Best Christian Guitar Lessons Online

Some of the best free Christian guitar lessons online may not turn up at the top of the search engine results. Well known worship guitarists and songwriters are online sharing their tips on how to play their songs, but sometimes they are difficult to find.  Here are some of the websites where you can learn the songs you want to play from musicians who know them well. Most of the instruction is targeted to intermediate players. If you already know the basics of playing the guitar, you will find some very helpful resources here. Even beginners can benefit from seeing guitar parts broken down and explained.

Any list like this will miss some good Christian guitar lessons, but this should be enough to keep a worship musician busy for a while.

CCLI is the organization that licenses praise and worship songs for church use. Their website  includes some useful guitar lesson videos under the "Instruct" selection on the CCLITV site. These videos include some good worship guitar instruction including some beginning guitar instructional videos by Paul Baloche. There is also an entire series of praise guitar lessons from John Standefer

You might also want to browse around the CCLI website. They maintain a list of the top 25 praise and worship songs that are currently being playing in churches. The website also has videos of new worship songs at "First Take" and features lesser-known artists at "Open Mic." These aren't instructional videos, but they are higher quality videos of worship songs. This can be a good resource for finding new songs.

Paul Baloche has written some great worship songs. He also has an excellent website with many free resources for worship guitarists. His free songbook downloads include chord charts, audio samples of his songs and links to videos of some of his more recent songs. While his website is a great resource, most of the guitar instructional videos can be found on Paul Baloche's YouTube Channel. He teaches the guitar parts for "Our God Saves," "Offering" and a few other songs. He also gives a number of tips for church worship leaders on how to deal with both musical and personnel issues on their worship team.

For sheer volume of praise, worship and contemporary Christian songs, the Guitar Praise website ranks highly. This is an all volunteer guitar lesson site. That means that the quality of the instruction as well as the audio and video quality varies greatly from song to song. Many Christian songs for electric guitar, acoustic guitar and bass are available. One nice feature is that many guitar solo parts are shown in tab format which makes it much easier to figure out what the guitarist is playing. While you may be disappointed in the quality and accuracy of some of the guitar instruction, this site is definitely worth checking out.

Hillsong has a YouTube channel that includes some video that features some impressive work from one of their top electric guitar players, Nigel Hendroff. For those of you who are familiar with Hillsong's music, they usually have multiple guitars playing. It can be difficult to hear the individual parts clearly. Nigel demonstrates the individual parts so that you can see and hear clearly what he is playing. There isn't a lot of detailed instruction, but Nigel is an engaging personality and an extremely gifted guitar player.

Brenton Brown has song sheets with chords and lyrics for many of his worship songs available on his website. He doesn't have a lot of guitar instruction available online.  However, his MySpace page has a few guitar instructional segments.  If you check out the blog on his BrentonBrown.com website you will also find some live videos that are worth a look along with some thoughts and reflections from one of the leading worship songwriters.

KIm Gentes, a worship leader in Arizona has put together a collection of quality video guitar lessons that feature some of the classic Vineyard songs. He also includes instruction for "Meet with Me" by Lamont Hiebert.  While Gentes isn't the best known worship leader on this list, the instruction is clear and most of the videos show clearly what both the left and right hands are playing.  Many of the techniques in these guitar lessons can be transferred to other songs.

Beginning guitar instruction is pretty much the same for most styles of music. There are many resources on the Internet. Here is a basic fingerpicking lesson. This could also be helpful for people who have played for a while and can strum well, but haven't ever mastered fingerpicking accompaniments. For absolute beginners here are some simple guitar chord diagrams from another Hubpages contributor.