While playing the guitar can be a pretty cool experience, teaching your fingers to find their way around a fretboard can seem the very opposite of cool – bleeding fingers, aching knuckles and the loneliness as you slave away. If you are going to go through all of that, at least, you should be allowed a sense of inspiration, hope and purpose to keep you company. While you could go sign up to learn with a professional teacher, you do know that pretty soon, perhaps in just a month, what you paid the teacher could very well add up to more than the price you paid for your first guitar. That’s where software guitar lessons come in – you get to spend as much time as you want being taught to handle the coolest instrument on the planet, you do that at your own pace, and you never need to be worried about the time or the money takes.

Let’s start out by looking at the standard well-respected guitar packages. You can expect most software guitar lessons to cost around what you would expect to pay for just one regular guitar lesson – about $50. But there do exist a few well-endowed packages that cost in excess of $200 that intermediate guitar enthusiasts really rave about. A guitar lessons package usually does its teaching with clear close-up-shot videos of professional teachers laying out the principles of how it’s done, with actual playing. You also get an online chord dictionary usually that shows you pictorials of how you play chords on a fretboard, a software metronome, and a software tutor to help with one of the toughest parts of learning – tightening and tuning guitar strings just so.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. When you go in the store for the best package of guitar lessons to suit your needs, what would you look for? To begin with, you aren’t looking for something that’ll lick you into shape and turn you into a virtuoso guitarist. What you want is something that will help you enjoy the first few months you spend with your instrument, and that will teach you a few of the basics without rushing you. For this, you need to find something that’s easy to use, that gives you plenty of practice tools and exercises, and isn’t too elementary that you would get bored with it.

With these in mind, let’s look at some of the best software guitar lessons packages they have on the shelves right about now. Charanga Software’s Guitar Coach Deluxe is one of my favorites. It teaches you to play classical guitar and it does this out of the six CDs in the package. It has a CD completely given to teaching you to their basics of the guitar, and the others teach you specific chords and songs. Each specific technique comes with a video of a live guitarist showing you exactly how it’s done. It lets you play along with each lesson, and you get to record your performance. For all this, you pay a grand total of $40.

eMedia’s Guitar Method teaches you to play the guitar – electric or acoustic – and features the work of PhD guitar instructor Kevin Gary. It has more than 150 lessons, and happily, they really go into specifics like how to pick the strings and how to play the chords. The chord dictionary comes with attached sound clips so that you can hear exactly how it’s supposed to be done. I love the way it tries to teach you how to enjoy guitar without needing the software’s handholding all the time. The lessons themselves are just wonderfully explained and laid out, you get all of this for $60.

But what if you aren’t a real beginner, and you need guitar lessons that are a little more in-depth. Guitar Magic Evolution is your thing then; this package goes into guitar theory, and the esoteric world of chord formations. They offer 170 lessons, dozens of songs and revealing videos.

My choice for the beginner would then be eMedia’s Guitar Method. And for an advanced learner, Guitar Magic Evolution is hard to beat.

I’ll come clean any day – I’m addicted to music, and I’m proud of it. As much as I would like to get my MP3 music downloads off a torrent or a peer-to-peer site, I’m afraid that I’m going to be in hock for $100,000 the day I’m caught. So if there is any description that I’d like on my tombstone, it could be “an iPod addict who’d like nothing better to do find somewhere great for cheap or free MP3 music downloads”. Let’s get the free ones that I’ve discovered out of the way. AOL Radio, SHOUTcast, AOL Music Weekly CD Listening Party and Spinner’s MP3 of the Day are wonderful for a couple of free crumbs every now and then. But for my regular stuff, this is where I go.

At first glance, Rhapsody looks like an offer that he could not possibly want more out of. You pay your few dollars (between $10 a month and $15 a month), and stream all the music you could ever want on your computer or your phone; they have nearly ten million songs, and all of it is practically in your mobile device at any time. You can even set up an online library right on Rhapsody to listen to your unlimited subscription downloads. If you want to own your MP3 music downloads, it’ll cost you something like 69 cents. So all of this seems fine; what is my gripe? To begin with, Rhapsody hates the Mac. You can use it on the Mac, but everything is so badly designed for anything but the PC. It also, the whole subscription streaming service ends up charging me several dollars every month for the rest of my life. I’ll never get a song the moment I stop paying. And may confine in a little secret? Those tantalizing unlimited subscription downloads? I never found out how to actually get them.

Grooveshark is a great and innovative option; and the interface is basically that of a playlist; but it tries to turn you into your own DJ. It works perfectly, signing up is quick and painless, and you can look at what everyone else has on their playlist.

eMusic has about 7 million songs, and you get to buy songs to keep for about 41 cents each. What am I complaining about? You don’t buy these mp3 music downloads
one at a time; you pay for 75 songs every month, whether you download them or not. And your quota doesn’t roll over to the following month.

Pandora is somewhat different; it finds out what you want, based on what you already like. It conjures this information based on its input from the Music Genome Project, and you even have an iPhone app to go with it. Pandora comes up with suggestions all the time, and once you understand which ones to use and which ones to leave alone, Pandora gives you great discoveries. You can buy the songs you want, and it’s cheap.

I happen to like Zune Pass best of all – sometimes even better than iTunes. You pay a flat $15 a month fee; you can listen and stream as much as your little heart desires, and you get 10 DRM free MP3 music downloads every month. To me, that’s a deal that can’t be beat.