New guitarists are spoiled for choice when it comes to leaning the instrument. It used to be that you had to either take expensive lessons, or else try to find a good guitar book - and there were a lot of bad guitar books.
Luckily, these days you’re spoiled for choice as far as learning options. In addition to great websites like KillerGuitarRigs.com which are full of information about guitars, techniques, theory etc, guitarists have hundreds of thousands of hours of videos available to them on YouTube to learn everything there is to learn about the guitar.
However, YouTube has a huge drawback - there is little or no structure around lessons available. While YouTube can be awesome for zeroing in on one area of your playing that needs improvement, it’s often quite worthless when it comes to getting you from zero to amateur, amateur to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced.
While many YouTubers have spent huge amounts of time making channels that cover things are looking for, almost none of them have gone to the trouble to give their viewers a distinct path to follow from one video the next and to the next after that.
The result is guitarists who have an odd bag of tricks that don’t necessarily fit together - the kind of guys who know how to sweep pick but couldn’t play a G chord to save their lives.
It’s for this reason that I would always suggest guitarists supplement their steady diet of YouTube with a good all around guitarist book, or better yet some lessons with a local. The lessons have the added benifit of being able to tell you when you’ve got somehting basic wrong, like holding the pick backwards.
With the right path, some patience and a little dedication, most people will find themselves level well enought to play with others in no time. And then the real fun begins…