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 they’re supposed to learn. For better or worse, music isn’t meant to be learned the way we learn math or physics; the songs you’re supposed to learn don’t exist. Unless you’re studying theory, there is no linear path to mastery. The best path you can take is the one you’re most excited about. You’ll 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, I’ve been maintaining the following huge list of songs that are popular to play on guitar. (Thanks to Reddit’s /r/Guitar community for helping me expand the list.) Any style, any difficulty. Many of my students don’t sing, so I’m 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 Beginner’s 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. Don’t have a teacher? I teach Skype lessons, and I’d be happy to walk you through any (or all) of these songs.

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

Here’s a Spotify playlist with all these songs in it.