So you’ve got great guitar skills, you have a passion for music and you want to make a good living out of your beloved instrument. Excellent! But rather than make the same mistakes as everyone else, here are some things to bear in mind as you embark on your journey...
Do you have prepared material (and a photocopier)? You might have all the knowledge in the world but just talking to students about chords, scales and technique is insufficient for most learners, especially if they are beginners. After all, who can remember an hour long conversation? You could write notes for them in the lessons but far better would be to have a body of well presented core material already written up and ready to photocopy for your learners as they progress.
You can’t prepare absolutely everything in advance so adding to and improving your teaching material should be an ongoing part of what you do. This goes for repertoire, riffs, theory, sight reading, technique, etc. If you regularly add to your teaching material then before long you will find yourself with an impressive library of resources to call on. This makes teaching a more pleasant experience for you and for the student. Encourage them to get a folder to keep the material in, and to keep it organised. The student that is on the receiving end of this kind of tuition is far more likely to stick around for months or years than one who gets given a few scraps of paper full of pencil scribblings each week.
Ultimately, your students will keep coming as long as they feel good about what they are doing. A large part of that is their morale, their rate of progress and therefore how well they practise. In providing them with high quality material you are making practice just that little bit easier for them.
Your teaching space should be a professional environment. This matters a great deal for first impressions. If a student (possibly with their parent) walks into your teaching room to find screwed up paper everywhere, a dinner plate on the desk, clothes on the floor or, if you teach in a bedsit, an unmade bed ... well you hardly give the impression of a serious professional and you may not get a second chance to show how good a teacher you really are. Keep your room tidy, correctly set up and open the window from time to time to get fresh air in. Remember, each student could potentially come to you for many years. That adds up to A LOT of money. Don’t blow it for the sake of 5 minutes of housekeeping.
If the lesson's time is 6.30pm, then you must be ready to teach at 6.30pm. Your teaching room should be already tidy and set up to teach. Having to tidy up and set up stands, plug in leads, etc, in front of a student just looks amateurish, plus you are eating in to his or her tuition time.
A student should feel that he or she is welcome. If you are not a naturally ‘smiley’ person then that’s fine. Even just a 10 second ‘so how have things been going this week Jimi?’ at the start of the lesson could be enough to make a person feel welcome. If the student is late for his or her lesson, you don’t need to frown at them and make them feel uncomfortable. Calmly explain the need for your lessons to run on time and finish his or her lesson at the usual time. They will know for next time, will keep coming, and nobody had to get upset.
But don’t be too familiar. There is a lot to be said for the teacher-student relationship. The student has come to you for guitar tuition, not to be their friend and soul mate. A little bit of chat is a good thing but it’s generally not such a good idea to get drawn into conversations about a person’s private life. This is particularly true for younger students who could feel very uncomfortable about certain topics of conversation. The same can be true if you are a male teacher teaching a young female student. Whilst not becoming paranoid, you should avoid anything that could be construed as sleazy. A joke, no matter how innocent, could easily make a female learner feel uncomfortable. Friendliness, absolutely, but keep the relationship professional.
If you are a fabulous rock teacher but you are clueless when it comes to playing country, be honest about it. If someone comes to you wanting to be the next Albert Lee then you don’t have turn them away. Depending on their level, you could tell them that you are not a country specialist but that there is a body of foundation material that you can teach them which will help them a great deal - say major and minor pentatonic improvising, understanding keys, alternate or hybrid picking. They may well still take lessons from you on this basis and this is far preferable to having to stumble your way through each lesson pretending that you are something you are not. You’ll get found out sooner or later anyway.
Similarly, don’t force-feed a student material that they did not come to you for. If a 14 year old student comes to you for rock lessons, don’t force him or her to learn jazz. You may well be a great jazz teacher and think that you are doing them a favour but it’s unlikely that they’ll keep coming to you for long.
Marketing has changed in recent years. In 2001, you may have placed an advert in a local paper but nowadays that is probably a waste of money. The internet is God in the 21st century so you must have a website. A website is your shop window that communicates to people who you are and what you do. It does not have to be an all-singing all-dancing showcase of the latest web design techniques. Even just a single page with your photo (holding a guitar) and contact details may be enough. You can always add to it in time. If you are reasonably computer literate you can make this yourself using software, but if not then call in a favour from a technically orientated friend or just bite the bullet and pay someone to do a simple page for you, you should make back the money in no time.
Once you have a website you may then want to look at ‘search engine optimisation’ so that your website pops up when people search in Google for guitar lessons. If you don’t know what that is then you can either research it online or again approach that technically orientated friend. Facebook and Twitter are also becoming key marketing resources in the 21st century. Again, there is a wealth of free information out there about how to use these two ‘social networking’ sites.
What is the going rate where you live? This should be your starting point. If you are just starting out then it can be tempting to ‘undercut’ the opposition but this rarely makes much difference to the number of students you attract. They should choose you as their tutor because they believe that you will be a great teacher, not because you are the cheapest.
On the day of the first lesson, explain your terms to them, ie if they need to pay you a deposit cover any no shows, and how much notice you require in order for them to cancel without having to pay. As long as you tell people your terms clearly at the start – or better yet give them your terms in writing – usually nobody gets upset later on and cancellations are far less frequent.
If you expect them to give you 48 hours notice for any cancelation, then you must do the same in return or else give them a free lesson the week after.
We were all beginners once. Even Yngwie struggled to make a D chord sound good once upon a time. Teaching can be a frustrating experience sometimes but rather than letting this frustration show, try to remain calm. If things are going badly, stop the student for a moment to explain the problem (or the main one at least!) and try again slowly – very slowly if need be. Don’t be afraid to tell the student to stop. You should not have to compete with the sound of a guitar in order to explain something. This just gets frustrating and the student is probably not listening anyway.
Are you doing things in the best possible way? Could you have explained things a little better just then? Every time you spot a little flaw in your methods and correct it, you become a slightly better teacher than before. Well done!
So that’s it, my advice on how to be a successful guitar teacher. There are obviously many more things to consider but I hope you find these helpful. Teaching guitar for a living is really something of a privilege. There are many worse jobs out there that you could be doing so even on the most frustrating days just remind yourself of this and try to keep things in perspective. Most people take up guitar with visions of stardom but the reality is that even many world class guitarists have to teach to make a living. So, be grateful and enjoy it.
Stuart Bahn
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