Besides music creation, the computer helps in so many different ways. You can use a spreadsheet to plot your practice time. You can create great-looking pages to promote your band. You can burn your own CDs at home and sell them at your gigs.

A popular piece of guitar software is a chord program that contains hundreds of chords in a database format. There are also shareware metronomes and scale learning programs. If you can think of it, chances are that someone has created software to help it. There is even software available on the Internet to help you learn guitar. If you have programming chops, you can create your own software to help your study skills. Teachers now give lessons via e-mail, making distance learning with professional musicians possible. Explore the Web to see what's out there. Look in Appendix A for some useful links.

Many students are excited at the amount of free tablature available online. It's possible to search for your favorite song and quickly find a text file containing the guitar parts. However, Internet tab is illegal, for starters, and more importantly it is grossly inaccurate. Tab like this is written by other students and is wrought with inaccuracies of chords and fingerings. While it may be convenient, you're much better off buying books from a music store for this. Not only are they professionally prepared and correctly written out, but you also help pay the musicians for their work.