Just about everyone is familiar with the ultra-popular rock guitar, from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and everything in between. The guitar reached its zenith of popularity and flexibility with rock and popular music, and it is within this genre that we can truly see how multi-faceted the guitar can be.
Certainly the most popular and most often heard guitar music falls into the Rock category. Chances are, if you’re listening to the radio, you’re listening to a guitar in a rock/pop context.
Primarily an electric guitar style, Rock guitar can be extremely diverse, ranging from the simple chord strumming of Folk-inflected music to the extremely loud and upbeat distorted guitar sounds of Punk and the highly technical and fast soloing techniques of Neo-classical Hard Rock.
Many students of Rock guitar would rather not learn how to read music or study music theory, and simply want to play their favorite songs.
Rock guitar lends itself perfectly to this approach, as scales and chords can be taught by sight, written in guitar tablature that requires no knowledge of music notation or theory. If you can read a chord chart, you can play it!