Before you learn to play electric guitar

One of the first guitar lessons that anyone starting to play electric guitar needs to learn, is how to get the most out of an electric guitar.

This is something I feel very strongly about, before you either buy electric guitar lessons, or try and push ahead with free electric guitar lessons online.
If you're trying to learn on a poor quality badly setup guitar, or even a good quality badly set up guitar, things are going to get unnecessarily difficult.

I can't tell you how it saddens me to see some guitar students struggling ahead on a guitar that can only cause them pain, while teaching them bad habits that will ultimately stop them from making good progress on the guitar.

Yup, you guessed it. Learning to play on an unplayable guitar can cause you to develop an excessive grip on your fretting hand, which will slow you down badly, or in some cases make you just give up altogether.

For the beginner guitarist wanting to play electric guitar, I've put up 2 articles on my blog about beginner guitars.
The first one - Beginner electric guitars, what to look for gives good advice on what to do with your electric guitar, and a recommended electric guitar for beginners. Whether you buy the guitar or not,
I want you to read it.
The second article - Rock guitars for beginners is mostly to show you what I consider a good rock guitar.
Bottom line is, get your instrument as playable as possible, then you're off to a good start.

Play electric guitar lessons so far

Ok cool, you're still with me.
All that tough talk about what to do before you learn to play electric guitar didn't put you off.
Great.

The guitar lessons I've put up so far, are listed more or less in the order they should be tackled.
So the navigation at the top left is from easy to more difficult.

I'm actually just at the beginning of things with these guitar lessons, so there'll be plenty more to come from play-electric-guitar.net
So far, I haven't put up any guitar lessons that are exclusively for those that play electric guitar, so even acoustic guitar enthusiasts can get something out of it.

Let's see if I can give you an electric guitar lesson that doesn't need pictures or video.......
Ah yes.
Here's one.

Practice how to play electric guitar - Without one

Whether you're going for a walk, riding the bus, or just sitting somewhere without a guitar handy, you can use the power of visualization to train your mind and improve your guitar playing skill.

Doing a mental run through all the scale patterns helps you to remember them better, and if you go beyond just static pictures of the fretboard, and actually imagine yourself playing the different patterns, it's even more effective.

With guitar chords and such like, you can do the same thing.

This is like hard wiring your brain into what your fingers must do.
With lead guitar it also helps to try and hear the melody in your mind as well as see them moving.

When I first begun to play electric guitar, I would do this quite often.
People would laugh when they saw my fingers twitching away for no apparant reason.

In the 1970's, They did some experiments on athletes.
They got them all hooked up to bio-electric feedback machines, and told them to run their race only in their minds.
The tests showed that the exact same muscles triggered as if they were actually running the race.

Like they say, "What you visualise, you materialise".
Give it a try.