Is it better to get guitar lessons or be self taught?
I think private lessons from a good teacher are a great way to start. You need to get the fundamentals down well. It’s certainly possible to learn to play guitar on your own, but I think most people who do that skip the fundamental (aka “boring”) stuff and skip right to learning to read tabs and copying their favorite artists. If you do decide to learn on your own, I’d still recommend a good series of lessons books or video tutorials that take you through a proven method starting with basics and working up from there. You need to learn and understand music theory, scales, modes, chord theory, etc to be a good guitarist. Yes, anybody can get a guitar and look at a picture that says where to put each finger and practice until they can play a few songs, but if you want to be a really good guitarist it requires more than that.
