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Part of my job as a guitar teacher is curating songs that my students might like to play. While some students know exactly what they want to learn and enthusiastically pursue every item on their ever-growing to-learn list, others just want to know what songs theyre supposed to learn. For better or worse, music isnt meant to be learned the way we learn math or physics; the songs youre supposed to learn dont exist. Unless youre studying theory, there is no linear path to mastery. The best path you can take is the one youre most excited about. Youll get far better results from trying to learn a song you love that might seem too difficult for you right now than from learning an easier, less exciting song your teacher assigns.

So, to inspire my students, Ive learn guitar been maintaining the following huge list of songs that are popular to play on guitar. (Thanks to Reddits /r/Guitar community for helping me expand the list.) Any style, any difficulty. Many of my students dont sing, so Im focusing on songs that are recognizable from the guitar part alone. (I also have a huge database of strum-and-sing style tunes in my Beginners Song Browser.)

Click the song title to hear it on YouTube. When you find a song you want to learn, click the Lesson link to watch a video lesson on how to play it. Need more help? Make a list of the songs you want to learn from this page, and bring it to your guitar teacher. Dont have a teacher? I teach Skype lessons, and Id be happy to walk you through any (or all) of these songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGekKM2mTrA

This is a work in progress, so feel free to comment on any links that have gone bad or songs that I missed.

Heres a Spotify playlist with all these songs in it.