Answering this question is as much about attitude as music history. Rock guitar is any six-string guitar used to play rock-and-roll, punk, or other forms of modern popular music. From Eddie Van Halen to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page to Kurt Cobain, rock guitar has gone through fast evolutionary growth and continues to inspire new musical exploration today. Rock guitarists typically play on an electric guitar, which can handle the bending, distortion, heavy strumming, and screaming solos associated with the genre. An electric guitar also has less tension in the strings than an acoustic guitar. This allows you to play faster with greater ease, as well as bend strings farther. Some mainstays of rock guitar include power chords, bent notes, loud volume levels, and dissonance.

Rock guitar provides a strong foundation to learn other types of guitar. The genre itself is enormous, with large numbers of songs of all skill levels. This means the chance to play songs you love is 100%, and playing music you love is crucial to growth and sticking with your instrument. Rock songs are also generally easy to learn. With three to four chords, you can play thousands of classics. And with a single scale — the minor pentatonic, in the case of rock — you can begin to learn lead guitar solos. Rock skills translate to other genres like pop, blues, country, and more. Most importantly, rock guitar focuses a lot on feel. When you can play music with feeling, you are immediately a captivating performer to watch. Finally, rock guitar is written out in tablature, which is easy to learn and everywhere on the internet.