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I’ve been thinking of writing this article as a while, under the title of “Why your band will never make you rich”, but I thought the title I used is a bit more positive.

Most people who get into guitar professionally did so because they dreamed of their band blowing up and making money…

But they rarely sit down and think about the numbers involved in that. So let’s sit down with the numbers…

When I started teaching guitar, like all guitar teachers who get started, I struggled to find students.

So I did what seemed obvious, I went and signed to different agencies that would provide students.

And in every single case, I had problems.

Agency 1

This was your typical agency for new teachers, they would create a website for you on their domain, give you some lesson materials, some basic tax advice etc.

Not Being Good Enough To Teach Or Answer Students Questions

This is a common fear which is based on an assumption about the average type of student that you will be teaching.

Usually, as new teachers, we assume that the students we will be teaching are advanced guitarists wanting to learn advanced things, and as such we need to be absolute shred-demons in order to teach them.

This simply isn’t true. While there might be the occasional advanced student, the vast majority of students will be:

A lot of potential guitar teachers may think that the only way to teach guitar is online, after all, everyone is online.

But I hope to debunk that idea and show you that teaching locally makes more sense (to get started), and that if you do want to teach online, teaching locally is the best way to start.

## Who Is Your Competition?

This is a big consideration that people don’t think about. When you are teaching online, you are competing against every other guitar teacher, course and program in the world.

A reader of How to Practice Guitar and Train Your Creativity recently emailed me asking about how to apply some metronome exercises from my book to Piedmont style fingerpicking (often referred to as Travis Picking).

His Question

Considering your advice below, how would you apply it to songs?

I am learning to fingerpick blues, mostly Piedmont style (often erroneously called “Travis picking”).

The bass alternates between two bottom strings, usually either six and four or five and four, and are almost always quarter notes. Melody notes are on the top three strings, either played as quarter notes by pinches or eighth notes in between the bass notes.

Note: This article is entirely focussed on songs that you can play, but can’t play at the required tempo. We’ll cover what it means to “play” in the Pre-Routine section below.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a baroque keyboard piece, which I’ve transcribed for two guitars - hopefully I’ll have it released on my Youtube channel soon.

Being baroque, it’s quite intricate - lots of 16th notes, stretches and large jumps and transitions.

Recently a reader asked, “Why is it when I’m playing guitar to myself and practising I sound fine, but when I record it sounds awful?”.

This is a very common experience for beginner-intermediate guitarists, and there are a couple of reasons for this, so let’s look into them and what we can do about it.

Limited attention

When we are practising guitar, we are working on something new (remember the distinction between playing and practising that we discuss in the book.

Chord Progression

This track has the following chords:

i7  iv7
Cm7 Fm7

In the backing track we start with the chords high up on the neck, slowly playing down the beck using different inversions.

Improvising

This track uses the natural minor scale.

You can improvise over it using the following scales:

Over the last couple of weeks a couple of readers have emailed to ask about finding motivation. One reader asked for tips on finding motivation when the more youthful goals of attracting girls and being a rockstar no longer apply.

So in this weeks post we’ll look at motivation, what it is and how to find it.

What is motivation?

Motivation is defined as:

a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

Chord Progression

This track has the following chords:

i9  viø  iiø  V7
Bm  G#ø  C#ø  F#7

In the backing track we start with the chords high up on the neck, slowly playing down the beck using different inversions.

Improvising

This track uses a mixture of minor modes.