If you’re interested, you can watch the live, hour long webcast on Tuesdays at 7:00 pm CST. Can’t make it? No worries. You can watch the replays in the archives any time you like.

January (2011) is “Beginner’s Month”, so if you are new to learning to play guitar, these sessions are perfect for you. For example, the the last session was focused on learning how to use a metronome. Future months will be devoted to different guitar styles like blues, jazz and others.

What’s nice about the Gibson Learn and Master LIVE sessions is that you can interact with Steve Krenz himself, as well as others on the webcast. It sounds really fun and it’s definitely an innovative way to help you learn to play guitar.

Make sure to check out the archives to see what you have missed so far, and then set some time aside to join the next live lesson. To learn more about Steve Krenz, read my Learn and Master Guitar review.

Online guitar lessons are a great way to start out on rock’s favorite instrument, without having to break the bank. Read on to learn about some of the best online guitar lessons available to the beginning guitarist.

Free Guitar Lessons

There are many free guitar lessons for guitarists of all skill levels on the internet. Unfortunately, the quality of these sites varies quite a bit. Even the best sites typically don’t cover everything you would want to know as a beginning guitarist. You might have to patch together information from multiple sources. Of course, many beginners might prefer this style of learning. Here are a few of the best free guitar lessons out there:

Guitar Noise

This site contains dozens of free guitar lessons. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to actually find them. If you’re new to the guitar, I’d recommend visiting the home page and then clicking the “Hot Lessons” link at the top of the site. This section indexes the most popular lessons on the site and is a great place to start. The site also has a fairly active community of members who frequent the forums. This is an excellent way to get direct answers to your guitar-related questions.

About.com Guitar Lessons

This site is part of the sometimes-useful about.com network of articles. The lessons aren’t incredibly well-written, but they’re great for a beginning guitarist who wants an ordered series of articles. These articles walk the beginner from tuning and stringing a guitar to barre chords and complex strumming patterns.

If neither of these sites is helpful to you, try one of the sites listed below:

• Cyberfret – Free Online Guitar lessons
• Guitar Tricks – 24 Free Online Lessons
• Guitar For Beginners & Beyond – (professional lessons require registration)

Paid Guitar Lessons

Some people need more structure to their lessons than any of the free resources can provide. Prices for these lessons vary quite a bit – as does the quality. I recommend doing a lot of research before you invest in a monthly membership. Here are a few of the most popular guitar lesson resources:

JamPlay

This is one of the best guitar lesson repositories available. They’re currently selling a monthly subscription to their video library of over 250-hours of lessons for about 20 bucks a month. The videos are taught by a wide range of expert guitar players.

Guitar Tricks

This site provides a very structured set of guitar lessons that walk a player from beginning to advanced levels of playing. It’s a bit cheaper than jamplay at $12.95 per month.

Here’s a couple additional links if none of the sites mentioned above interest you:

• InfiniteGuitar (~$9.00/month)
• Guitar Teacher World ($29.99/month for video lessons)