Once upon a time, the alternative to guitar lessons with a teacher was learning from a book. Books contain more information than any one teacher knows but they can't lead by example. A guitar tutor book contains lessons but it can't show you how to hold the guitar or how to move your hand and arm to make a difficult chord fingering.

One thing that lessons with a guitar teacher can give you is the feeling that you have done a good job. That somebody appreciates the efforts you have been making. Your family and neighbors might be full of verbal encouragement but you know they wince every time they see you pick up your guitar. But your guitar teacher will give you credit when credit is due.

Guitar lessons in books can't give you that kind of encouragement but they are packed with more information than any one guitar teacher can teach. Guitar lessons on DVD give an extra dimension to information we find in books. A DVD contains video of a guitarist showing his hands playing the scale, chord or song that he is teaching.

Another thing in favor of guitar lessons on DVD is that DVDs are an ideal way to teach specialized areas of guitar playing. Jazz Rock Mastery by Scott Henderson is a guitar lesson DVD that aims at the already seasoned guitar player who needs to further his knowledge and technique, and Blues With Brain by Chuck D'Aloia gives the aspiring blues guitar students years worth of material to work with. Both of these DVDs impart information and instruction that could not be passed on by the written word alone.

There are well-known guitar courses that include DVDs along with printed books. Amazing Guitar Secrets has two DVDs, a CD and ten books. This is a general guitar lessons course that benefits beginners, intermediate and advanced level guitar students. Learn And Master Guitar, the one guitar lesson course that everybody seems to recommend, has a choice of ten or twenty DVDs along with a book and audio tracks to play along with.

DVD guitar lessons give us the opportunity to see professional guitar players show us how it's done plus many DVD lessons feature extreme close-ups of the teacher's left and right hands so we can get every little movement involved in picking, hammering and chord changing.

This brief survey of a few different types of guitar lessons should help you sort out in your own mind what kind of guitar lessons will give you the kind of material you need so that you can learn to play the guitar.