How do I learn to play an acoustic guitar?

How about this - learn a few cords, and then try to find people to jam with (patient people) or just sit in with people who are jamming, and watch. Don't do what I did, which was to learn guitar - beyond simple chords - by a massive frontal attack of trial and error. Endless experimentation. There are upsides to this though - treating guitar practice as exploration and play will likely give you a "voice" on the instrument which is unlike that of any other guitarist. I might sound somewhat like Leo Kottke and somewhat like Michael Hedges, but distinctly different too. One pointed suggestion : rather than focussing on learning on specific music, try learning lots of technique - chords, alternate chords, different voicings, styles of strumming, picking (classical vs. newer hybrid techniques for steel guitar - and then there's always Flamenco!) Learn scales, and how to transpose chords. Get a second or third guitar - they're cheap! - and keep those tuned in alternate tunings. Dropped D, Open G, whatever. Make up your own! That's what Nick Drake did- and look at where it got him (well, he's dead. But his tunings were wonderful). I once spent four years straight playing only in open G. It's a nice tuning for fast, complex picking and bottleneck slide guitar, especially on a twelve string. Strong hands and fingers are a must (see the "strong hands" AskMeta question from two or three days ago). Also, I've developed a weird "punctuated learning" style which seems to maximize my efforts to develop my playing - I play a lot for a day or two, put the guitar down for a week or even a month...... Somehow, my overall grasp of the instrument (if not my specific technical prowess) seems to improve in the intervals of not playing. I've put the instrument down for as long as a year at a time, but somehow my playing is, with several days practice and remembrance, always better - deeper. This reflects my acquisition, I suspect, of wisdom. This punctuated non-playing also prevents my guitar hobby from becoming obsessive. That, I currently reserve for Metafilter. I'm taking it slow. By the time I'm fifty or fifty-five, I reckon, I'll be a fine guitarist.

get a nice little tuner as well Honestly, this is the most important thing you can learn when it comes to music. I went six months from having my first guitar, to buying my first tuner. It was mostly wasted time.

Get a metronome as well, learning to play to a beat early on will help a lot. If you can already learn music perhaps you might not be served too well by tablature. But this all depends on the type of music you'd like to learn. Definitely go for the private lessons, even if it's with the clear intention of just getting up to speed on the basics with some pointers on where to go after that.

I found the Guitar for Dummies DVD on Netflix, so I added it to my queue. Got it last night. I know a chord!

No one mentions http://www.olga.net/? The original and best.

See http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/28085 also.

That looks interesting, tdismukes. What about http://guitarvideos.com/video/401.htm?

http://www.guitarvideos.com/ has some of the best audio and video lessons I've come across. There's a lot of good information, even in the beginner courses.

I never took lessons on guitar - I've been playing about ten years now. However, I did also have 12 years of learning the violin before I got a guitar, with gave me a good grounding in musical theory - do you have any experience in music theory? Do you understand what Csus4 or harmonic minor means? These bits of understanding of how music worked helped me greatly on guitar, because it's so easy to think of things in terms of intervals and transposing. If you can learn to think of things in these terms rather than mathematically playing "6th fret, 2nd string...3rd fret, 1st string..." if can help you a lot. I found some of the "Learn to play Blues Guitar"..."Learn to play Rock Guitar" kind of books enormously helpful when I started out. They helped me learn some of the important chords and scales, and it makes playing other songs and writing your own much easier. What sort of geeetar did you get, by the way?