Terzian
Gracie Terzian is not a guitarist, per se. I’ve seen her play ukulele, harp ukulele in actual music videos, and a 3/4 scale guitar and piano in lesson videos, but I found her because she teaches music theory, which I’ve been trying to learn more of lately. I don’t know what Gracie does for a day job, but my guess would be “elementary music teacher”, because she explains things in her music theory videos as if someone in 5th grade is watching, and I want to be very clear: THIS IS PERFECT FOR ME.
Elementary school students love all those mnemonics, silly stories, and other devices that help them remember things, and I also find that useful. Gracie teaches intervals, how to read music, the circle of 5ths and 4ths, and she does all of it extremely clearly, quite slowly, and for my brain, very effectively. I don’t need music theory explained in the context of guitar. In fact, sometimes, that can be a little distracting. Watching Gracie illustrate everything on the whiteboard and just occasionally tap the piano to illustrate, for example, that a minor 2nd interval sounds like the beginning of the Jaws theme is enough (see how I just remembered that? It works!)
Who’s Your Favorite?
Sure, I have a collection of favorites, but I’m always searching and perusing artist and educator YouTube channels. And, although I’m currently trying to learn more theory and jazz and stuff, I still keep up with all kinds of stuff from country, funk, rock, folk, etc. So share your favorites, no matter the genre or skill level!