There are lots of guitar players out there who would love to turn their love of music into a source of income, and maybe even do music as a career some day. Teaching is one of the more rewarding and more lucrative ways to have a career in music, but many people who would make great guitar teachers never consider the possibility because all they see are the obstacles that seem to be standing in the way. The truth is, if you can learn how to play you can learn how to teach, and although it’s not always easy, it’s not as difficult as you might imagine.
In this episode, I’ll be answering some actual questions sent in by beginning guitar teachers that will hopefully give new guitar teachers the confidence they need to take action and get started with teaching lessons. I’ll cover things like how to attract your very first students, how to put together a curriculum, and how to deal with some of the common mindset issues beginners usually face, like “am I good enough” and “is it OK for me to charge money for lessons”. Sometimes just getting some basic questions answered is a good motivator, so that’s what we’ll be doing here.
There are lots of people out there who would love to start teaching guitar, but who haven’t taken the steps to actually get started yet. If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you might be one of those people. And maybe it’s because of fear. Maybe you’re just afraid to take that step, or maybe you just don’t know what to do first to keep moving in that direction, but there could be a number of different reasons, but I get a lot of emails from people and a lot of them are what I call pre-teachers or aspiring guitar teachers and they ask me questions.
And there are several of them that get asked really often. The same questions over and over again. So, in this episode, I’m going to cover some of these frequently asked questions I get from aspiring guitar teachers, people that are thinking about teaching, but who haven’t actually gotten started yet or maybe who are just getting started. So, if you’re thinking about teaching or just getting ready to kick off your teaching studio, hopefully this information will give you a boost of confidence so that you can begin taking those steps to get started and to get more established with your teaching business. So, let’s jump right into the questions.
Question 1: I’m a Self-Taught Guitarist; Is It OK To Teach Other People?
The first question is, and by the way, I’m not going to give you the names of the people. I am going to protect the privacy of the people who asked these questions, but I am going to read some of these questions kind of verbatim. So, first question is: “The biggest struggle for me right now is that I’m a self-taught guitarist. I hope that, therefore, teaching guitar will help structure my own understanding of the guitar into an organized compilation rather than bits and pieces I’ve learned from random sources. It also worries me that it will be a hindrance in my ability to teach. So, the basic question is I’m a self-taught guitarist and I don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of the instrument yet. Is this going to be a problem for me when I want to go and start teaching other people?
And my answer to that question – actually I get asked this question or a version of it pretty often – is there are a lot of self-taught guitar teachers out there. There are also a lot of guitar teachers that have music degrees and who’ve gone through guitar training programs and things, but they are just as many that are self-taught. And being a self-taught guitar teacher, it’s only a hindrance, in my opinion, if you think it is, if that’s what you believe. Self-taught doesn’t have to mean second class. You know, I think there’s this stigma that we place on ourselves. I mean I’ve taken a lot of lessons and I’ve also done a lot of self-taught and self-directed study, and you know what. Whatever it takes to get you where you want to be as a guitar player is fine.
There’s not one path that every single person has to follow to reach success as a guitarist or as a guitar teacher for that matter. Self-taught doesn’t have to mean second class. There’s a stigma that we put on ourselves where it’s like, if I didn’t graduate from the Berkeley School of Music or I didn’t go to GIT or I didn’t study with a teacher for ten years, then I’m somehow less qualified to be a guitar teacher than someone who has done those things. And I’m just going to say if you’ve managed to develop a level of competency on the instrument on your own, then you have skills. You have knowledge and you have experience that you can share with other people.
Now, if you’re completely self-taught, does that mean that you’re going to be able to teach advanced jazz guitar or classical guitar, or something like that, for example? Well, probably not. Those specific focuses of teaching require years of study and practice and some formal education to a large degree, but if you’re a rock guitar player that’s managed to learn how to play really well and you’ve been playing in gigs and you’ve been playing in bands and doing different things like that, and you’ve been successful at it and you’ve developed your skills to a pretty good level, there’s no reason why you can’t be a guitar teacher.
One area that’s going to be challenging though is having a good understanding of how guitar lessons work, because if you’ve never really taken any guitar lessons yourself, it might be hard for you to put together a good mental framework for how to communicate this stuff. So, fortunately there’s an easy solution to this problem. All you’ve got to do is sign up for some guitar lessons yourself. Find a teacher locally or find someone online if there’s no one local that you can study with. Someone who has some of the skills that you’d like to learn, even if you just want to improve some things that you’re already doing, and then start taking lessons.
So, that’s going to do a few things for you. Yes, you’re going to improve your playing skills. You’re going to learn how to play better when you study with a teacher yourself, but the main reason I want you to do it is because you’re going to get a better understanding of what it means to teach guitar. It’s simple. Just sign up for some lessons and then pay attention to what the teacher does and how they operate. You could probably even ask them some questions and they’ll give you some tips and pointers. But the person that asked this question is completely right. The process of putting your own curriculum together, kind of categorizing all the different aspects of music and playing guitar teach so that you can teach it to other people is definitely going to take your understanding of the instrument to a whole new level, and I’m going to talk more about that in a second, when I answer another question, but teaching that curriculum that you put together to your students is going to reinforce the stuff you already know. It’s going to create new mental connections for you. It’s actually going to help you be the best player that you can be.
So, this kind of touches on mindset stuff a little bit, and I just want to encourage anyone out there. If you’re a self-taught guitarist, don’t let that disqualify you from teaching other people. You can be a successful guitar teacher. As long as you’re a few steps ahead of the students that you’re teaching and you care about their progress on the guitar, you know how to help them reach their goals. There is a lot of stuff that you can learn as you go. So, just because you’re self-taught doesn’t mean you can’t be a guitar teacher. It actually could even be an asset for you in some regards. So, yeah, that’s a common question that I get, and yes, if you are self-taught, it doesn’t disqualify you. You can be a guitar teacher.
Question 2: Can I Charge For Lessons If I Don’t Have Formal Training?
The next question is: “Do I have the right to charge a fee for guitar lessons if I do not have any formal training?” So, this leads right into what I just talked about. For some reason, if you’re a self-taught guitarist, then some people think that you don’t have a right to charge money for lessons. Maybe I could teach people for free, but because I don’t have a college degree in music or I’m not licensed as a guitarist or something like that, then I don’t have the right to collect money. And I’m going to say that’s not true. Yes, you do have the right to charge a fee for lessons.
Let’s think about this for a second. What is involved in being in business and charging money for a service? All you’ve got to do is provide value that’s worth paying for. If you can provide value that’s worth paying for and you find people that are willing to pay it, and you actually deliver on that value once they pay you for it, then there’s nothing to be concerned about. There’s no problem here. Yes, you do have the right to charge a fee for lessons. The value that your students would be paying for in lessons with you doesn’t require a music degree. It doesn’t require any formal education. You have a lot of knowledge and skill as a guitarist, even if you’re self-taught. You have a lot of knowledge and skill to impart to other people, and the person who asked this question sound like the kind of person who cares. I’m sure that if this person started to teach, that their students would get great results from studying with them and in my opinion, that’s a benefit that’s worth paying for. There’s value there that’s worth paying for.
That’s the bottom line. It’s not your qualifications and your credentials. It’s about do you have value that people are willing to pay money to receive. And if you’re a good player and you have a good understanding of how the guitar works, and you care about people and you have basic communication skills, you can be a guitar teacher. You’ve just got to believe that you can be a guitar teacher. That’s the important thing. You can’t let thoughts like this, these limiting beliefs and these myths that a lot of people tend to believe. You can’t let that control the situation and determine what you do. You have to believe that you can do it. So, the answer to that question is yes, you do have the right to charge a fee for guitar lessons even though you haven’t had any formal training.
Question 3: How Do I Attract My First Guitar Students?
This is another very common question that I get asked pretty often by people that are thinking about teaching. And my advice is I would suggest that a good place to start is to send an email to everybody that you know explaining that you’re teaching guitar lessons now. So, the best thing to do first, with any kind of business venture, is to ping your social network first. So, your family, your friends, your associated, your co-workers – anybody that you know. Send out an email to them, and social media makes it extremely easy to do this. So, if you have a Facebook account and you’re connected to everyone that you know that’s on Facebook, then you could easily post something on your Facebook page and tell everyone that you’re teaching now. And the reason you want to do that is you’re asking them to spread the word for you and to tell everybody that they know that you’re teaching as well.
The idea is that you may not have some people in your immediate circle that would be interested in taking lessons with you now that you’re just getting started, but they may know someone who is. So, by posting this to everyone you know at one time and asking them to let everyone that they know about what you’re doing, there’s a good opportunity that someone in that circle of connections is going to be interested in taking lessons. So, here’s the kind of stuff that you want to put in that post so that your family, friends, and other people know what to look for. So, you want to tell them what kind of students you’re looking for, so say, “Hey, I’m going to be teaching blues guitar, for example, and I’m really looking for some good beginner-level students. People that are interested in learning blues that have never really played before, and I’m also looking for people that live in the Denver, Colorado area,” for example, if that’s where you’re teaching.
You want to be kind of specific about what kind of referrals you’re looking for, and then you want to also mention what you can do for those referrals. So, you could say, “I have this really cool approach to teaching blues that cuts down on the learning curve and helps people get started really quickly playing songs and stuff.” And talk about the benefits of studying with you and what makes you unique. Kind of put a little bit about that in that email that you send out or that social media post so that you also give them some reasons to recommend you. Not just hey, my friend is starting to teach guitar lessons, but hey, my friend is teaching guitar lessons, but he has a really cool approach that can help you with [blank] or that can help you with one, two, three. That kind of helps give some weight to those referrals and give people more incentive to contact you.
And then obviously you want to say how they can get in touch with you, so at the bottom, at the end of it, put something like: “Email me at [your email address] or call me at [your cellphone number],” or whatever as a call to action. And then just put that together as a social media post or an email, and then send it out. And you might be surprised at how many people in your extended circle, maybe not people you know immediately, but people that they know that you may not have met yet – how many of those people might just be interested in signing up for lessons or at least talking to you about it. So, that’s a great first step; is to ping your social network.
If you can reach out to everyone in a circle of acquaintances of everybody that you know, that can be quite a big group of people. It could be surprisingly big. And usually your friends and family are going to do this for you at least once when you’re just starting out. Now, this is the kind of thing you can’t really do more than once. You can ask them the first time. Maybe three or four months later you can ask them again just to remind them, but if you start doing this kind of stuff all the time, people are going to ignore it and it’s going to make you look desperate. So, this is kind of just an initial thing that you can do to kind of help launch your business when you’re just starting out, and it’s just a good way to help you spread the word and get some early traction.
So, that’s my advice. Then you have other types of marketing that you can get going. Your website. You know, search engine marketing and you could do paid ads online, and things like that, that will help, but leveraging your social network is a great way to actually get some traction when you’re first getting started. Now, if you’re completely new to this, there’s another kind of twist that you can take on this social networking thing. You can offer to teach a few lessons for free in exchange for feedback and, most importantly, testimonials and referrals. So, you could put a spin on it and say, “Hey, I’m offering three free guitar lessons to the first ten people that contact me,” or something like that, and you agree to teach three or four lessons to a few students.
And at the end of that time period, they’re going to do three things for you in exchange. Number one, they’re going to give you a review of how you did, so they’re going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly of their experience taking lessons with you so that you can learn from that and make improvements. Number two, they’re going to write up a testimonial for you that you can use in your marketing. You use it on your website. You use it in your ads. You maybe even get them to add reviews on Yelp and Google, and places like that. And then the third thing is, in exchange, they’re going to recommend three friends that they know who might also be interested in taking lessons with you, assuming they had a good experience.
So, you give three free lessons away. You get feedback, testimonials, and referrals in exchange. That’s not a bad way to get started either because it helps you on multiple levels. Another thing you could do is if you belong to any clubs or groups or organizations, like maybe you’re the member of a church, you play on a sports team for recreational purposes, or something like that, then you could also spread the word there and see if anybody is interested too. Ideally those people would be included in your social network, but maybe you can put something on your church bulletin or you can put up a flyer at your church, or something like that if that’s something that you’re a part of. But if you’re a part of any kind of club or group, that’s also another good source of potential students or referrals.
So, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. Ways to kind of get students quickly when you’re first starting out. Now, you probably won’t be able to fill your studio with this tactic, but you should be able to get three, five, maybe ten guitar students out of it and it’s a great way to get started.
Question 4: What Location Should I Use To Start Teaching?
The next question is: “I don’t have a lot of money to start my teaching business, to invest when I’m just starting out. And I’m a little bit leery of bringing strangers into my home, so do you have any ideas for startup locations for my teaching studio?” That’s an excellent question.
So we’ve established the mindset stuff. We’ve talked about how to attract your first group of students. Now, I don’t want to teach out of my home. Where do I do this? Well, I can see the concern that some people might have about opening their home to essentially what are strangers. Especially if you’re like a female guitar teacher or you’re a younger person, maybe a teenager that’s interested in doing this, could see the concern there. But what you really need to do before you bring anybody into your home is to pre screen them before you give them your home address. This is kind of the same tactic that you use whenever you post an ad on Craigslist to sell something at your house.
Like for example, we’re trying to sell something not too long ago and I didn’t put my home address in that Craigslist ad, simply because I don’t want people, total strangers, knowing where I live and just showing up at my house unannounced. So, what I did was I put the nearest cross streets that we live on, which happen to be about a mile and a half away because I live out in the country. Kind of the nearest major cross streets, so that way people have an idea of where you’re located. They kind of know the general geographic area. They can determine whether it’s going to be convenient for them to go there once a week or not, but they don’t know exactly where you live.
Now, if you have a commercial space that you can go and teach out of, then you could put that address out there. That’s fine, but if you’re teaching out of your home, I don’t recommend that you advertise your home address as your studio location. Instead just put the nearest major cross street so that people can know where you are. That’s important for marketing purposes and stuff like that. So let’s say that someone responds to your ad. Now you want to pre screen them before you give them your home address. Eventually, when you meet with them, you’re going to have to tell them where you live and bring them into your home, but there’s no reason to do that until you screen them first.
So, maybe talk to them on the phone first to get a feel for them. Maybe if you want to meet with them, if you’re really concerned, maybe you can just meet with them at a coffee shop or something to talk about lessons, or at a music store, or at another place, but you can kind of get a feel for people before you bring them into your house. And if you don’t feel comfortable with that person, then you don’t have to teach them at all and you don’t have to tell them where you live and you don’t have to bring them into your house. But unfortunately the reality is, just starting out, you’re probably going to have to teach out of your home, unless you know somebody who would rent you some space for cheap or if you have, like I mentioned before, a membership in a church or some other organization or a school that would let you use one of their rooms. Your home might be the only reasonable option. So, that doesn’t mean you have to just totally put yourself out there and be dumb. You can screen people. You can be a little more cautious and make sure that the people that come to your house are people that you actually would want to have in there in the first place.
Hopefully that helps kind of give you some wisdom to follow about bringing people into your home, and 99 out of 100 people are not going to be a problem anyway. Most people that are interested in guitar lessons are going to be great people that you’re going to want to work with and stuff, but it never hurts to kind of be on the safe side. So, I mean that kind of answers that question, any other ideas for startup locations. I mentioned a few. A lot of times you can work out deals where if someone wants to study with you, you can maybe even barter free lessons in exchange for space that they may have or may know about. There are different things you can do if you think it through, but nine times out of ten your home is going to be the best option when you’re first getting started.
Question 5: Are There People I Can Teach During The Day?
Okay, next question. “What kind of adults would be available to learn guitar during the day and would it be safe as a woman for me to open my door to strangers, particularly males, when nobody else is home?” So, this kind of feeds into the same question that we just talked about. There are actually two questions here. The first one is the part about, as a female teacher, bringing men that you don’t know into your house when nobody else is there. Probably not the best idea. What I would recommend in that case is to try to find some place other than your home to teach. I mean depending on the climate, you could even teach in a public place. Some teachers teach guitar lessons outside, and that works really well. You could teach in a public park. There are different things you can do.
Another option is if you are going to be teaching from your home and you’re concerned about this kind of stuff is to find someone that can be there with you so that you’re not by yourself. You’re not going to be teaching lessons, you know, back-to-back all day long. They’re going to be scheduled ahead of time, so see if you can get a friend or family member to come over to your place and do it with you while you’re there. That can kind of help alleviate some of those security concerns.
Now, the second part of that question is: “How do I find people to learn guitar during the day,” and it sounds like this person was interested in teaching adults. I would suggest maybe broadening that a little bit and, for adults, try to find some retired people that don’t have day jobs anymore, that have the flexibility in their schedules that they could come during the day. Another group that might be a possibility is college students, because just like they schedule their classes during the day, they could schedule their lessons with you too and a lot of times fit those in, in the morning before class or in the middle of the day, or something like that. College students typically have a pretty varied schedule of their classes and things that they have to do, so that might work.
For working adults, you have some options. You could do some 7AM to 9AM lessons and catch people before they go to work. You would only obviously have a couple of slots available that early, but there might be some people that would be interested in taking guitar lessons before they start their day. You could also check with some local businesses in your area and see if they might let you teach some guitar lessons onsite during their lunchtimes. So, maybe you could rent or use a conference room and teach lessons to employees that work there, or something like that, during their lunch breaks. It’s just an idea.
Probably the best way to do this though if you only want to teach in the morning hours, for example, if you really want to control your availability, then offering lessons online using Skype is a great way to go because you can match your daytime working hours to students that are in a completely different time zone from you that matches your availability. So, I don’t have the math in front of me as far as which time zones are which, but let’s say that you want to be able to teach from 9AM to noon mountain time, which is Greenwich Mean Time -7. That’s my time zone. And you can’t find a lot of people in your local area that are available in the mornings to study. So, what you could do is you can pull out a time zone map or use a website that helps convert time zones. There are a few of those out there. You can Google to find them and say, “If the best time for people to take lessons is between 6PM and 9PM, Monday through Thursday,” for example, then figure out what area that time zone would line up with yours.
So, you know, maybe it’s an extra six hours ahead or something like that. So, what countries are in a time zone that is six hours ahead of you? And if the ones in there are English-speaking countries, which chances are pretty good that they will be in some cases. Maybe not time zones that include Russia and China, and things like that, but you could do marketing online to try to reach students in that time zone so that those are the people you teach and then, when it’s the morning for you, it’s the early evening for them and it’s a perfect match, and you can try to get all your students from that time zone. That’s another way you can do it.
There are a lot of different options. You have to be kind of creative with some of this stuff. Any time you run into challenges when you’re starting a new business, there’s almost always some kind of work around that you can come up with to make it feasible to do. You’ve just got to think it through a little bit. So, those are just some ideas of how you could be a little more flexible with your lesson times.
Question 6: How Do I Put Together A Curriculum For My Lessons?
And then I have one last question, and this is a big one. “Can you help me to make a good study plan/curriculum for my guitar students? Should I teach theory first or should I just teach them songs in the first month? How should I put my curriculum together?” That’s an excellent question because, you know, if we follow our progression here, you take care of your mindset and beliefs. You found your first students. You found your place and your times to teach. Now it’s like, what do I teach these people? I’m going to give you some of my thoughts on this topic.
I definitely recommend teaching songs and the building blocks that make them up first, before you get people into music theory, sight reading and other more advanced musical topics. People take guitar lessons because they want to learn the songs that they love. There’s a small group of people that are interested in guitar for academic purposes, but I’m going to say probably 90 to 95 percent of the people out there want to play songs. And if you help them learn how to do that as quickly as possible, they’re going to be a lot more likely to get hooked on the guitar and become a student of the guitar for life.
Now, once they get hooked, they’re going to be more interested in things like music theory, sight reading, and all of that later on, but for beginners you really want to make sure you give them what you want first. You want to turn them into guitar players. Once they self-identify as guitar players and get hooked, then they’re going to be more open to more technical, more dry, more advanced-type stuff that requires a little more work and effort to learn and understand. You can help them become accomplished musicians later. Musicianship is important. I’m not negating that at all, but you want to turn them into guitar players first, and then later on you can turn them into well-rounded musicians.
All that music theory and all the fundamentals in the world aren’t going to matter if that student gets bored or they get overwhelmed and they quit taking guitar lessons and do something else. So you’ve got to lead them along a little bit with the stuff that they want first. So, to put your curriculum together, what I recommend – I mean there are some different options here. Some people teach you that you should just go out and use a premade curriculum. I’m not one of those people. What I really recommend is that you put your own curriculum together and that you do that by starting out with making a list of all the things that you’ve learned about the guitar yourself.
So, you take out a pencil and a paper and you make a list of all the stuff that you know how to do, so you break it down into styles, into techniques, into concepts, and kind of organize everything into a list. And then kind of shuffle that and prioritize everything chronologically from beginning to end, and then you should end up with what should be a logical progression of musical concepts for the guitar that you can use with beginners. This is going to kind of be your road map, the curriculum path that you lead your students through as you teach them in your lessons. Now, I have done this. I have a document with this all broken down that I could give you, but the real value in doing this is that it helps you start to think about playing guitar in a linear fashion.
So, it helps you organize it in your own mind a little bit better, so you know what to start with and then what to do next and what comes after that, and all the way down the line. And this thinking work here actually helps you to become a better teacher. It helps you understand what you’re doing a little bit better, so that’s why I recommend that you do it yourself. Now, if you have a list of concepts like this already laid out and you want to compare it with mine, I’d be happy to share it with you, but just giving you my list is not going to be as beneficial for you as if you take the time to do it yourself. So, that map is important. It’s just kind of a skeleton of what it means to learn the guitar over the period of three, four, or five years or more.
So, now that you have that skeleton in place, now it’s time to kind of fill in the gaps. So, next you want to take each step, each item that you put on that list represents a step of the musical journey. Take each one of those steps and then put together a basic lesson plan for it. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be all polished. Just write down, under each one of those things, how you plan to teach it. How did you learn how to do it? What kinds of things really helped you to learn that better? Fill in each category that way, and then that’s going to give you a game plan when you get to your lessons so that you don’t have to worry about feeling lost. You know, you could also pull supplemental materials from some guitar method books that you like and actually use those materials to fill in the gaps too.
So, that way you have the best of both worlds. You have this customizable curriculum that you put together yourself, but you have the best teaching resources out there incorporated into it so that you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel. So, if you’re looking for recommendations on good method books, I have a list of them on my website. Recommend teaching books under Free Stuff. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, so you can check it out.
So, I mean this may sound a little bit overwhelming. It may sound like a lot of work initially. And I’m going to be honest with you. It is a little bit of work, but it will really help you to understand what it means to play the guitar and it will make you a better teacher than if you just use a beginner’s method book for every lesson with your students and flip them through the pages. You’re not going to get as good results if you do it that way, so put your own thing together. And the work that you put in now is going to make you a better teacher for the long-term and it’s going to help you be more successful in your studio and with your students, and it will also help you teach guitar the way you see it and help you be unique more so compared to the other teachers in your area.
So, you want to pour your personality into this. You want to pour your perspective into this. And if you just teach through a method book, you know, you’re teaching somebody else’s perspective. So, why not put together your own? You can take lessons from the method books and use them from time to time where they fit best, but people want to study guitar with you. They don’t want to study guitar with Mel Bay. So, put your own curriculum together. You know, take a few hours and sit down and do this exercise, and you’re going to really benefit from it and so will your students.
To wrap this up, if you’re interested in teaching guitar, I just want to encourage you. Don’t let fear stand in your way. Don’t let any obstacles that you perceive that may not even be real – don’t let those stand in your way and don’t let any other hang-ups stand in your way either, whether it’s space or curriculum or finances or marketing, or anything like that.