How To Become A Guitar Teacher

How To Become A Guitar Teacher – A Guide

There are many people who consider teaching guitar and the Internet is awash with “how to become a guitar teacher” articles. There are good and bad teachers all over the world, so if you are thinking about adding yourself to these ranks, then hopefully this guide will help add you to the former and not the later description.

I have over the years had people phoning me up not for guitar lessons, but to ask how much I make a year because it seems a pretty easy job and they’d like to do it! Yes, I really have. Talk about having their priorities wrong. To be a great instrumental teacher, first and foremost you must have a love of the instrument you teach as well as music in general. You must also be a very good player and crucially be able to communicate to the student from your own experience how they in turn can develop their skills.

So, when thinking about this concept of good and bad teachers, how can we define what makes a good or a bad guitar tutor?

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What Skills Are Needed To Teach Playing Guitar?

I have tried to make the following list as comprehensive as I can and hopefully not left to much out. So, here is a list in no particular order.

THE GUITAR TEACHERS MUST KNOW LIST

• Be able to play your instrument in a wide variety of musical genres to a very high degree.
• You should be a good listener.
• You need to be able to both listen and interpret what the student is communicating to you. What they say and what they mean are not always the same thing.
• Strong communication skills are a must.
• Have the ability to break down playing and learning processes to small manageable chunks which are in a thought through order.
• Be able to motivate either using (figuratively speaking) a hand on the shoulder or a kick up the backside.
• Have a deep or at least a deepening understanding of the history of your instrument and its context within music.
• Be able to gauge where a student is in terms of their development, skills and learning.
• Have a wide repertoire at your fingertips for the style(s) of music you teach for demonstration, influencing and suggestion.
• Have a patient countenance.
• Understand that it’s not about you, it’s about them.
• Have the ability to enthuse and instill inspiration and enthusiasm.
• Being able to read music in my view is a must but to be fair, there are many examples of wonderful teachers who do not read and still inspire and produce great players.
• A contentious point and not everyone will agree with it, but I feel that teachers should also be players. The more experience you have of playing in real world scenarios, the more you have to share with your students.
• Having a wide range of musical resources at your disposal. Including, but not limited to guitar music (notation), mp3 files, music books etc.
• In today’s world a computer and playback facilities would be a very good idea.

Don’t Worry If You Don’t Tick All The Boxes

Hopefully reading through the list you can recognise some of these attributes and skills
within yourself. You don’t need to possess all these skills right away, but building them up over a period of time will be a considerable help.

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Teaching Complete Beginners Guitar

One of the big mistakes I have seen many teachers make when starting to teach new guitar students is giving too much material too quickly. You don’t want to overwhelm a new student. You need to give them small amounts of material that they can build on. Having a lesson plan either written down or in your head really will help with this. If the guitar player is very young, then this advice is even more important. Children will probably not have the confidence to tell you that you are going to fast. They don’t take everything in or struggle to keep up and they lose heart. A first guitar lesson with a child for example would probably consist of the following.

• Getting to know them and putting them at ease.
• Describing the parts of the guitar, the string names and holding the instrument.
• How to tune the guitar would be covered but at a basic level.
• At the end of the lesson I would show them a couple of chords
• I would take these chords and show them how to change between them.

The Importance Of One To One Tuition

This last point above is important because nothing beats one to one tuition. You need to have at your disposal methods and ideas that either cannot be found online or information that is very relevant to the individual pupil you are teaching. You need to be able to build upon the basics that are found in thousands of video lessons, but personalise them for the student before you. If you can’t do this, why should the pupil come for guitar lessons?

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What To Expect From A Beginner Pupil?

After six lessons with a complete beginner I would expect them to be able know and name all the elements of the guitar. Be able to tune the guitar. They could play around five basic open string chords and move between them. Furthermore, they would know one or two simple tunes and have the technique to play a C major scale. This would be what I expected from them, but each person is an individual, so some would be able to do more, some less.

Teaching Individually Or In Groups?

For me, this is an easy question to answer. Group tuition can be attractive to the guitar teacher and guitar students as it offers the teacher higher levels of income for the same amount of time and reduced costs for the student. The problem with group guitar lessons is that you need to work to the pace of the slowest student. This in turn can hold back the players who pick things up faster. It’s not a great way of teaching. I have had to do it in college scenarios, however, it’s not an ideal solution. Nothing beats individual one to one guitar tuition. You want to learn how to be a guitar teacher, not be and expert in dealing enmass with large classroom situations.

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A Word About Child Protection

Although this article is about how to become a guitar teacher there are other considerations. You will know doubt be teaching young people or at least a good percentage of your pupil roster will be under the age of fifteen. I always ensure that with very young children a parent or guardian is present. This is not only for appearance’s sake, but it gives protection to me as the parent is right there at all times.

With so many child abuse stories now coming to the fore, you need to take this seriously. It may seem silly, but I don’t have any physical contact with any children I teach. For example, if I need to touch a finger to point the child to play on another fret or position on the fingerboard I will use the rubber end of a pencil to do so. This may seem like overkill, however, most schools now have a no contact policy and you should be aware of this.

Disclosure Certification

In Scotland any individual working with or teaching children can apply to Disclosure Scotland which runs the PVG – Protecting Vulnerable Groups scheme. After checks you will be certified to teach young people. Most countries now run something similar so it would do no harm for you to find out what your country or state has in place with regards teaching children.

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Best Setup For Your Guitar Tuition Studio

I speak about the equipment needed for practice in an article titled how to practice guitar and the advice in that article is also good for guitar tutors. The basic idea though is that you have everything you need at hand. This will include your printed resources, music stand, computer, printer, piano keyboard etc. You want to ensure that you have as much as you need to give your students the best possible experience.

How To Teach & Make A Living

This article has so far rightly dealt with teaching considerations, but you also as a tutor need to consider income. If teaching guitar is going to be more than just a hobby for you then you will need to consider tax implications. You need to keep track of all your income as well as ensuring that you track all your outgoings. Anything that you spent that can be justified as expenditure for your guitar tuition business can be put against any tax liability. For example, new strings, any equipment such as music stands etc., as well as music paper, computer paper. The list goes on.

Keep on the right side of the government because the fact is that if you don’t keep a record of everything they will come knocking on your door at some point and you don’t want that!

Making Sure You Get Paid For Teaching Guitar

The fact is that there will be students that you teach who will have a reason for not turning up. I’ve heard them all. Don’t feel well, haven’t practiced, something has turned up and so on. Every case has to be taken on it’s merits as sometimes unexpected things do happen and plans change, but this is your business. If you don’t set down some simple rules or understanding then your income will suffer. Here are my rules.

• Pupils pay up front for lessons in batches of six. I don’t as a rule let pupils pay as they go.
• Pupils must give me two days notice of cancellation or I will charge for the missed lesson.

That’s really it as far as rules are concerned for me. You will find that as the lessons have been paid up front people are more likely to turn up to get their monies worth. In this way you protect your income whilst providing a quality service and the normal friendliness of the lessons (hopefully) does not spill into the monetary aspect of the situation.

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How Should You Promote Your Lessons To Gain New Students?

The fact is that every student teacher relationship has a sell by date. In my opinion, the best time to get a new student is when they are aged around thirteen years old. At this age they are old enough to take instruction and are reaching an age when being good at something is very important. It also means that if they are committed to playing guitar they will stay with you for around five or more years. University or leaving school usually means they will fly the guitar nest. Obviously you will teach older people as well, but the reality is that they don’t usually last as long as teenagers. So you will need to replace the pupils you loose through natural wastage.

Using The Oldest Method Around

Word of mouth is often overlooked, however, personal recommendation is still in my opinion the best way of getting new pupils. One idea would be to print up recommendation slips. Offer them to your pupils and say that if anyone signs up for lessons they will receive a free lesson. This is a simple technique that works really well.

With the Internet there is no lack of local bulletin boards where you can advertise your teaching practice. The problem is that the competition is stiff if you don’t want to pay for advertising. A better idea would be to introduce yourself to your local music shop and see if you can do a reciprocal deal where you send them pupils for gear and they send you new pupils.

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Ways To Stand Out From Your Teaching Competition

The quality of your teaching and the knowledge and skills you bring will hopefully make you a stand out teacher. There are though a huge amount of people now teaching guitar and you need as many services and options available as possible to stand out from the crowd. One way of doing this is by offering to take people through exams. Offering to take people through a graded guitar exam system offers more than just the obvious; it also offers longevity of tuition. If your pupils enjoy the exam grade and pass then hopefully they will want to progress to the next exam grade meaning you have at least another three months of lessons.

The Most Important Piece Of Equipment & Skill You Need

In all my years of teaching guitar the fact is that I have only ever been asked if I have professional qualifications once. Yes, once! Quite astonishing. In most cases, your first point of contact with a potential new pupil will be via the phone. The phone is without doubt your most important piece of equipment and your ability to talk on the phone is the greatest skill you need to develop in engaging new business.

Most people want to know just two things and this is a problem. The things they want to know are:

• How much do the lessons cost?
• Where are you based and how far is that from their home?

Now, if you answer these questions right away I can guarantee that in most cases the potential pupil will say thanks and hang up then go away and try to find someone cheaper. This assumes that you’re not the cheapest teacher in your city or town. What you need to do is engage the potential new pupil through talking with them about what they are looking for etc. For example, ask them if they already have a guitar. Believe it or not, there have been many occasions when people have phoned me for lessons but don’t have a guitar. Ask them what kind of music they like and what they want to learn. Basically, keep them talking and build up a rapport with them before answering the only two questions they want answered.

You don’t have long to build up some sort of relationship but if you do then there is a much better chance you will get them to come for at least an introductory lesson.

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How Much Should You Charge?

This is a tricky question to answer. Everyone will have an idea of what they feel they are worth based on their experience, knowledge and previous work done. If you want to teach full time then you need to sit down and work out exactly how much you need to create an income that means you can both meet your bills and live a life that is in some way not impoverished.

Once you have worked out how much you need to earn on a weekly or monthly basis, you can then work out how many pupils you will need to meet this monetary target. The number of pupils you decide on will then help you create your hourly rate.

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Other Ways Of Earning Money

The big problem with teaching guitar is that the lines between business and personal relationships can become blurred. In deciding how to become a guitar teacher you also need to consider monetary reality. The hard nosed businessman part of you should, however, be charging for all activities connected with, but not explicitly centred around guitar tuition. Here are some ideas where you can charge additional fees as you see fit.

• Transcribing a song that a pupil wants to learn.
• Changing guitar strings.
• Going to music shops to give advice on buying a guitar or guitar gear.
• Creating backing tracks for practice outside of normal lesson material.
• Writing your own guitar tutor publication and selling to pupils.

Round Up & Final Thoughts

Hopefully you will have gained some new ideas and have the confidence on how to become a guitar teacher. My career has been split between performance, composition and tuition. The biggest part of this has been tuition; probably as high as sixty percent of my lifetime’s earning. Don’t ever listen to the old but wrong adage “those that can play, those that can’t teach”. It’s not true. Almost all musicians teach at some point and only a tiny percentage don’t need to teach and earn exclusively from performance. In most cases, this tiny percentage teach anyway on occasion as they have something to say. If you have any thoughts or feel I have missed something on how to become a guitar teacher then please leave your thoughts below. You will need to sign in to add a comment.

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