14 Questions You Might Have About Teaching Guitar

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14 Questions You Might Have About Teaching Guitar

A lot of guitar players look to teaching guitar as a way to make a part-time, or even full-time, income. Today we’ll look at 14 questions prospective guitar teachers have.

How Do I Teach Effectively?

This is one of the most important questions when it comes to teaching guitar - how to do the actual teaching.

Teaching boils down to effective communication, you have to understand:

Where the student wants to get to
Where the student is currently at in their understanding and ability to
How to break down the process of getting from where they are at to where they want to be
How to present that information to them in a way they can understand
How to train them on that information so they can perform the ideas on guitar

Being able to teach effectively is a skill that, like any skill, takes time to learn and practice. But, like any skill, it is something that you can learn.

Any guitar player with patience, a bit of empathy and compassion for their students can learn the skills necessary to become an effective teacher.

What Should I Include in Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced Curriculums?

Something all teachers need to do is build a bank of materials that they will draw from for lessons. This bank of lessons can include custom made materials, books and songs.

When it comes to deciding what is included in your curriculum, there are going to be two main categories:

Core skills
Special interests

Core Skills

When it comes to learning guitar, there are going to be things that every students needs to learn, for example:

How to play open chords
Where the notes are
How to strum basic rhythms
How to play barre chords
How to play power chords
How to play in time

And your curriculum is going to want to be built around those skills.

Which skills are included at which level is broadly common sense - you’ll teach how to strum quarter notes and eighth notes before you teach advanced flamenco patterns. You’ll teach the minor pentatonic scale before you teach Bad Horsie by Steve Vai.

Deciding exactly what you include at each level can be determined with a bit of trial and error - you’ll quickly figure out which order of topics is most effective for the students you are teaching.

Special Interests

Special interests could include particular songs and genres a student will want to learn and the level they want to reach.

For example, every student will benefit from learning power chords at an early stage, but some students will want to learn Iron Maiden songs, and some students will want to learn Taylor Swift songs (Tip: Getting a student to play along with their favourite songs, even if it’s a simplified version, is a huge motivation boost for them).

Some students will want to learn common practice period theory and apply it to writing their own music, and some students will want to learn just enough theory to write punk songs.

Sometimes students will be happy smashing through pentatonic scales to jam with their friends, and some students will want to learn how to use 3 note per string scales and improvise over secondary dominant chords.

Special interest topics will be more tailored to individual students in terms of what is assigned to that student, but, you will still be able to create curriculums around the topics. What I mean is, some students will want to learn 3 note per string scales, some will be happy with just doing a pentatonic box or two. If a student learns a particular topic will be down to that student, but how it is taught and the order in which topics are taught is going to be universal and part of a curriculum you develop.

How Do I Assess A Student’s Skill Level?

This is a relatively easy question to answer:

Look at a broad range of skills a student could have
Work out a simple test to see if they can perform those skills / understand those skills
Take them through a series of tests and see where they get stuck

Let’s look at an example.

You have a new student who has been playing for three years. They say they can play a few chords and songs. They say they want to be more proficient at playing songs, play songs more reliably and learn more songs of a particular country artist they like.

Let’s think of a range of skills that it sounds like that have, and that they want to have. We could ask them to do the following:

Write down a simple chord progression. Ask them to play it using open chords.
Ask them to play it using barre chords
Depending on the barre chords they use, ask them to play it again using different shapes
Ask them to perform a song they know - look at how they perform it, is the timing accurate, are the chords ringing out clearly. Do they know what chords they are playing, or are they blindly copying shapes from a tab?
Write down a simple rhythm. Ask them to strum it.
Ask them what they find frustrating and what they struggle with

As the student is working through the above tasks, look and listen to what they do. Take some notes. If they get stuck, help them.

It’s worth bearing in mind that they may have learned different terminology for particular ideas or techniques and you’ll have to work with that.

Don’t be afraid of putting the student, or prospective student, through a series of exercises to see where they fall apart.

Now, with beginner students this usually isn’t necessary, as everyone starts from zero. But with self-taught intermediate players this is an important process, as you will usually find that they have an imbalance of skills. This imbalance can be quite extreme - for example, they might be able to play a Steve Vai solo, but not understand what a minor third is in a chord.

Something that’s important to note here is you should never take a students word for what they can do/understand. Take their word as a guideline, but always test! So if a student says they can play E shape barre chords, ask them to play G, A, D using those shape barre chords and see what they do.

How Do I Keep Students Motivated and Engaged?

This is simultaneously easy and difficult.

As with anything in life, we can break this down into things you can influence, and things you can’t influence

Let’s start with what’s difficult - which is the things that are outside of your ability to influence.

Some students won’t practice. That’s ok.

At some point or another, students will have stuff going on in their lives - they’ll have a fight with their partner, they’ll have trouble at work, something will be going on. That’s ok.

When students aer facing these sort of problems, they are not going to feel motivated to practice - who would? And that’s ok.

You can’t fix their home/work/social life, but you can provide an environment where they can turn up, do something and have fun.

Now, what is inside your ability to influence?

What you do in lessons.

How you break down material.

The best way to keep a student motivated is to:

Have fun in the lesson
Help them make progress and do things they couldn’t do before
Over time, expand their musical horizons

Have Fun In The Lesson

If you are teaching children, the child’s parents will pick them up after the lesson. The first question every parent will ask their child is “Did you have fun?”. The more the answer is “yes” the more lessons the parent will pay for. When the answer stars to become “no”, the parent will stop paying for lessons.

Adults are more or less the same. They want to have fun. They don’t want to feel like they’re on a slave galley with their teacher cracking the whip.

But, in order to do “stuff” on the guitar, skills have to be learned and trained.

You don’t want to have a lesson where the student sits with a metronome practising scales for 60 minutes. At the same time, you don’t want to screw about for 60 minutes.

So you need to plan lessons with some balance. Usually the following format works well:

Present a small amount of new material
Work and train that material
Work on something fun - a song they want to learn, improvisation etc

And making sure all three work together is great, but not always necessary.

This makes sure the student works on the skills they need to work on and also leaves the lesson on an emotional high.

Help Them Make Progress

When a student struggles to play simple chords for three years, and after 3 months of lessons with you they are flying through those simple chords, googling tabs and learning songs, they are going to keep coming back for lessons.

The key to keeping students motivated is to help them consistently progress - even if it is by small amounts.

A fundamental part of being a human being is the desire to grown and improve. Help students achieve that with their guitar playing and they’ll keep coming back.

Now, this won’t work for every student. Students that do no practice outside of lessons, or insist on practising anything except what you give them cannot be helped. And that’s ok.

But for students that want to be a student and do “student things”, like practice their lessons, as long as you help them improve, they’ll stay motivated.

Expand Their Musical Horizons

There is a Tony Robbins quote I love:

Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10

And guitar students are no exception.

And it makes sense.

Someone who is struggling to play an Em open chord isn’t going to be thinking about composing a 4 part chorale, or improvising with arpeggios and scales.

But over time, as you help them progress, they will be able to look back and see how far they’ve come.

At which point you can say: “When you started, did you ever imagine you would be working on something like this?”.

They’ll realise the answer is “no” and be motivated to keep working with you long term and also be more interested in taking on more complex challenges with their guitar playing and music.

Should I Teach In Person Or Online?

I recommend every guitar teacher starts with teaching in person. This is because, from a purely teaching perspective, it is much easier to interact with and help the student in person than it is online.

Once you have learned teaching skills, common pitfalls and challenges that students face and effective methods for teaching; moving online or adding an online component/option to your teaching can be effective; but in person is always easier to start with.

There is an entire article on the benefits and challenges of teaching in person and online here.

How Do I Set My Rate?

This is a nerve-wracking topic for every new teacher.

However, the answer is simple. Look at what teachers in your area are teaching and use a price that’s vaguely similar.

As you get more experienced, create a better environment and get better results from your students you can increase the price.

Start about average, then slowly increase the prices year by year.

Where Do I Find Students?

A lot of new guitar teachers will rely on agencies to find students for them. While this can get you a handful of students, long term it’s a poor option which I’ve gone over in detail here.

The easiest way to get started is using your personal network - simply, tell people you know that you’re starting teaching and looking for students. Talk to your friends and family, post on your personal social media and if you know any local business people ask if you can put an advert up in their shop, business, company bulletin etc.

Long term, you want to learn how to do paid advertising and build a reputation in your local community.

Paid advertising is a skill that a lot of teachers are reluctant to learn, and if they do try it out they almost always do it wrong (re-enforcing their fear of it), but when done right it allows you to consistently get students. Paid advertising is not a complex skill, but it does require thinking that many find unconventional at first.

But fortunately, as a local guitar teacher, the competition in this space is very weak.

Once you get the hang of it, you may find yourself being annoyed at your phone ringing all the time and struggling to fit students into your schedule!

What Materials/Books/Apps Should I Use?

The best way to get started is to the use the simplest solution.

Teach your students in person and write down what they need to know as your go in lessons.

You’ll quickly find that there are things you are repeating - for example, you always need to draw the same chord diagrams, you’re repeatedly using the same tabs etc.

Write these down using something like Goodnotes, export as a PDF and then you can print it out for each student rather than write it out by hand.

A solution like this is surprisingly effective.

You can also use software to write out diagrams and tabs with a more professional look, programs such as:

Guitar Pro
Neck Diagrams

Will cover all your guitar related needs.

You may want to create backing tracks for your students, in which case a DAW will be useful.

There are a ton of books you can use for teaching, to either supplement or replace materials of your own. In fact, a lot of teachers will only use books, and lessons are simply guiding the student through the book. Personally, I don’t recommend this, and I think books should be used to supplement lessons or to help with specialist subjects.

How Do I Market Myself As A Guitar Teacher?

All new guitar teachers make the same mistake when they start marketing themselves. They talk about:

Their qualifications
How long they’ve been playing for
That they teach all styles
What their prices are

What you should be talking about is things the potential student cares about, can understand and relate to:

You specialise in a certain style
You can help them fix specific problems they are having with their playing
You’ve helped other students like them before (if this is true)
You can help them make progress

To get started you don’t need anything. Reach out to people you personally know and let them know what you are doing.

The next step up from that is creating some simple social media pages for your local teaching - not for yourself as a musician. In fact, you don’t need any social media or internet presence of your playing in order to become a local guitar teacher.

Your social media pages don’t need 1000s of followers. They are a way for people to do a little background research on you and to see that you exist.

Long term you’ll want a website that showcases your teaching/your school. These are relatively easy to make these days - there are plenty of templates that you can use. A teaching website only needs a few simple things:

Text on who you can help and how you can help them
A little background on yourself
Some photos
A contact form

You’ll also want to register on some review websites and start building reviews.

How Do I Handle Cancellations And Late Payments?

To handle cancellations, you need a cancellation policy. 24 to 48 hours notice is a standard policy. How strictly you enforce it is up to you, but usually, you want to be fairly strict. If you let people re-arrange lessons all the time, they will do so and it wastes a huge amount of your time and creates a logistics overhead of constantly re-arranging lessons.

You’ll want students to pay in advance for a small block of lessons, or a month of lessons, so that enforcing your cancellation policy is easy.

Late payments are a pain. You have to be strict about not delivering lessons that are not paid for. If a student has not paid, and they turn up for a lesson, you have to tell them no lesson until they’ve paid - and that the current lesson is forfeit.

Of course, there are always exceptions - if someone has faced a sudden death in their family then you’ll want to be more lenient.

But for day-to-day lessons, being strict is the way to go.

If students cannot respect simple rules and your time, then you probably don’t want them as a student.

Of course, the best way to deal with this is to have a business model and systems that prevent any of these problems from arising in the first place. As a business owner (which is how you have to think of yourself, even if you’re a one-man show), part of your job is to fix problems as they come up and prevent them from happening again.

These problems are quite easy to prevent with the right systems and this is something that we cover in the Guitar Teacher Training program.

Am I Qualified To Teach?

This is something that we covered extensively in this article on guitar teaching qualifications.

The short answer is: If you are significantly more advanced in ability than the level you want to teach, and you genuinely care about the student and actively try to help them, you’re qualified and you’ll figure it out.

Will I Enjoy Teaching, Or Will It Burn Me Out?

There are two parts to this question:

The type of person you are
The way you deliver lessons

And the two parts interact with each other.

The Type Of Person You Are

From having met a lot of guitar teachers from around the world, I’ve noticed that the ones that tend to do best are not the teachers that are the most accomplished musicians, but the teachers who are easy people to get along with, the people that socialise easily with others and find it easy to make friends.

Teaching guitar is a people oriented service business. You meet a lot of people and will be interacting with people, whether it’s prospective students on the phone or teaching your students in person.

Most students do not want to become ultra advanced players and, whether consciously or not, will place a high premium on their teacher being someone they enjoy talking to and get along with.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be a huge extrovert. I would describe myself as an introvert, so I had to use a teaching model that would somewhat limit my interaction with students - I knew that I couldn’t be teaching every day for hours and hours as this would burn me out and leave me feeling exhausted. So I used such a model.

If you are an extrovert and you thrive on social interaction, then having a full teaching schedule that lets you teach as many students as possible might be something that you want.

Which is right or wrong depends on who you are and what you want. There are ways to succeed in either scenario - and having limited hours for teaching does not necessarily mean limiting your income.

The Way You Deliver Lessons

The traditional teaching model is 1-2-1 lessons. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that having a high income requires either:

Teaching a LOT of students each week
Charging a high amount for lessons
Or maybe both!

If you are a more introverted type of person, then using this type of teaching model may leave you feeling quite burned out. Even if you are an extrovert, teaching 10-15 people a day several days a week can be exhausting.

There are other business models you can use, and this is something that you can be a bit creative with. At one point I was teaching 3 evenings a week and taking the first week of every month off and making a full-time income from teaching.

As long as you are actively helping students, the exact format you use to help them doesn’t matter too much. Having said that, some teaching formats are easier to use than others, and the simpler the format the easier it will be to implement - and for your students to understand!

How Do I Handle Difficult Or Unmotivated Students?

Answering this question properly requires some nuance:

Is this student an adult or a child?
Is this student facing difficult life challenges?
Is this student the wrong type of person to take lessons with you?

If a child is just starting lessons, it might take some time for them to progress enough to do something that they find truly exciting. Some students, especially early teenagers, can even take years to develop a real interest and self-motivating to practice properly at home in between lessons.

Some adults may find some areas of lessons highly interesting and others a bit boring, and as such their practice ends up being skewed to what they find fun.

Some adults may want to screw around in lessons and act like children!

In the case of children and early teenagers, you have to accept that they may be unmotivated for possibly years, and have appropriate measures in place to mitigate this.

Ultimately, it comes down to: Do you want to teach this person or not?

There is nothing wrong with deciding you don’t want to teach a particular person. You don’t have to be mean or nasty about it - just simply and matter of fact communicate that you’ll no longer teach them. Maybe recommend some alternative teachers in your local area.

Some students might be very social in lessons to the point of its hard to get anything done. In a one to one environment that’s fine - if that’s what they want to pay you for, let them.

In group environments, some students might be highly disruptive. In this case, you’ll have to decide what you do - you can’t let them be disruptive for all your students, that’s unfair. You might have to have a private word with them to discuss the situation, or let them go as a student.

If a student doesn’t want to practice, they won’t. Not everyone is the right person to take lessons with you.

Both of these situations are ok - what you do will depend on who you are, how you teach and what you want to get out of teaching.

Conclusion

This is a brief overview of some common questions that guitar players have when looking to start teaching guitar.

I’ve tried to answer based on my own experiences teaching.

We go into much more detail with concrete “do this then do that” solutions in the Guitar Teacher Training Program.