First Steps

If you're learning guitar from scratch, this is where you start. First Steps teaches you how to read guitar tab, how to warm up both hands and how to play in time with a metronome: three habits that every other chapter builds on.

You begin with tab itself: six lines, one per string, numbers for frets, and the names of the open strings. Then comes a chromatic warm-up, one finger per fret, that wakes up your hands and trains them to work together. Next you count out loud with the click, playing quarter notes, eighth notes and rests on open strings until your notes sit right on the beat. The chapter ends with the spider, a finger independence exercise for your fretting hand.

Every exercise plays in the browser with a click, so you hear exactly how it should sound before you play along. Start slow on the tempo ladder, raise the tempo only when it's clean, and use the checkpoint at the end of each lesson to know when you're ready to move on. By the end you'll read beginner guitar tab with confidence and play simple lines in time.