career advice

Although there are many different ways you can help your students become better guitar players and musicians, we can group almost everything you do into three main categories:

1. Inspiring and motivating your students – teaching guitar well is often more about inspiring your students than teaching a new scale, chord or song.

2. Teaching them ‘new things’ to play/practice – Most guitar teachers understand this basic concept, but often struggle to know exactly how much ‘new content’ is too little or too much for each student. Most teachers ‘overwhelm’ their students with simply too much material in a short amount of time.

3. Helping them to solve their playing/musical problems – The best way to improve your guitar teaching is to understand exactly how to help any student overcome any problem.

Each of these areas has its own challenges, but for most teachers it is the last category (helping students solve guitar playing/musical problems) that can be the most difficult to consistently do well.

When teaching guitar to solve problems and bad habits, the first thing to do is be clear about  the process itself:

Identify the true cause of the problem. Remember that ‘symptoms’ of problems and ’causes’ of problems are often totally different things. A misdiagnosed problem (just like a misdiagnosed medical problem) can make things worse than doing nothing at all.

Find proven solutions to overcome this problem. Yes, this seems like an obvious point, but often teachers ‘guess’ or use the trial and error approach to teaching guitar. Surround yourself with other experienced guitar teachers. Ask them for their advice on your specific challenge, doing so may save you and your student a lot of time and frustration.

Communicate the causes and your solution to your student’s problem. Again, this may seem like common sense, but fact is, most teachers do not fully explain the cause and solutions to the problems students have, they sort of skip this part and move directly into implementing the solution. The reason why communicating the cause and solution to your student is so important is that, without the student truly knowing what these things are, they often won’t truly practice your solution diligently at home.

Implement the solution (training). To be the most effective, you need to do more than ‘teach what to do’, you need to ‘train’ them to do it. The ‘teaching part’ can usually be done quickly, but it is the ‘training’ that takes the time. Think more like a sports trainer and less like a school teacher as you implement solutions while teaching guitar (more on this below).

Hold their hand – You do not need to treat all your students like children (unless they are children), but when teaching guitar, it is important that you monitor your students’ motivation level and help them to keep it high. A mediocre guitar teacher who keeps his/her students highly motivated will almost always get much bigger results than a great ‘technical’ teacher who does little or nothing to keep students inspired and motivated – yet this is an area most teachers don’t do consistently well in – because they underestimate its importance.

Because students typically have multiple problems in their playing (inconsistent articulation, weak sense of timing, excess body tension, inefficient hand movement, excess string noise, just to name a few common ones), and because there are typically multiple causes to each of those problems, the hardest part about teaching guitar, as it relates to solving students’ playing problems and breaking bad habits, is knowing the best order to deal with the causes of a student’s problems. Timing is critical and so is the order.

Many (well intentioned) teachers make the mistake of trying to use ‘linear logic’ to help students break bad habits and overcome challenges. There are many problems with this, the main one is we don’t teach machines, we are teaching people. Everything we do, and when we do it, has a positive or negative impact in the mind of our students. In theory it might make perfect sense for a teacher to make the student deal with the most basic problems first. That seems logical right? Well, those that follow this all the time will have a hard time keeping students long enough to help them become the guitar players they wish to be.

Contrary to what many guitar teachers believe, fixing the most fundamental problems your students have in the beginning (or trying to break too many bad habits at once) does more harm than good for most students. Yes, problems and bad habits must be dealt with in order for your students to reach their maximum potential, but too much of this at the same time may kill the will for your students to endure the natural frustration that comes with learning to play guitar.

Each student is different and you need to get a sense of how much tolerance the student sitting in front of you can handle in the present moment. If you overestimate this, the result is likely going to lead to massive amounts of frustration for your student and he/she may give up lessons and playing guitar completely.

How long does it usually take your beginning guitar students, as an example, to sit or stand with ‘perfectly correct’ posture, use perfect left and right hand positions, use the correct picking motions and articulation etc. etc. when playing and practicing? Sure you can teach this in a minute or two, but how long will it take that student to instinctively do this all the time on his/her own without you reminding them? For most students, it takes a long time.

Is it okay to let your students continue to play and practice guitar when you know many basic things are wrong and that they will form bad habits by allowing them to go on in this way?

Most guitar teachers would say, “no, it’s not okay” and then proceed to immediately try to correct all of them as soon as possible. Other guitar teachers simply don’t notice or don’t care enough to address these things. They figure as long as students keep coming back to lessons, everything is good.

The best approach for teaching guitar is neither. To be clear, your top priority should be to keep your student coming back for as many lessons as possible – not simply because you make more money that way, but because, if a student gives up lessons, you can do nothing to help him/her. Obviously, you must deal with problems and bad habits though (to not do this would be the same as only feeding kids candy and never real food).

When teaching guitar to solve a problem, avoid dealing with the entire problem and all its causes at once. Begin with the one thing you can do for your student that will be easiest for him/her to correct. This will help to build confidence that he/she can begin to overcome the problem and that doing so wasn’t extremely hard to start with. Pay attention to how much of this you think they can handle right now. If it looks good, then give them the next thing to fix.

Although some guitar playing problems and bad habits can be really big issues to deal with, try not to make the entire lesson only about solving problems. Most students need to get a sense of forward progress and even though solving problems is forward progress, they can’t always see that themselves even after you explain it to them, so give them something else that is fulfilling for them to play and practice.  A little sugar with the medicine helps it go down easier .

Test your guitar teaching skills.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He coaches other guitar teachers on how to teach guitar

© Tom Hess Music Corporation All Rights Reserved

Imagine going through week after week earning more than enough money to maintain a fun lifestyle, but not even noticing that you have done any work. That’s what being a guitar teacher means to me. I enjoy the work so much and find it so rewarding, that I don’t really experience it as work at all!

The popularity of the guitar continues to increase, so the demand for good guitar teachers remains strong. The question is, are you the right sort of person for the job?

Part of my activity over the last several years has involved the recruitment and training of a great many music tutors. I can say with certainty that the four items uppermost on peoples’ minds when they apply for a job as a music tutor are:

1. You have to be an expert musician
2. You should have some sort of teaching qualification
3. You have to be a university graduate
4. You need to be a music theory wizard

But these four items aren’t even on my tutor recruitment checklist.

I’d like to explain why:

Item 1. You have to be an expert musician

Of course you have to be a reasonably good musician for two reasons. First, you have to have credibility. Second, you have to know something about the territory into which you are going to lead your clients. After all, if you were hiring a guide to lead you up a mountain, you would want to hire someone who had climbed that mountain before, wouldn’t you?

But being an expert can actually be something of a liability when teaching guitar. This is because the vast majority of your work is going to be with people in their first year of playing. If you have played for twenty years and performed on stages all over the world, cut albums and written hit songs, you’ll have heaps of credibility. However, you are really going to struggle to relate to the guy sitting in front of you, with five thumbs on each hand, who is trying to understand why the ‘top’ string is at the bottom!

If you have been playing three years or more, are committed, and making good progress yourself, then you have every chance of being a better guitar teacher for beginners than any “expert musician.”

Oddly, people who themselves learn slowly are often better teachers. I think that’s because they’re conscious of the small details that new students often need help with, but that are invisible to people who learn like greased lightening.

Item 2. You should have some sort of teaching qualification.

If you have any amount of experience in teaching or training, you would definitely meet one of the requirements on my recruitment checklist. Expertise in teaching is undoubtedly gained from experience more than any other factor. But qualifications from mainstream education of teachers do not by themselves make you a good teacher. All of us can think back to our time at school and bring to mind teachers who were certainly qualified but perhaps shouldn’t have been!

Item 3. You have to be a university graduate.

A university education provides you with a chance to hone your intellectual skills and discipline your mind. These are fine things to do and there is little doubt that, when it comes to grappling with the intricacies of advanced music theory, an academic background is definitely going to make things more comfortable for you. But, to be honest, this is a relatively unimportant aspect of guitar teaching and generally overrated. What matters more is the ability to put yourself in your client’s shoes, to empathize, to understand and to accept people as they are.

So, if I had to choose between someone coming from four years at a university and someone who had spent those years travelling the world, working in a variety of settings, rubbing shoulders with rich and poor and generally experiencing contact with people from all walks of life, I would not hesitate to choose the latter, all else being equal.

Item 4. You have to be a music theory wizard.

Music theory is not something you need to understand in order to start teaching guitar. Music theory is something you will grow to understand as you teach guitar.

The process of teaching guitar puts a natural demand on you to continually think about the subject and work with its basic elements, so a deep knowledge of music theory is a result of being a guitar teacher!

Most of your teaching time is spent getting people to string a few simple chords together or playing some basic scale patterns. Every now and then a student will ask a question about what they are doing. You will either know the answer or not. If you don’t, and you believe answering the question is appropriate to the level of the student, be honest and say, “I’ll check that out for you and answer it in full next week!”

After a few hundred lessons your own knowledge and confidence with the subject may lead you to take on more advanced students. At this point you will need to have a higher level of understanding. You will find a wealth of resources on the Web to help you with this.

So if you don’t need to be an expert musician, qualified teacher, graduate or theory wizard, what do you need? What does it take to be a good guitar teacher?

I have isolated four essential qualities a person should have before I recommend taking up guitar teaching as a career. Here they are in order of importance:

1. Patience – an infinite amount of it

Patience is essential because you have to create a safe space in which people feel they have time to apply themselves to the tasks you set.

2. The ability to communicate with confidence

Students’ confidence in their ability to learn is the energy that you work with as a guitar teacher. Confidence is contagious, so if you communicate confidently then some of that rubs off on them.

3. The ability to play guitar reasonably well

As mentioned above, you are going to lead them up the mountain. So it helps if you’ve made the climb before!

4. Commonsense

Teaching is a specialized form of communication. The art of teaching is based almost entirely on the application of commonsense. Having said that, you can gain a lot of insight from reading articles by experienced teachers who have distilled their knowledge gained from many years of teaching experience.

Finally, here are some of the positive rewards of developing a career as a guitar teacher:

1. You’ll be doing what you love and – better still – sharing that love of music with others.
2. You’ll have the freedom to work the hours you want to work.
3. You’ll be in control of your income. Want more? Teach more hours or put up your prices. Need less? Allow natural fall-off to reduce your teaching hours.
4. You’ll be your own boss. You’ll have no one to answer to but yourself.
5. You’ll have plenty of scope to express your creativity, both as a musician and teacher.
6. Best of all, you won’t even notice you’re working!

I hope you have found this article stimulating. If you would like to look closer at teaching guitar as a career, or if you are already a guitar teacher and would like some support, then please visit my website www.teachguitar.com, where you will find a wealth of resources to help you.

A very common and frustrating problem beginning guitar students face is not being able to change chords quickly, fluently and musically. This may be frustrating for you, the guitar teacher, too, when you are not sure about how to solve the problem.

There can be more than one reason why a student may struggle when trying to change chords smoothly. So the first thing to do when dealing with this challenge is to diagnose why the problem exists. You need to determine if your student has one of the following problems:

• A. A physical coordination problem
• B. He/she has not been practicing
• C. A lack of understanding of what needs to be done
• D. A mental processing problem

Most guitar teachers assume the reason is either A. (a physical coordination problem) or B. (little or no practice). Fact is, most of the time this is wrong. The majority of students actually do attempt to practice. And true physical coordination problems are rare.

For most guitar students almost all guitar playing problems are caused by their brains, not by their hands! This is why many efforts to help them may not work well.

As I mentioned before, there can many reasons why a student is struggling with this (or any other issue) so it is not possible to give a one-size-fits-all solution in an article. There are however three powerful guitar teaching tips that can help solve this problem with beginning guitar students.

1. Get your students to keep their strumming hand moving in correct rhythm no matter how far behind the fretting hand may be in forming the next chord. In other words, tell your students (when practicing this way) to not allow the strumming hand to wait on the fretting hand! Practicing in this way will solve a lot of other rhythm and timing problems in the future for this student! The student should practice this way about one third of their practice time until the problem is resolved.
2. Get your student to not use the strumming hand at all and simply change chords with the fretting hand quickly (rapid fire, one after another). The student should practice this way about a third of the time until the problem is resolved.
3. Make your student play a chord he/she needs to master. Tell him/her to grip the strings hard when playing the chord, then to relax totally (without taking fingers away from the strings/chord), then tell the student to squeeze again all fingers at the same time! Then relax.

The goal here is to train his/her brain to make all fingers move and relax together and not one finger at a time (which is how beginning guitar students make chords on their own – big mistake)… Repeat this exercise until the student can do it well.

Next, have the student move fingers off the strings but maintain the basic chord shape while hovering over the strings…. Then press down on the strings and make the chord… repeat this many times and then gradually move further and further away from the strings before making the chord again. Eventually from an open hand the student should be able to form the chord easily… but in each case you must be sure all fingers are moving and relaxing at the same time, not one finger at a time! The student should practice this way about a third of the time until the problem is resolved.

Notice that these solutions of the problem are all ‘physical’, but they are designed to overcome the student’s “mental processing problem” because the student has not learned to separate and isolate each motion. The beginning guitar student’s brain is overloaded with too much information to apply at the same time, this is why we work on method #1 and #2 above to free the brain from too much processing at once. The last method (#3) is designed in order to break the student’s mental processing habit of sending separate and linear messages to each finger of the hand. What we want is to train the brain to process and send one message to all fingers involved.

To get more help on teaching guitar and building a successful guitar teaching business, check out these fifteen free guitar teaching tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He coaches other guitar teachers on how to teach guitar.