Best Guitar Books for Beginners in 2022

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Learning to play guitar with guitar books for beginners is still huge in 2022, despite the availability of the most modern way to learn guitar, online video tutorials.

“guitar learning books” (both acoustic and electric) are here to stay as thousands of guitar lesson books are sold every day.

You are reading: Guitar lesson books for beginners

For this reason, I thought I’d buy, read, review and compare a couple of these books and see how they perform.

The ones I ordered weren’t random but picked from the best-seller lists of online bookstores.

This means that these sought after books should be the best beginner guitar books out there…

or those with better marketing 😀

I’m a guitar teacher for over 20 years and a tech junkie, preferring to guide people to online video lessons. I believe that with the multimedia technologies of the 21st century, video guitar lessons are the most efficient way to learn guitar on your own. I’ll add some recommendations for video lessons after the book reviews, in case you want to see that side of learning guitar too.

best guitar books for beginners in 2022

The moment you’ve been waiting for has arrived, here are my reviews of the most popular guitar learning books.

I’ll give you my recommendations on which ones are the best later.

guitar exercises for beginners: multiply your guitar skills by 10 in 10 minutes a day from guitar head

One of the biggest challenges new guitarists face is practicing on their own. the problem is that they don’t know what & how to practice, so they end up scribbling, playing things they already know, or just not practicing enough.

This is why I like the Guitar Exercises for Beginners book. provides an answer to this problem and guides beginners in the right direction.

The book presents 100 exercises that all beginner guitarists need to work on to improve their guitar technique. The exercises start from the early beginner level and increase in difficulty naturally, just as a beginning player improves day by day. the author does a good job of explaining the correct and incorrect ways to practice and how long each exercise should be performed.

Each exercise is available as an audio file on theguitarhead.com, so you can hear what you’re supposed to play. I think this is very important for learning music and is a must have feature of any serious guitar book in 2022.

this exercise book has great reviews on amazon. It has an average rating of 4.5 stars from over 1,100 people who have rated it. 89% of customers gave it 4 or 5 stars.

I recommend this book as a free daily exercise book to keep your practice sessions regular and efficient as you learn to play. It’s about 140 pages long, and by the end of it, you’ll have a solid understanding of the basics of playing the guitar.

here are some pages from the paperback version of this book:

guitar for dummies by mark phillips and jon chappell

the fourth edition of guitar for dummies (recently released in 2016) is a nearly 400-page monster that is sure to have you setting your guitar on fire before you finish the book. book. 🙂

With this new edition, they eliminated the DVD of the previous version and introduced videos and audio clips online, as a complement to the teachings of the book. they didn’t take it overboard though, with just 85 video and 95 audio tracks, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. you can’t learn music just by reading about it, you need audible tools.

Reading the Beginner Guitar Book, it becomes clear that, unlike the Teach Yourself Guitar book above, this one is not intended solely for beginners. it has a lot of information and theory, which would be useful for the intermediate level guitarist. Beyond teaching the basics, this book also touches on the details of different genres.

Having been recently released, this new edition does not yet have reviews at the time of this writing. the previous third edition had 79% 4-5 star reviews from customers. In short, if you want to continue learning from a guitar book, this would be my recommendation.

also here are some pages from this book:

learn to play the guitar by yourself: a quick and easy introduction for beginners

This paperback is the best-selling guitar learn-to-play book on amazon.com and sells for under $6 right now. does not include cd or any type of multimedia.

is a very short book at only 47 pages and covers the basics of what you would need to learn to start playing the guitar. kind of like a hit and run guitar manual.

You could say that the book does what it promises, it gives the beginning guitarist an introduction to the guitar. it is aimed at complete beginners and stops at the beginner level. it does not include theoretical or remotely complex lessons.

the book has many diagrams, which will be useful for beginners. I won’t go into detail about the exact content of the book, you can see it in the table of contents in the image gallery below.

Reviews from other readers are generally positive, with 78% of readers giving it 4 or 5 stars.

after reading teach yourself to play the guitar for yourself, my opinion is that if you are going to give someone a guitar, this could be a good book to accompany it. If you wanted to spend a little more, or if you are looking for a book for yourself, I would choose the second book reviewed below, The Guitar Book For Dummies. has video and audio demos online, and hearing what you should be playing helps when learning music… 😉

here are some pages from this book:

hal leonard guitar method by will schmid and greg koch

This is probably the most famous of all guitar learning books and is priced around $13 right now.

this hal leonard guitar book is actually a series of 3 books, each around 50 pages, and comes with 3 companion cd’s that you can refer to during the chapters. I would recommend this book to younger students (under 20). it’s ultra-simplistic, which can be nice in some cases, but a bit boring in others.

also has an overwhelming amount of sheet music. these sheets allow you to practice what is taught in the given chapter, which is nice, but going through the books, I felt there was a lot left to explain. this was probably a result of them trying to simplify things as much as possible, but this actually leaves holes in the padawan guitarist’s knowledge.

Another negative I found was that this book focuses more on traditional music notation and puts guitar tablature in the background. As a guitar teacher, I find tabs to be next to sliced bread as it makes learning so much easier for beginning guitar players. and since learning to play the guitar is difficult, anything that makes it easier is more than welcome. on the other hand, if you want to learn to read standard music notation, this will be the way to go for you.

Lesson syllabus is not really my style, but all teachers vary. it focuses too early on too much theory, and I believe in getting my students to play and have fun, and therefore develop a love for the instrument quickly, instead of indulging in theoretical studies.

this book has very good reviews, with a whopping 90% of them with 4 or 5 stars. wow!

here are some pages from hal leonard’s book:

how to play guitar by roger evans

This book was first published in the 1990s and used to be one of the most popular guitar learning books. it sells for about $10 right now.

It doesn’t include a cd or any form of multimedia, which is a major turnoff. it also has too much text and not enough graphics. Due to these factors, I do not recommend this book at all.

focuses on acoustic guitar, so those of you specifically looking to learn electric guitar will need to keep looking.

However, there is a lot of information in the book, it covers almost every detail of what a guitar student will be looking for (how to buy a guitar, fundamental guitar techniques, music theory basics).

the structure of the lessons is good, it varies between technical aspects of guitar and theory as you go, which means that you will not get bored of any particular topic and you will have the opportunity to try the theory parts. step at a time it’s a shame that new editions of this book have never been made with more graphics and complementary audio and video tools.

The written reviews are also quite positive, with 85% of readers giving it 4 or 5 stars.

Reading the reviews written for this beginner guitar book, I get the impression that most of the people who wrote the reviews are not very far into the book. here is one of the most helpful reviews:

…by the end of the reading I knew a little about a lot of different guitar techniques, but I certainly didn’t feel like I knew everything I needed to play the guitar well. I would recommend spending the money on a few lessons, when I finally broke down and started taking lessons, I learned more in a week than reading the entire book…

and finally, here are also some pages from roger evans book:

guitar aerobics by troy nelson

guitar aerobics was first published in 2007. it is a unique type of guitar book in that it gives you 1 exercise to do every day of the year. exercises start with basic exercises and progress to harder exercises.

what kind of exercises can you expect? each day of the week, you get a different type of exercise to keep things varied and interesting: Monday: alternate plucking, Tuesday: string jumping, Wednesday: string bending, Thursday: arpeggios, Friday: sweep plucking, Saturday: legato , Sunday: rhythm.

This book is not specifically for beginning guitarists, as it is not a textbook. however, it is a great companion book for a beginner’s guitar studies.

guitar aerobics exercises start with beginner exercises and progress to increasingly difficult licks after a few hundred days 🙂 yes, a few hundred days. remember, the book provides 1 exercise a day. pushed your limits every day in small steps, and after 365 days, you will definitely be a better guitarist than you are today.

You have to spend time with each exercise, you can’t rush things. You won’t be able to do all the exercises a day on Day 1, so you have to do them over and over again until you perfect them.

The book urges you to use the metronome and increase your bpm as much as you can.

The reason I like the concept behind this guitar book is that it forces the student to pick up the guitar every day. the only way to progress on the guitar is to practice regularly, and by its nature this 1 exercise a day book aims to do just that.

The book has an audio file for each exercise, as well as backing tracks to play. these can be accessed through the hal leonard publisher website.

Customer reviews of this book are overwhelmingly positive, with an average rating of 4.2 stars after hundreds of reviews.

If you’re interested in seeing some pages of the guitar aerobics book, here you go:

music theory for guitarists by tom kolb

If you’ve been learning to play the guitar for a while, you’ve no doubt heard references to bits of music theory you didn’t understand.

This is a book meant to fill in these gaps in your knowledge. the full title is Music Theory for Guitar Players: Everything You Always Wanted to Know But Weren’t Afraid to Ask, By the Way, was originally published in 2005.

Learning music theory isn’t important for beginner guitarists, but after reaching an intermediate level, learning music theory really helps to put it all together. covers pretty much everything a guitarist needs to know regarding music theory.

The book starts with the fretboard, key signatures, intervals and goes on to teach about scales, chord construction, key centers. towards the end he teaches modes and modal harmony, chord substitution and also reharmonization.

What I really liked about the book is that it has quizzes for you to test your knowledge. In addition, there are around 100 audio tracks that demonstrate what is being taught, which is very important for learning music.

after garnering hundreds of reviews, it averages 4.3 stars, which is impressive for a book on theory. other books that cover the subject don’t score as high as music theory is sometimes presented in a boring tone.

If you think you’re ready to dive into the world of guitar theory, here are some music theory pages for guitarists:

teaching yourself visually by charles kim

This book is not one of the most popular on amazon, but I wanted to include it in this list of the best guitar books because it is one of the best out there.

this is like the guitar book for dummies. covers just about everything guitar related, from basic chords and techniques, to how to buy an amp. the author wanted to include all the information in this book, so some chapters are a bit short.

The latest edition of Teach Yourself Visually also includes a 100-track CD. this of course doesn’t work nowadays when everything is online. I don’t even have a cd player anymore…

This is a good book to have on your shelf, in case you need to refer to something quickly. however, it is not suitable for learning to play the guitar as a sole resource.

Customer reviews of this book are positive, with an average rating of 4 stars.

here are some pages from the visual learning book, but if you jump over to amazon, you can see many more pages from the book:

what should a beginner guitar book cover?

During my 15+ years teaching private students, I have developed a very specific program that I teach people who are new to the guitar.

I discovered through trial and error that this works to thoroughly familiarize my students with the guitar and keeps them motivated at the same time.

If you are a beginner, these are the topics to look for when choosing a guitar book:

general guitar anatomy (acoustic vs electric, guitar parts, strings, tuning)
holding the guitar correctly
first simple 3-string chords and simple strumming
simple but popular songs to strum
simple melodies of famous songs on 2 strings, then 4 strings, then 6 strings
full chords for beginners ( a, am, c, d, e, em, f, g)
chord change through song learning
keys & amp; why certain chords sound good in a chord progression
more songs

Also, there are a few things I focus on with my students:

emphasis on learning real songs as soon as possible
sprinkle in light guitar music theory where appropriate
practice rhythm and timing

so this is the topic a book written for beginning guitarists should cover.

If a beginner’s book doesn’t cover these topics, then it will either leave gaps in your knowledge or not provide enough motivation to keep practicing.

If the book has more topics, great, it means that it was not only written for beginners, but also for more advanced guitarists.

If you’re looking for a guitar instruction book aimed at kids, the ones on this list won’t cut it. however, here is a good post on guitar books for kids: https://guitareuroshop.com/lesson-reviews/guitar-books-for-kids/

my conclusion after reading the best guitar books

In conclusion, after reviewing the most popular guitar books for beginners on the internet, I still think that the book should be the complement to learn to play the guitar, the main learning tool being the video lessons.

The world has evolved, and today there are better, easier and more beginner-friendly methods, which are much more suitable for learning music. after all, music is an audible art, you need to hear it. and seeing the teacher’s hands move along the guitar is also nice 😉

Of course, you’ll have to read up on some points of your guitar studies (ie guitar theory, modal studies, etc), but that’s no longer something for beginners. That’s why it’s good to have a book too, so you can read the details of something that interests you.

I recommend the guitar for dummies book for this as it contains a lot of valuable information.

As a companion book, Guitar Exercises for Beginners is a good daily exercise book for beginners, which goes well with an online guitar course or private lessons.

Also, the guitar aerobics book can be similarly useful for intermediate level players.

If you’d like me to do a video review of these guitar books as well, let me know in the comments section below.

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Best Guitar Books for Beginners in 2022 – TheGuitarLesson.com