After taking the first step and buying an acoustic or electric guitar, you'll need to find quality online guitar lessons to learn how to play your new instrument. Choosing the right lessons can mean the difference between success or failure, so it's important to know what you need to look for when choosing a lesson package. First of all, don't believe those sites which promise to teach you the guitar in 2 days. Those are scams.

Legitimate teach yourself guitar websites will spell it out understandably: to become good at the guitar you'll need to practice! The more you practice, the better you get. Thats just the way it works, there are no secret recipes to it.

The correct way of learning how to play the guitar is the following:

1. First learn the very basics:
   
2. The 8 essential beginner guitar chords (G and C major, and the major and minor variations of E, A, D).
   
3. Basic strumming.
   
4. Alternate picking of strings, along with some lead guitar techniques (hammer-on, pull-off, vibrato)
   
5. Now for the most important part! While you are learning, don't just practice the techniques and chords in their purity, but do so by practicing songs that you love!

Learning via video is the most effective way of learning to play the guitar online. There are many video lessons available, however, many of them are low quality. Good video guitar lessons, which make learning easy, will have on-screen chord diagrams and animated tabs, which make following the lessons and learning the different techniques much easier. Why?

• Relatively cheap, a whole line of video guitar lessons will probably cost you less than 2-3 hours at a personal guitar teacher. While an average guitar teacher charges about $30-40 per hour, a full course of quality online video guitar lessons will only cost about $60-90.
• No matter what time of the day it is, you can play your video lessons whenever you want to. If you don’t feel like it, skip a day, or even take more lessons per day.
• The production phase of video guitar lessons ensures that the best, and most effective teaching methods are included in the video.
• Animated tablature is used in quality video guitar lessons, which makes it easy to visually follow the notes you are learning.

Find a comprehensive website that will take you from day 1 to actually playing the guitar. Learning from books isn't a good option, simply because you can't hear the sound your guitar should be giving out, and can't see the hand movement of the teacher, as you can with video guitar lessons.

You see, it really is all about motivation and achievement. Learning to play the guitar by practicing songs is the best means of learning the guitar in a fun way. At the end of the day, it all comes down to how much you practice. But practice you will, since you'll find that playing songs you love will cause a real sense of achievement, and the best part, it can come very quickly with beginner guitar songs.