Teaching Guitar

When I started teaching guitar, I went into the process expecting some of the more obvious benefits, such as working on my own schedule and making an income, but I also found myself enjoying some unexpected benefits, which I’m going to share in this article.

Income

The most obvious benefit to becoming a guitar teacher is the extra income it created. While I made plenty of mistakes in the beginning of my guitar teaching career, eventually I was earning a pretty good income and had plenty of students coming for lessons every week.

According to Indeed.com, the average guitar teacher in the United States makes $28.51 per hour[1].

If we assume a 40 hour work week, that comes to:

40 hours x $28.51 = $1140.40/week

OR

$59,300.80/year

Not bad.

According to GlassDoor.co.uk[2], the average guitar teacher in the United Kingdom makes £33,000/year, which comes to roughly $41,000/year.

Again, that’s above average.

However, are those numbers any good? What do I mean by that?

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.

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.