The Best Guitar Courses Online: I've Seen It All & Here's What I Think.....

The intermediate or “advanced beginner” stage is where building better technique comes into play.

Sometimes the “advanced beginner” stage of learning overlaps with intermediate without any noticeable boundary. 

If you can play many of the standard riffs of rock, know some basic scales like pentatonic and major, and are acquainted with a vast array of playing techniques like legato and fingerpicking, then I’d say it’s fair that you’re at the intermediate level

Many intermediate courses will be focused on improving your alternate picking, legato, and fretboard knowledge. I have many strong opinions about fretboard knowledge learning I’ll share below. 

You’ll also dive deeper into riffs from funk, blues, neo-soul, metal, and hard rock that’ll be more demanding on your right hand accuracy. 

Anyways, here’s the courses and/or websites: 

• Paul David 
• Pickup Music
• Guitar Tricks
• [Best Value] Truefire
• Guitareo
• Breakthrough Guitar
• Brandon D’eon 52 Week Guitar Player
• Michael Palmisano Guitargate
• Bernth. [Great patreon community with exercises galore!]

The biggest problem I’ve seen with nearly every book, article, youtube video, and course you see here is that it’s ALL ABOUT LICKS! 

There is often no context, no breakdown, and hardly any suggestion about how to use them. That’s why I personally have been let down on the real fretboard knowledge that’s been available nearly everywhere. 

And this time, I can say I’ve been through most of these in some shape or form. 

Paul David has a great YouTube channel that I imagine the same quality video production will come into play. I’ve personally felt his material is too much on the “info-tainment” side. 

Pickup Music had tons of licks from great players like Isiah Sharkey and Nicklas Myhre to rip off, but it had that classic problem nearly everywhere that I mentioned. 

I bought a Jason Richardson course on Guitareo that came out this year of 2025, and it was lots of modal scale patterns I’d seen before. It also was very well edited with a smooth, sleek website. 

And, I’ve bought lots of Truefire courses though and you can learn a ton from there, but it is very overwhelming to go through. At my level of playing and fretboard knowledge, I could see a lot of what Orianthi, Greg Koch, Shane Theriot, and Jennifer Batten are all doing, and how to internalize that with my vocabulary. 

I can go on and on, but the big point is that none of these courses, as far as I can tell, help you develop a system for internalizing all of these licks, and later being able to use them in your improvising. 

Here’s some other points to leave you with regarding intermediate guitar learning: 

• When it comes to building your technique, yes videos are the best way. You’ll want good angles on both hands, as well as an instructor who can break down the little movements needed to play the licks they talk about
• A lot of intermediate courses are going to cover the classic lead guitar playing techniques like alternate picking, legato, tapping, sweep picking, and applied music theory
• If you are interested in learning licks, try to get acquainted with the greats of the genre you’re learning this licks from. It’s also a good idea to learn enough theory to understand how the backing chord progressions are working
• Have a clear set goal for buying an intermediate course like playing faster and cleaner, exploring a new genre, gaining the chops to play more advanced, or to learn more of the inner workings of the fretboard