10/23/2014

STG 140: G4 Guitar Network – Interview With David Hart

David Hart has become a friend of mine in recent months, and we meet together via Skype on a regular basis. David has been teaching guitar in Australia since the early 1990’s and he grew a large music school with multiple locations that increased by over 3,000 students in a single year. He eventually started the G4 Guitar Network as a way to provide a leveraged system that guitar teachers around the world could join as a franchise. G4 now has over 40 affiliated schools worldwide with many new ones in the pipeline, and it’s a great resource for guitar teachers who want a pre-built model they can use to grow their business. In this episode, David and I have a conversation that covers topics like how to deal with some of the main challenges most guitar teachers have to face, advice for brand new teachers who want to avoid common mistakes, and how using a pre-built system can make success with your teaching studio a much easier proposition. I highly recommend David and G4 Guitar Network for every guitar teacher who’s been overwhelmed with trying to do it all themselves, and who would like a turn-key branded system for success. Items Mentioned In This Episode Link – Music Teacher’s Helper Link – G4 Guitar Network Podcast Transcript Donnie: Hi, David. Welcome to the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast. David: Thanks, Donnie. Good to be here. Donnie: Yeah, it’s great to have you. Can we start by just having you tell us a little bit about your story? How did you get started with playing the guitar? David: Okay, it’s a long story, but I’ll condense it down into a short version. I started way back. I’m 47 now and I started. Really my first attempt at guitar was when I was about eight years of age. My parents, and I don’t even remember. I have no recollection, except for one vague memory of going to a guitar lesson with a teacher. Apparently I went for about three or four lessons, and I wasn’t practicing, so my parents decided that they weren’t going to go on with it. And you know, my parents really, at that stage, had separated, at about seven, so we’re all living in a very small space, so my mother couldn’t afford lessons. We were really on that kind of poverty line, so it just was a huge privilege, but I really loved music. My mother knew that, and so the passion was there, but no direction and neither of my parents played in music, so they didn’t have any idea of how to help me. And the teacher obviously didn’t know either. So, that was a false start, and then, when I hit high school, at 13 years of age, I met a guy, who had some guitars and we became friends because I was interested in music. Went to his house, saw his guitar and amp, and I think he had a Marshall amp at that time and a Vantage guitar, and that was the time when Van Halen was just coming on the scene. Actually this was just before Van Halen. Van Halen came out probably about a year later and at the time it was really AC/DC really was the main influence, and then Zeppelin and yeah, Van Halen sort of came on the scene. So, it was a real. KISS as well and that was a real turning point for me, but I started on drums because he was a guitar player. He wanted me to play drums, so I did the drums, and then I went to guitar. I was really mucking around on his guitar and I didn’t have any formal lessons. I was sort of self-taught for about two years, and then I finally decided to go to a teacher because it just wasn’t working. I was hacking away pretty badly. So, I had kind of that false start, and then I started as a teenager, and then, yeah, went from there. Donnie: Okay. So, yeah, we have a very similar background because my story is almost identical. I started when I was like eight years old and had a false start with a bad teacher, and was influenced by similar bands. I’m a few years younger than you. Not much, but I was a big KISS fan and AC/DC. All of that stuff, so yeah, it’s kind of interesting how the beginning for both of us is kind of similar, but you mention that you took some lessons and that the first time you had lessons as a younger child it wasn’t a good experience. But what was it like for you once you were older? David: Well, I guess I could say my first lesson after that experience at high school with the school teacher and maybe a couple of students, if you could call those lessons, but there was a guitar class at school, but it was really not very organized and, you know, it was just people telling each other what they could do. There was no real technical advice or how to sit or hold a guitar, or any of that sort of thing, or how to practice even. But when I went to my teacher at 17, I really got lucky. I mean the drum teacher I had – again, I got lucky, because I look back and I’ve worked with lots of teachers. I’m talking hundreds of teachers over the years, and I look back on those two teachers and I seriously got lucky. The drum teacher was just remarkable. Amazing guy and very structured, very organized, but very positive the whole time. He made you feel that you could achieve, you know, because I was very doubtful. You know, in those days, I thought you either had musical talent or you didn’t, and so that was my mindset at the time, which we know is just absolutely false, but that’s where it was. And so, other kids who had started when they were five and six – I thought they were natural, but they just started a lot younger or had musical parents or good teachers, or something. Donnie: Yeah. Yeah. David: I equate it to, say, learning Chinese. If you grow up in China, you’re born in China, of course you’re going to learn to speak great Chinese. You don’t even need to be Chinese. If you’re born in China, you’re going to speak Chinese. You know, and so that’s the thing; is that anybody is capable if you’re in the right environment. It’s what I call 98 percent environment, 2 percent maybe genetic because there are people who come. Every now and again you see someone who’s just got that kind of genetic trait of musical ability, and they’re usually the kind of lucky ones, but you know, most great musicians worked hard to get where they got. Sorry, to get back to that point, what happened for me was that my guitar teacher, a guy named Mark Bergman, still alive and well in Australia. He learned from a guy who was one of the top BBC Session jazz guitarists at the time. So, he really taught my teacher how to teach and how to play, but he was even more than that. He just had a passion for working with students and really developing you. You just got swept up. There was no way out of it. There was no way that he was going to let you be an average player. He just had this ability, and that’s what seduced me into teaching. That’s why I became a teacher, because of him primarily. Donnie: Yeah, so that’s a great transition there. So, let’s talk about teaching guitar. You’ve actually obviously been teaching for a long time and you work with guitar teachers now, so how did you kind of get started? You just mentioned kind of the origins of, you know, how the seed got planted to start teaching guitar, but how did you kind of grow you business from there and kind of get to where you are today? David: It was a pretty tough, long, hard road I would say. You know, the long and winding road would be the great way to sort of put it. You know, when I started, I did what most guitar teachers do and, you know, we know this. You know this from working with them; is we try and do everything ourselves. We try and learn through our own mistakes and, you know, there’s an old kind of phrase, which is, you know, a smart person learns from their mistakes. A wise person learns from other people’s mistakes. And I considered myself pretty clever in those early days. I mean I look at what was happening. I really analyzed what I did wrong and, you know, how I could do better next time, so I was improving. That was just the way that I guess I was brought up, but it didn’t dawn upon me probably for at least five or six years, and I read an Anthony Robbins book. And I realized, after reading his book, I just got so much out of that. It really just changed my whole mindset. Why haven’t I been reading books before this? So, I think I was at about 26 or 27 and actually the reason it happened was because my business was failing. I just found that it just wasn’t working and I was frustrated. And I don’t even know where I came across the book, but I’ve been reading different books on business, but when I struck Anthony Robbins, it was a mind shift. It wasn’t just about, you know, how to do your accounts or, you know, how to get a bank loan. You know, it wasn’t the kind of practical steps. It was about shifting your whole mindset. And I realized that applied to everything, not just business, but teaching. And once I started working with students, I realized that it wasn’t just a matter of showing them how to play the guitar. It was a matter of shifting their mind to getting to understand. Going from that as Carol Dweck puts in her book, Mindset, which I recommend reading. Going from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. And a fixed mindset is basically I’ve either got musical talent or I don’t, whereas the growth mindset is, well, I may not have musical talent today, but by working on it, I can have musical talent in the future. So, yeah. So, that’s it really. My thing with teaching was that, and where it really shifted for me in that kind of first stage, and there were obviously stages, but the first shift for me was realizing I needed help and that I wasn’t going to do this alone. That I really had to bring in, and then I actually brought in a coach and started attending seminars. And now I’m perhaps a bit of a junkie when it comes to learning. I’m constantly either reading a book or going to a seminar. Every year I travel overseas,

47 min

09/25/2014

STG 136: Beginning Guitar Teacher Questions Answered

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. Items Mentioned In This Episode Link – Recommended Teaching Books Podcast Transcript 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. So, having said that, that doesn’t mean that right out of the gate you should charge a hundred dollars an hour for your les

42 min

08/28/2014

STG 132: Busting Some Common Myths About Teaching Guitar – Part 1

There are lots of common myths about teaching guitar lessons floating around out there. They sound logical, so most people who’ve never experienced anything different just accept them at face value and operate their teaching studios accordingly. The problem is that when you operate based on wrong information, the results you produce are usually messed up, too, and your business is never as successful as you want it to be. In fact, some of these common myths can actually wreck your teaching studio if you base your decisions off of them! This episode is part 1 in a three-part series on the common myths many guitar teachers tend to believe. In part 1 I’ll cover things like effective planning, being more selective with the students you teach, dealing with rejection and difficult students, how to compete with the latest technology for learning guitar and whether or not the general interest in guitar lessons is waning. Whether you’re new to teaching guitar or you’ve been at it for a while, do yourself a favor and listen to this series…the truth can set you free! Items Mentioned In This Episode Article – “Is It Still Possible To Make A Full-Time Living Teaching Private Guitar Lessons?” Podcast Transcript Now, there are a lot of myths floating around out there about teaching guitar lessons. They sound logical, so most people who’ve never experienced anything different just accept them at face value and operate their teaching studio accordingly. The problem is that when you operate based on the wrong information, the results your produce are usually going to be messed up too and your business is never as successful as you want it to be. In fact, some of these common myths can actually wreck your teaching studio if you base your decisions off of them. So, this episode is part one in a three-part series on the common myths many guitar teachers tend to believe. In part one, I’m going to cover things like effective planning, being more selective with the students you teach, dealing with rejection and difficult students, how to compete with the latest technology for learning guitar, and whether or not the general interest in guitar lessons is starting to wane. Whether you’re new to teaching guitar or you’ve been at this for a while, do yourself a favor and listen to this series, all three parts of it, because the truth can set you free. This podcast is sponsored by Music Teacher’s Helper – the best way to manage your private music lesson studio. Music Teacher’s Helper is online scheduling and billing software that you can access from your computer, your laptop, your tablet, and your smartphone that saves you hours every month, enables you to generate reports for taxes, and ensures that you never lose track of a payment. Once you add a student, which is super easy, you can choose to automatically send them custom invoices that can be paid with a credit card even if you make that an option. Automatically email lesson reminders to your students, send them late payment notifications, and copies of their lesson notes. You can use the free easy-to-build website templates to help market your studio online, and so much more. There are actually so many cool features in Music Teacher’s Helper that I don’t have time to get into all of them right now, but the thing I like best about Music Teacher’s Helper is how it makes your teaching studio run almost on autopilot. Students can book lessons and they can request reschedules of their lessons through the tool. They can login with their own account and they access important information, like lesson assignments and progress reports, and they can log their practice times, and do that at any time of the day or night. So, whether you have five or 50 students, Music Teacher’s Helper works for music teaching studios of all sizes. I originally discovered the software and started using it myself several years ago, and I highly recommend giving Music Teacher’s Helper a spin so you can see for yourself how useful it is. They offer a 30-day no-risk trial, where you can test it out to discover how much time you’ll be saving. If you use this special address that I’m about to give you to sign up, StartTeachingGuitar.com/MTH, then you’re going to save 20 percent off of your first month if you choose to continue after the free trial. So let’s jump into today’s topic now, Busting Some Common Myths About Teaching Guitar Pt. I. If you’re new to teaching guitar lessons or maybe you’ve even been teaching for a while, you might have some inaccurate assumptions about what it means to be a guitar teacher. It could be a lot of different things. There’s a lot of information floating around out there that we tend to believe and take at face value that’s not necessarily true. A lot of these common myths are floating around out there, and a lot of teachers consciously or maybe subconsciously buy into them and believe them and act on them unfortunately. Sometimes you can make decisions based on these inaccurate beliefs, and then the results from that can mess up your business and keep you from making progress with your teaching studio. So, you’ve probably seen that popular TV show, Myth Busters. Well, this episode is part of a three-part series, and I’m going to be busting five myths in part one here today about being a guitar teacher so that you can build your business using accurate information so that you can avoid a lot of the common mistakes that teachers tend to make based on the wrong information, and then so that you can be more successful with your teaching studio by not buying into and acting on any of these myths about teaching guitar. So, let’s jump into part one. Myth #1 The first myth that I want to bust in this episode is the belief that whatever you need to know you can figure out as you go. Now, doesn’t that sound awesome? Doesn’t that sound just like so cool and daring, and – I don’t know – kind of romantic I guess in a weird way? Whatever you need to know you can figure out as you go; that kind of plays into the whole idea to me of the self-taught guitarist. You know, someone like Eddie Van Halen or whatever that never really studied formal guitar, but all of a sudden turned out to be an amazing virtuoso guitar player or whatever, and whatever he needed to know he figured it out along the way. You know, there are exceptions. There are probably a few people that just had like a golden road paved before them when they started teaching guitar lessons and everything worked out right, everything went perfect, and they didn’t know a whole lot when they got started, but they picked it up quick. Whatever they need to know they figured it out as they went, but I’m going to tell you 99 times out of 100 that doesn’t happen. It’s not about just jumping into starting a teaching studio kind of haphazardly. There are some planning and things that need to be involved. Some things, yes, you are going to keep learning. You are going to keep learning. You are going to keep figuring things out as you go, but you can’t have that as a foundation of your business. So, there’s this quote that you might have heard. I’ve used it before. It’s out there a lot, and it’s simply three words: ready, fire, aim as opposed to ready, aim, fire. When you’re holding a firearm, a gun, ready, so you get it ready. Aim, you point at the thing that you want to hit. And then fire, you pull the trigger. But what a lot of people do is they do ready, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, keep aiming, keep firing until they hit whatever it is that they want to hit, and that’s a great way to pull yourself out of things like procrastination and patterns of inaction. A lot of times you just spend so much time on the ready and aim part that you never execute with your teaching studio. You never try that new program or you never reach out and open up that new location, or you never get started teaching people at all. Get that first student. So, sometimes yeah, you’ve got to ready, fire, aim, but if you make this the way that you operate all the time, it can mess things up. Sometimes you do need to aim before you fire, particularly if you actually want to hit something intentionally. You definitely need to aim before you fire. You know, if you don’t aim before you fire, you never know what you’re going to hit. You could hit an innocent bystander or something. So, I mean this is an analogy, but in your business too yes, you’ve got to get started. Yes, you’ve got to take action. Yes, you could keep learning as you go. But before you jump into starting a new teaching studio or implementing some kind of big change, you have to start with a solid plan. Yes, you can keep learning as you go. You don’t need to know everything upfront, but you’ve got to make sure that you are ready. And the best way to do that when you’re starting a business is to put together a simple business plan. I mean that’s like a dirty word to a lot of people that are just kind of free styling, trying to be a business owner, trying to open up a guitar teaching studio. It’s like business plan. You know, they picture this hundred-page thing full of charts and spreadsheets, and math calculations and paragraphs of information about this and that. Well, it doesn’t have to be that complicated, but let me tell you. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to have a plan. If you want to hit something, you’ve got to get ready, you’ve got to aim, and then you’ve got to fire, in that order. So, put together a simple business plan. It doesn’t have to be a hundred pages. It could be five pages, or you could even break it down to one page, but that business plan should explain exactly how you’re going to make money, exactly how you’re going to get students, and exactly how you’re going to pay your bills. If you don’t figure that out, espec

42 min

07/31/2014

STG 128: Cracking The Code – Interview With Troy Grady

Troy Grady has spent years researching, studying and unraveling the secrets of the world’s fastest professional guitar players and has recently created and released an amazing video series called “Cracking The Code”. In it, he attempts to unravel the mysteries of how famous virtuoso-level guitar players developed their technique, why the average person has so much trouble trying to develop to that level and what to do about it. Troy was kind enough to spend some time talking with me about the video series, his research and how it can help guitar teachers be more effective. In this episode, you’ll hear my interview with Troy Grady where we discuss the history of modern electric guitar playing, how he was able to get up-close HD video footage of the picking technique of monster players like Steve Morse, Tommy Emmanuel, Frank Gambale and Rusty Cooley, and how to take the basic technical concepts he was able to identify and apply them to your own playing and to your guitar lessons. Troy has done some ground-breaking work that I really think will change guitar playing as we know it. This interview will explain how. Items Mentioned In This Episode Link – TroyGrady.com Link – Cracking The Code (YouTube) Link – Buy “Cracking The Code” Season Pass Podcast Transcript Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast. I’m your host, Donnie Schexnayder, and I’m here to help you be more successful as a guitar teacher by attracting more new students, keeping your existing students from quitting, and getting paid what you’re really worth. The topic we’re going to talk about today is Cracking the Code – Interview with Troy Grady. But first, this podcast is sponsored by Music Teacher’s Helper – the best way to manage your private music lesson studio. Music Teacher’s Helper is online scheduling and billing software that you can access from your computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone that saves you hours every month, enables you to generate reports for taxes, and ensures that you never lose track of a payment. Once you add a student, which is super easy, you can choose to automatically send students custom invoices that can be paid with a credit card if you make that an option. You can automatically email lesson reminders to your students, late payment notifications, and even your lesson notes. You can use the free easy-to-build website templates to help market your studio online, and so much more. There are so many cool features, I can’t even get into them all right now, but the thing I like best about Music Teacher’s Helper is how it makes your teaching studio run almost on autopilot. Students can book lessons and request lesson schedules. They can login with their own account and access important information like lesson assignments and progress reports any time of the day or night. Whether you have five or 50 students, Music Teacher’s Helper works for music teaching studios of all sizes. I originally discovered the software and started using it myself several years ago, and I highly recommend giving Music Teacher’s Helper a spin so you can see for yourself how useful it is. They offer a 30-day no-risk trial, where you can test it out to discover how much time you’ll be saving. And if you use this special address to sign up, which is StartTeachingGuitar.com/MTH, you’ll save 20 percent off of your first month if you choose to sign up after the free trial. Now let’s jump right into today’s topic, Cracking the Code. Interview with Troy Grady. Interview Donnie Schexnayder: I have a special guest on the STG Podcast today, and that’s Troy Grady, a great guitar player from Brooklyn, New York, and the creator of the Cracking the Code video series. So, here’s a quick description of the series from Troy’s website. “Cracking the Code is a groundbreaking documentary series that explores the puzzle of virtuoso guitar picking. The show’s three seasons chart thousands of hours of research, across nearly three decades, in pursuit of an elusive formula for plectrum dominion. Melding archival footage, in-depth interviews, painstakingly crafted animation, and custom soundtrack, it’s a pop-science investigation of an age-old mystery: Why are some players seemingly super-powered? The surprising answer is that the world’s top guitarists rely on a system of highly efficient, highly precise, and yet nearly subconscious mechanical techniques. In Season 2, we’ll discover the most ingenious and critical of these techniques: pick slanting. To replicate this, students of the instrument would have to traverse years of practice only to arrive independently at precisely the same set of subtle hand movements. This is like expecting every Swedish chef to reinvent the meatball,” and that sounds exactly what we, as guitar teachers, need to know to be able to help our students improve their playing technique and get better results from their lessons. So, Troy is going to unlock some of the secrets for us in this interview today. So, I just want to welcome you. Hi Troy, welcome to the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast. Troy Grady: Hi Donnie, thanks for having me. Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, tell us a little bit about your story. How did you get started with playing the guitar? Troy Grady: Well, I’m laughing because I didn’t bring my meatball recipe with me, but if you were expecting that, I’m sorry, but you will be disappointed. Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, I had different secrets in mind. Troy Grady: Excellent. So, how did I get started? I got started probably the same way that many people did, by aspiring to spandex pants and fantastic hair in the mid-’80s. In the show, you see this Dave Lee Roth, smile banner hanging on the wall above the recreation of my childhood bedroom, and that is unfortunately for my childhood self, exactly what it looked like. Dave and his crazy stare was hanging over my bed, warding off women for at least a half-mile radius in all directions. So, while I practiced endless renditions of Eruption and Steve Vai songs Eric Johnson songs, and all of that great stuff. So, it was kind of a golden age of fantastic guitar technique and although the guitar as a pursuit for teenage dudes, I think, still is popular as it ever was, the difference between then and now is that this stuff was pop music. Right, you had incredible solos happening in the equivalent of a Katy Perry song on the radio, which is kind of what Beat It was for the time, which was Eddie Van Halen’s contribution to Michael Jackson’s worldwide smash hits. So, that stuff. You turn on the radio and you heard incredible guitar playing, and it was hard not to want to be a guitar player back then. Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah. So, did you take any guitar lessons or were you primarily self-taught? Troy Grady: I was a piano player first. We always had a piano in the house, and so I was already, I think, just on the sort of cusp of attaining a certain type of pop music independence on that instrument right around 13/14 because I’m from Long Island and it is I think a local statute that you must learn to play Billy Joel while growing up in Long Island. So, I was doing all that stuff, scenes from An Italian Restaurant, Angry Young Man, and he’s kind of, in a lot of ways, the Eddie Van Halen of piano. Angry Young Man is this two-handed tapping thing, but on Middle C on the piano at a million miles an hour. And so, that was kind of the eruption of piano. If you could do that, you were the coolest kid on the block. And so, I spent a lot of time doing that, and by the time I got into guitar playing, a lot of the fundamentals were already in place and it was a bit of a point of pride that I’m going to learn how to do this on my own and figure out rock songs off the radio. So, I didn’t take lessons at first. I have periodically, over the years, when I had specific questions, and some of those questions then became Cracking the Code when I didn’t get the answers I thought I should be getting. Donnie Schexnayder: Okay, cool. So, since you mentioned Cracking the Code, let’s jump right in and talk about that. I love what you’re doing with the video series. It’s funny, it’s nostalgic, and it’s like packed full of all of this game changing information. And I actually found out about it from the Guitar Noise Blog, and then as soon as I did, I sat down and watched all of season one just in one sitting. Troy Grady: Wow. Donnie Schexnayder: I mean it really resonated with me that epic journey of learning the guitar that so many of us shared. So, for anyone that may not have heard about it yet, tell us all about Cracking the Code. Troy Grady: Right, so Cracking the Code is essentially really a couple things and it’s sort of hard to pigeon hole, but it is the story of my search for advanced picking techniques driven by what I felt was almost an inordinately difficult challenge of learning how to do this stuff. And when I sat down to write the show, I did it from an autobiographical perspective, and so the show begins very much in, as you’d say, sort of a nostalgic fashion. Told from my viewpoint, but really as a way of relating to anyone who’s ever wanted to learn to play an instrument really well because that was my story. That’s what the ’80s were all about when it came to guitar playing, and that’s what I felt helped convey the technical information in a way that was more engaging and entertaining with a different type of entertainment than you would typically find in an instructional video. So, the first season of the show is very much a story, although in that story are the technical challenges that I faced and as a result, those are the threads that will begin to tie together in the next season of the show, as we actually figure out how some of these advanced picking techniques actually work. Donnie Schexnayder: Okay. So, what kind of res

38 min

07/03/2014

STG 124: Guitar Advice From The Pros, Volume 1

I recently discovered a great podcast called The Guitar Channel, hosted by Pierre Journel. He has hundreds of episodes of his show, mostly containing interviews with famous guitar players including Nuno Bettencourt, Steve Vai, Steve Lukather, Paul Gilbert, Al Di Meola, Guthrie Govan, Tommy Emmanuel and Lee Ritenour. In each interview, he asks the pro-level player what words of wisdom they would like to share with up-and-coming guitarists, and some of the answers are invaluable for both guitar teachers and guitar students. Pierre was gracious enough to give me permission to share some clips from his podcast interviews with the Start Teaching Guitar community so we can all learn and grow as players, teachers and students of the guitar. In this episode, I’ll have words of sage advice from Dave Weiner, Lee Ritenour, Tony MacAlpine, Nuno Bettencourt, Guthrie Govan, Eric Bibb and Marty Friedman. They cover topics including originality, practicing technique, being well-rounded, the importance of music education and lots of others. Listen, learn and share with your students! *Special Offer From The Guitar Channel Podcast* This episode has been a great success and as a result, Pierre Journel from The Guitar Channel podcast would like to present a special offer to the STG community. In addition to the free interviews, Pierre also has a cool “Backstage Pass” member’s only program where you can get access to exclusive members-only interviews, special guitar master classes with some of the artists he has interviewed, guitar backing tracks for some great songs by those artists and lots of other cool stuff. A Guitar Channel Backstage Pass membership is normally only $6 per month, but if you use the link below to sign up, you can get your first month for free: https://startteachingguitar.com/tgc-backstagepass I’ve joined myself and there’s some great content available in this membership. I highly recommend checking it out! To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode. Items Mentioned In This Episode Link – Music Teacher’s Helper (Save 20%) Link – The Guitar Channel Podcast Podcast – TGC Episode 32 – Dave Weiner Interview Link – Riff Of The Week Link – DaveWeiner.com Podcast – TGC Episode 147 – Lee Ritenour Interview Link – Six String Theory Competition Link – LeeRitenour.com Podcast – TGC Episode 140 – Tony MacAlpine Interview Link – TonyMacAlpine.com Podcast – TGC Episode 57 – Nuno Bettencourt Interview Link – Extreme-Band.com Podcast – TGC episode 143 – Guthrie Govan Interview Link – GuthrieGovan.co.uk Podcast – TGC Episode 68 – Eric Bibb interview Link – EricBibb.com Podcast – TGC Episode 158 – Marty Friedman Interview Link – MartyFriedman.com Podcast Transcript This podcast is sponsored by Music Teacher’s Helper, the best way to manage your private music lesson studio. Music Teacher’s Helper is online scheduling and billing software that you can access from your computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone that saves you hours every month, enables you to generate reports for taxes, and ensures you never lose track of a payment. Once you add a student, which is super easy, you can choose to automatically send students custom invoices that can be paid with a credit card, if you make that an option. Automatically email lesson reminders, late payment notifications and lesson notes, use the free easy-to-build website templates to help market your studio online and so much more. There are so many amazing features I can’t get into them all right now. The thing I like best about Music Teacher’s Helper is how it makes your teaching studio run almost on autopilot. Students can book lessons and request lesson reschedules. They can login with their own account and access important information like lesson assignments and progress reports any time of the day or night. Whether you have 5 or 50 students, Music Teacher’s Helper works for music teaching studios of all sizes. I originally discovered the software and started using it myself several years ago; I highly recommend giving Music Teacher’s Helper a spin so you can see for yourself how useful it is. They offer a 30-day no risk trial where you can test it out to discover how much time you’ll be saving. If you use this special address to sign up – startteachingguitar.com/mth – you’ll save 20% off your first month if you choose to sign up after the trial. Introduction So, I’ve been really enjoying a cool guitar podcast lately, called The Guitar Channel, hosted by a guy named Pierre Journel. And the podcast has been around since, I think, 2009. I’m just a little bit late to the party because he’s got tons of episodes and he’s been doing it for a long time. He does a really, really great job, but Pierre lives in Paris, France, and he seems to be a really cool guy, and somehow, I don’t know how, but Pierre manages to land interviews with some of the most famous guitar players in the world. Now, I don’t know how he does it, but it’s great to hear just a normal guy, normal guitar player like you and me, who loves the guitar and who loves, you know, guitar music, and he’s just talking to some of his heroes and asking questions that we would all love to know the answers too. So, in his various episodes and interviews, Pierre has hundreds of episodes with interviews with everyone from Steve Vai to Steve Lukather to Steve Stevens, and all these other amazing guitar players in between. Now, at the beginning of each interview, Pierre asks the guitar players to share some highlights of their journey since they first got started, and it’s fascinating to hear how some of the top players that are on the scene today got their start and how they’ve built their careers to the point from where they were just started out, playing guitar, to where they had major turning points and major milestones in their careers as musicians. It’s fascinating to listen to those stories from the horse’s mouth. But there’s also a segment at the end of each of these interviews where Pierre asks the guest if they have any words of wisdom for other up and coming guitar players, and that’s one of my favorite parts of his show because a lot of the advice that gets shared is very useful, very insightful for guitar teachers and for guitar students alike. So, I asked Pierre if I could take a handful of clips from some of his interviews and share them with the Start Teaching Guitar audience so that we could all learn and grow and get more information from people that are doing guitar at such a high level, and he generously said, “Yeah, sure, you can take clips of my episodes and my interviews, and you can use them on your podcast.” So, I would never have access to interview some of the guys that Pierre does, so I was very grateful that he was willing to allow us to share some of those clips on the episode today. So, this is our all-star guitar advice from the pros episode, containing guitar wisdom and advice from six great players in their own words and recorded in their own voice. So, today we’re going to hear from guitarists like Dave Weiner, from Steve Vai’s band, from Lee Ritenour, from Tony MacAlpine, from Nuno Bettencourt, Guthrie Govan, Eric Bibb, and Marty Friedman. All famous guitar players that I’m sure you’ve heard about and a lot of your probably have a lot of respect for. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to play a short clip from each of these guys. I’ll introduce them, then play a short clip, and then talk about it for a minute or two afterwards. It’s going to be great, and I’ll also link to each podcast in the show notes, each one of Pierre’s podcast episodes so that you can listen to the entire interview with that artist if you want to. I highly recommend that. They’re great interviews. And I’ll probably do another episode like this in the future too, so keep an eye out for Volume Two at some point, but just so that you know, some of these words of wisdom are for you as a teacher and a guitar player, and some of them are going to be for your students. So, feel free to pass this episode on and to share this information with your students if you think it’s appropriate for them too. And I highly recommend subscribing to The Guitar Channel Podcast. Pierre comes out with a new episode, a new interview almost every single week, maybe even more often than that, and he’s also got some video gear reviews on YouTube and things. He’s really doing some great stuff for the guitar community, so you want to check it out. His website is TheGuitarChannel.biz, and there you can find all of his episodes and all of the other information about The Guitar Channel Podcast. I highly recommend checking it out. Dave Weiner Let’s jump into the guitar advice. The first bit of advice comes from Dave Weiner, who is Steve Vai’s touring guitarist. He’s played with Steve Vai for ten, almost 15 years now, and he’s a really great player and artist in his own right. He’s got some solo albums out and he created a series of videos a while back, called Riff of the Week. You can check it out at RiffoftheWeek.com. And he’s also an online guitar teacher. His website is DaveWeiner.com. I’ll have links to all of this in the show notes if you want to get more information. But Dave had some great insight for guitar students and about his experience as a guitar student himself, so let’s listen to what Dave Weiner has to say right now about the guitar. “You know, that guitar got me started. I remember, with my first guitar teacher, we would just try and, you know, even something as simple as try to smoothly change between chords, and I remember that specifically. And then I rem

46 min

06/05/2014

STG 120: 5 Must-Have Mobile Apps For Teaching Guitar

Mobile devices are one of the coolest innovations of the 21st century. Never before in the history of the world have we had so much power and access to so much information in our back pockets. Now you can run your entire teaching studio, communicate with your students, do your marketing and even teach your lessons from a device that fits in the palm of your hand, and there are new applications that can make your life easier and more productive are being developed all the time. In this episode, I’ll tell you about 5 of my favorite mobile apps for teaching guitar…some of them are even completely free to use. I’ll give you the details of each one, along with links you can use to check them out, and I’ll also tell you how they can be used in your teaching studio to help you be more effective with your lessons. The mobile age is here and it’s easier and less expensive than ever to leverage technology so you can be more successful with your teaching business. To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode. Items Mentioned In This Episode Link – Music Teacher’s Helper (Use promo code 3B007F to save 20% off your first month) Link – Evernote Link – GuitarToolkit+ Link – Garageband Link – Dropbox Link – Ultimate Guitar Tabs Podcast Transcript We live in a mobile world, my friends. Mobile applications have taken the world by storm over the last ten years. That smartphone sitting in your pocket right now is way more powerful than the desktop computers we were using even just a decade ago. The number of people using mobile devices is growing rapidly every single year, and actually, these little pocket handheld computers are going to eventually replace laptops and desktops completely for most people in the very near future. There are a lot of things you can use them for. You can use a smartphone, like an iPhone or an Android, to connect to the Internet, to communicate with people all over the world via email, via Skype, via all these other methods. You can store important data on your smartphone. You can run the programs that you use and love, and take them with you wherever you go. You can consume media, like music and movies and television programs any time you want, any way you want, from wherever you are, all on your mobile device. You can improve your skills through taking online training courses and things like that, all from your mobile device. You can organize your life with your calendar and your to-do lists and everything that you have going on, all from your mobile device. You can even do crazy things with a handheld mobile device. Crazy things like start your car. There is an app that will actually let you start your car from your mobile device. You could control your TV. You can turn your mobile device into a remote control. You can use it to monitor your heart rate. You can use it to tell what your altitude is at any given time. You can use it to avoid speed traps. There is actually a database, a mobile app that has a database of speed traps all over the country, here in the United States at least, that places that are known to be frequented by cops looking to write tickets, so you can avoid them. You can buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks right from your mobile device and pay for it from your mobile device. You can even prove to your significant other that they snore. There is a mobile device that will come on at night and record someone snoring so that you can go back and play it for them and prove to them that they snore. That reminds me of The Three Stooges episode I saw a long time ago, where Moe slaps Larry across the head and he says, “Hey, stop snoring,” and Larry goes, “Hey, I stayed up all night to see if I snored one time and I didn’t.” Anyway, I’m not really a comedian. That was just something I thought of when I was telling you about the snore-recording app. But the point is there are lots of different things you could do on your mobile device, and they keep innovating and coming up with new, useful applications every single day. And the really cool thing about all this stuff is that most of these apps are actually free, and the ones that you pay for, it’s not like you have to pay a hundred dollars like you do for a Windows app, like QuickBooks I think is almost two hundred dollars for a desktop accounting app. They cost like two dollars or five dollars or ten dollars. You know? So, this stuff is really powerful and it’s totally portable because it’s on your device and it’s affordable, and there are lots of cool things that can make your life and your business a lot easier if you use them. That’s true. You can also use your mobile device to run your guitar-teaching studio and be a more successful guitar teacher. This episode that we’re kicking off right now will cover five specific mobile apps that are useful for teaching guitar lessons. These are some of my favorite apps. Some of them are free and some of them cost a little bit, but they are all great. And the apps that I mention here, today, in this episode, are going to be for the Apple iOS platform, but some of them are also going to be available on Android and Windows, but there are a few of these apps that are only available on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad series of mobile devices. So, if you don’t happen to own one of those, then some of the apps you’ll be able to easily find, but others you either won’t be able to use them or you’ll have to find something similar that works on your particular platform if you use Android or Windows for your phone. And also, you guys, this is not a comprehensive list. There are a lot of others. There are hundreds of different apps and probably some that deserve to be on this list, but you know, I had to narrow it down to five for the time limits that I have here with the podcast. So, feel free to let me know which apps you think should’ve made the list. We can talk about those in the show notes and in the comments for this episode, and you know, you can recommend your favorites to other people that listen to the episode too. So enough of the chitchat. Let’s jump right into the five apps. 1) Evernote The first one is an app that I’ve been using for a while and I’ve recommended before, but it’s called Evernote. Now, I’ll have links to each of these in the show notes. Evernote is a completely free app. You can do some paid upgrades to it to get additional storage space and additional sharing features, and things like that, but the free app of Evernote in its free condition and state is actually more than adequate for what most people need. Evernote is one of my favorite mobile apps. It has literally changed the way that I work, the way that I do music, and the way that I write songs. It’s actually become an extension of my brain, believe it or not, and I have things in Evernote that I don’t have stored any place else. So, in the past, let me give you some examples. If I wanted to maybe like type up the lyrics to one of my songs or if I wanted to keep track of lesson plans for students or if I wanted to write up a to-do list, or maybe keep a list of books that I want to read, usually I would save all that stuff in a Word document or in a Google Drive doc, and then I would either keep it on my computer somewhere or I would store it in my Google account, where I could access that from my mobile phone, but not as quickly, not as easily, and it was only in one place. What I do now is I create a note in Evernote, and you know what. It’s so much easier to find that whenever I need to find it again. I go in there and I can search from keywords and everything, every note that I have in there with those keywords pops up instantly, and it’s so cool. It’s really, really cool. You can even use Evernote to clip websites. So, you find this cool website. In the old days, we used to bookmark websites.Well, now you can just select the piece of the website that you want to keep, or the whole thing – the whole page -, and then just clip it and it’ll instantly save it into your Evernote account, into the notebook that you specify. So, it’s there anytime you want to find it in the future. Very cool stuff. I have Evernote installed on my desktop computer, on my MacBook Pro, and I also have it on my mobile devices, on my iPad, on the phone I carry around in my pocket, and the cool thing is that if you add a note to Evernote on one of those devices, it automatically syncs it to all the rest of them. And even if you don’t have any of your devices, you can go to a web browser in an Internet cafe, log into Evernote’s website, and have access to all of your information there. Super cool. The best thing about Evernote really though – the syncing thing is really cool, but the really cool thing is that you can search all of your notes in seconds flat. You can add tags to your notes. You can define what each note contains. You can format everything really nice. You can save PDF files directly into Evernote and read them from there. Really cool. If you type a tag word into the search field though, it’ll bring up every note that has that word in it instantly, so you can quickly find what you’re looking for. So, if this has got your wheels spinning, here’s some ways you can use it in your teaching studio. You can use Evernote to keep track of which pieces of music a student is learning. You can keep track of practice schedules and assignments in Evernote. You can keep lists of songs that are suitable for different age groups of students, different genres of students, and different difficulty levels. You can store a list of all of your music reference books, your method books, your CDs and MP3 files, and things like that, that you own. You can actual

32 min

05/08/2014

STG 116: 5 Methods For Mastering Money In Your Guitar Teaching Studio

Many guitar teachers have a love/hate relationship with money. It’s awesome to get paid for doing something you love, but it’s no fun working hard doing something you love and not getting paid what you should be. Too many guitar teachers have hangups about money, are getting paid less than they’re really worth and have to deal with too many hassles when getting paid for their services. The answer is to give yourself and your studio a “money makeover”. In this episode I’ll talk about some of the most common hang-ups and wrong beliefs many guitar teachers have about money, and I’ll talk about what you can do about them if you discover that you’re a victim yourself. I’ll also give you 5 cool methods you can use for mastering money in your personal life and in your teaching studio so that you can finally be more successful. Making peace with money makes room in your life for abundance, and the only thing keeping you from experiencing what you really deserve is you. To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode. Items Mentioned In This Episode Link – Guitar Teaching Income Calculator Podcast Transcript One of the big things I like to focus on with Start Teaching Guitar and the podcast is helping you get paid what you’re really worth. I talk about that all the time, kind of in the tagline for the show, and it’s something that’s really important to me, because money can be a sensitive subject for some guitar teachers. Some of you listening to this episode right now may be afraid to ask for money at all. You’re teaching people, but you don’t feel like you deserve to be paid for it. There are probably others of you that may be afraid to charge what you’re really worth. You’re collecting tuition money, but it’s not as much as you should be collecting for the value that you bring. And then some of you may have problems with getting paid on time or getting paid at all, or have some other kind of money-related headaches. So, these things are all tied together because they’re all related to money and collecting money in your teaching studio. So, if you want to reach your potential as a teacher and you want to make a good living, teaching guitar lessons, you have to overcome the money issues that might be holding you back. So, in this episode, I’m going to try to encourage you about money and dispel some of the stupid things that we tend to believe about money and about ourselves in relation to money. And I’m also going to give you some practical tips for improving the flow of money coming into your teaching studio so that you can finally experience the success that you really deserve, and that’s a big reason why a lot of guitar teachers are not successful financially; is because somewhere deep down inside, they don’t believe that they deserve it, so we’re going to blow that myth right out of the water and also tackle some very practical aspects of collecting money from your students in this episode today. Why Guitar Teachers Have Trouble With Money So let me start out with a couple of the reasons why guitar teachers have trouble with money sometimes. 1) Poverty Mentality The first one is a poverty mentality. Some of us were raised to think poverty all the time. We view the world through a lens of poverty. Poverty is like glasses that we look through and everything we see around us, we see through the eyes and the lens of poverty. So, if you have a poverty mentality, then you think things like the glass is always half empty. There is never enough money to go around. Every time you look around, you only see scarcity and lack. You see the world through this framework of lack, where there’s never enough of anything. There are always scarce resources available. And whenever you look at prices, all you see is how expensive everything is compared to what it used to be. And you know, when you’re shopping, you’re always looking for the absolute cheapest price because money is scarce. Money is rare. Money is not easy to come by. And these are all symptoms of a deep belief that a lot of people, myself included, call a poverty mentality. Now, if you go into any kind of business with a poverty mentality, there’s a good chance you’re not going to make as much money as you should be making, or could be making. You’re going to always question things and you’re going to always make your decisions based on this mentality of poverty, and it’s going to hold you back from being as successful as you deserve to be. That worldview, that poverty mentality worldview, is one of the biggest reasons that guitars seem to have hang-ups with money. It limits everything that you do in your teaching studio. You could take the big risks that would help you be more successful, help you grow, help you take things to a new level, but because of that poverty mentality, you never take those big risks that could change your fortunes for the better. Your mindset, your poverty mindset makes sure that you never even try because hey, what’s the point? Why should I try if there’s not enough to go around anyway, right? But think about this with me for a second. What if the opposite was true? What if the glass really was half full? What if there really was plenty of money to go around? Even if it’s not in your bank account just yet, but what if there was plenty of money floating all around you and all you had to do was reach out and grab it and it would be yours? What if there was abundance all around you instead of scarcity and lack? What if everything that you ever needed was just an arm’s length away from you? What if the world around you had unlimited resources, unlimited opportunities, and unlimited potential that was available to you if only you would take advantage of it? What if all you could see around you was the value you receive for the money you spend on the things that you buy? What if you began investing in value instead of looking for the cheapest price and the cheapest thing? What if the opposite was true? How would your life be different? How would your circumstances change? How would your teaching studio change if all the things I just said were true? Well, guess what. They are true. All of those things are true. The difference between having abundance all around you and having scarcity and lack all around you is all about what you choose to believe. This is all a matter of shifting your beliefs and choosing to see the world in a different way, and anybody can do this. It doesn’t matter how bad the economy is. You can find value to provide and a market for that value in the worst economy. Sometimes you have to think a little harder. Sometimes you have to do a little bit more digging. The things that you’ve done in the past may not work in a down economy, but that does not mean you can’t make a living. Anyone can shift their mentality and see opportunities that other people don’t seem to be able to see. The economy doesn’t matter. Your circumstance in life doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re crippled and in a wheelchair. It doesn’t matter if you have all these other external limitations. Your circumstances don’t matter because you can shift your mindset from a mindset of poverty to a mindset of abundance and you can be more successful. The people around you don’t matter. All of us are surrounded by naysayers and people that always are pointing out flaws and telling us the reasons why the things we want to do aren’t going to work, but you know what. They don’t even ultimately matter, as long as you don’t listen to them and believe what they’re saying. If you believe that you have the capability to be successful, to have more than enough money, to have abundance, then those things are going to start to come true for you. Is it really as simple as just choosing to believe? I’m not going to say that it’s like magic. I’m not going to say that there’s this supernatural change that instantly happens as soon as you shift your mindset, although at some level I believe that it’s true. What happens is you open the door to your life, to your business, to your family, to your finances for all of this abundance whenever you choose to refocus yourself on the positive instead of the negative. It doesn’t cause all of this to happen instantly, but it makes it possible. So, choosing a different worldview, choosing a different view, instead of poverty, choosing abundance will help to drive poverty from your life. It will open the doors to the success that you want to see and it’ll start attracting that abundance, that prosperity, that money, the finances, all the things you want to see. The blessings you want to see in your life. They’re not going to come if the doors are shut. They’re not going to come if you don’t believe they exist. So, your poverty mentality is a huge thing that can hold you back in your business from being successful financially, and a lot of people deal with it. I know I’ve spent a lot of years dealing with it myself. And sometimes still I have to bring a car into the mechanic shop or something like that, I cringe and I’m like: “Dang, I don’t want to spend this money,” but I’ve got to realize: “Hey, if I release this money and I get my car running good, I’m going to have a better running car. I’m going to have more reliability. I’m going to have less stress in my life, and there’s plenty more money where that came from.” So, choosing a different worldview will help to drive poverty from your life and help you to attract abundance. So that’s the first big reason why a lot of guitar teachers have money trouble; is that they just don’t believe there’s enough money to go around in the world, or in their li

37 min

04/10/2014

STG 112: Growing Your Teaching Studio $5 At A Time

37 min

03/13/2014

STG 108: How NOT To Teach Guitar Lessons

I’ve done lots of podcast episodes about how to become a better guitar teacher; today I want to take a look at this from a different angle and talk about how NOT to teach guitar lessons. There are tons of teachers out there doing it WRONG! Hopefully you aren’t one of them, but regardless, it’s good to hear some examples of common guitar teacher “bad behavior” so you can be aware of the shocking behavior some teachers exhibit in their lessons and make sure you avoid it in the future. In this episode I’ll give you several examples of how NOT to teach guitar lessons from my own experience, from the stories of other STG members and from other places on the web. Bad teachers reflect poorly on all of us. Hopefully tons of people will listen to this free episode and the end result will be a better music education experience for guitar students all over the world. Please share it with everyone you know and join me on this mission to raise the bar for teaching guitar! To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode. Items Mentioned In This Episode Article – Stupid Things Guitar Teachers Do To Waste Your Time Podcast Transcript I’ve done a lot of episodes about how to teach guitar lessons, dozens and dozens of them. I’m on Episode 108 now by the time you’re listening to this, so there have literally been dozens and dozens of episodes about how to teach guitar lessons more effectively. Today I’m going to shift gears a little bit and we’re going to talk about how not to teach guitar lessons. This is going to be interesting and hopefully a little bit entertaining, but it’s probably going to be a little bit painful too because I think everybody is going to be able to relate to some of the stories I’m going to tell today. But to just start things off, this topic was suggested by an STG All-Access member named Richard Sweeny, and Richard told me in an email: “I think you could do an entire lesson on what not to do. One of my favorite sayings is if you are going to tap dance in a minefield, it helps to know where the mines are.” That’s a great quote. “Knowing what not to do is sometimes more important than knowing what to do or how to do it,” and that’s an excellent point, Richard, so I took your advice and I’m dedicating this episode to you. My Own Childhood Horror Story – A Bad Group Guitar Class So, let me start off with my story. Everybody probably has one or two – I’ll call them – horror stories from when you took guitar lessons yourself at some point. And if you didn’t experience anything like this yourself, you’ve probably heard something from someone else. So, my story is: when I was eight years old, growing up in South Louisiana, absolutely was crazy about the band Kiss. Now, I realize I’m dating myself. This is the 1970s. My musical tastes have evolved quite a bit since then, but you know, when I was a kid, I used to sit on floor in my room and I used to play Kiss records nonstop. Kiss Alive. Kiss Alive II. And those are my favorite albums, the Live ones, but I had several of their other ones. And I would sit on the floor, looking at the album covers, listening to the music, playing air guitar. You know, I was just crazy about Kiss. So, the following Christmas, my dad bought me my first guitar. It was a knock-off of a Gibson SG that I believe we got from the Sears catalogue or from the J. C. Penney catalogue, or one of those places. But it was like an Angus Young-style Gibson SG guitar with a little amp. And when I got that, my dad found the best thing he could find as far as guitar lessons for me. Like I said, I was eight, maybe nine years old at the time. So, he searched around and asked people, and he found a small group guitar class, meeting in a nearby country town at their school. So, he enrolled me in the class and I was all excited about it. I was looking forward to learning how to play this new guitar that I had. It turns out it was a disaster, mostly because it was a bad teacher that was teaching that class and he was really only interested in taking our money. He did not make any kind of effort at all to connect with me as a student. I was just another face in the class, and I had to jump in and learn what everybody else was learning. I didn’t get hardly any individual attention. It was a really, really tough situation for me. You know, being a pre-teen kid, eight, nine years old, it was just totally the wrong situation for me. So, I quit after a couple of lessons and the sad thing is I didn’t pick the guitar up again until I was 18 years old, about ten years later. And I don’t remember that teacher’s name. I’ve tried to think back and see if I can remember who this guy was. He’s probably dead by now, honestly, but I definitely remember how that teacher did not seem to care about me, or any of the other students in class. He wasn’t interested in me. He wasn’t interested in what I wanted to learn. He certainly wasn’t interested in teaching me Kiss songs, which is what I was crazy about at the time, but you know, I learned a valuable lesson from that later on, when I started teaching guitar, and that was don’t do it the way this guy did. So, that’s kind of my horror story. You know, I had a few other teachers that were great players and not good teachers. They used to just open the fire hose in my face in their lessons and just blast me with so much information that I couldn’t process it, couldn’t go back and really integrate what they taught me, and also had some teachers that were really good. That knew exactly how to teach, how to pace their lessons, and how to give me what I was looking for. You know? So, I don’t want to make all of the teachers that I worked with sound bad, but that was my horror story. I had this one guy that basically almost ruined the guitar for me for life, just because he didn’t give a crap about me as a student. Horror Stories From Other Teachers So, that’s my personal example of how not to teach guitar, and that’s really inspired me over the years, but I found some other ones. And actually, Richard Sweeny who recommended this topic, gave me one of his own. And this is what he had to say. In an email, he said, “Today I snagged a student from another teacher without doing anything. It seems the mother of the student caught the guitar teacher smoking during the session and fired him on the spot.” Okay, now I realize that that’s not funny. If I was that parent, I would really be pissed off and I would not be happy with that guitar teacher, and I would’ve done the same thing, maybe even worse if it was me. But I just can’t imagine why someone that was in business that was teaching for money would think that it’s okay to smoke cigarettes in the middle of a guitar lesson. I’m just trying to imagine a scenario or the kind of person that would think that that’s okay. That just blows my mind. You know, most places of business, you can’t smoke inside anyway. It’s against the law. But you know, this is crazy. Right? Another story I found. Actually, I posed this to social media and I got a few replies from members of the STG community. This one’s from Josh Liston in Australia. And he replied to my post on LinkedIn, and he said, “As I’m now 30 years old, I have a fair amount of industry experience, yet I’m not too old to be involved with guitar players that are just starting out teaching 18 to 22 years old.” So, this is people about ten years younger than Josh. And he says, “I hear them ragging on each other’s tastes, technique, gear, and even students. It’s pretty disappointing in particular when many of those same young teachers work for the same music store in town.” So, Josh, I’ve experienced this too. I’ve known a lot of, especially music store teachers. There seems to be some kind of vibe in a lot of music stores, and no offense if you work in a music store. I know that there are some stores that are run by really positive people, but a lot of the ones that I’ve been in that had music teachers that and even people that work behind the counter, you know, it’s just the attitude wasn’t good. It was just overly negative and critical. And I remember going into music stores back in Louisiana when I was younger, and they would be bad-mouthing all of these pro-level guitar players. Like I remember one guy talking about George Lynch. How he did something that got somebody else mad. He did this other person wrong, and the other guy goes: “Oh, that’s just another reason not to like him,” and stuff like that. And I just remember thinking to myself. You know, I didn’t say this out loud, but I just remember thinking: “Dude, George Lynch is a rich and famous guitar player. Has more talent in his one pinky finger than you have in your entire body. And he’s touring and playing in arenas, and here you are, working behind the counter at a music store.” So, I think a lot of that is just because, you know, everybody wants to be successful with music. They want to do more than what they’re doing. And some people, I guess, if they feel like they’re stuck in a dead-end situation, that talking bad about other people, trying to make themselves look and feel better is kind of a way to escape that, I guess, in a small degree. But I think it’s unprofessional and I would never do business with someone that had that kind of attitude, no matter what they were selling. I don’t care if they’re a plumber or a used car salesman, but especially somebody I was going to have to sit in a teaching studio with week after week and learn from. That is one thing I do not want to learn from anybody; is how to have a crappy attitude. So, I can relate to you there, Josh. I’ve seen tha

35 min

02/13/2014

STG 104: 7 Guitar Teaching Excuses I Never Want To Hear Again

If you’ve been thinking about taking the plunge into teaching guitar lessons but you haven’t found the motivation to actually get started, then this episode is for you. There are lots of excuses we’ve all made at one time or another for staying on the bench, but today is the day to face them head on and start taking some action. In this episode, I’ll get into seven common (but lame) excuses I hear all the time for not getting started as a guitar teacher. I’ll explain each one and give you a friendly kick in the pants if you happen to be using any of these excuses yourself. I’d love to never hear any of these 7 guitar teaching excuses ever again for as long as I live…hopefully after this episode, you won’t let any of them hold you back any longer! To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode. Podcast Transcript If you’ve been thinking about starting out as a guitar teacher, but for some reason you haven’t taken the plunge yet, maybe it’s because you’ve been making one or more of these lame excuses that I’m going to talk about in this episode today. Now, I’m not trying to offend anybody. I’m not trying to give anybody a hard time. But a lot of times, we make excuses that we think are perfectly acceptable for things that we know that we know that we want to do, that we know that we should do, that we know are going to be great things for us to do, but we make these excuses and we end up never doing them. It’s really easy for that to happen with your aspirations to be a guitar teacher. So, I’m going to get into these seven ways that we make excuses. These seven specific excuses that we make. And honestly, I hope I never have to hear any of these excuses again. But if you hate your job, if you’re tight on money, or you just need some kind of creative outlet, then teaching guitar lessons is definitely something you should look into. It’s an awesome thing to do. But procrastinating because of fear, or just making excuses for whatever reason, won’t get you a single step closer to where you want to be. Yes, you do need to think this thing through. Yes, you do need to plan well if you want to be successful as a guitar teacher. But at some point, the excuses need to stop and you need to take action. So, this episode will hopefully encourage you to do exactly that. So, I’m not going to waste any time. Let’s jump right into the seven excuses. Excuse #1 – I Don’t Have Enough Money The first one is: “I don’t have enough money to start teaching guitar.” That’s a common excuse. It’s a common reason for people to want to hesitate. They think that they need to have more money to get started. Maybe you think that you need to go and rent this really fancy teaching space or you want to save up money to run these magazine or TV or radio ads, or something like that. But honestly, you don’t need a lot of money to start teaching guitar. And if you have a lot of money, that means you’re probably going to waste a lot of money getting started. Just like most businesses that have a lot of money when they get started, they waste it. They buy a bunch of fancy stuff that they don’t need and they spend money on all kinds of things that don’t even make a difference as to whether they succeed or fail. So, if you don’t have enough money to start teaching, don’t use it as an excuse. It’s an asset! It means that you’re going to be lean and mean, and that you’re going to be very selective about the things that you do spend money on. So, what you need to do is you need to start at home. Don’t go out and rent teaching space unless you can get a screaming deal on it, or get it for free or whatever, but start in your house. Start small. Don’t feel like you have to become this huge music school from the very get-go. Start out small, and then work with what you’ve got. You don’t need a lot of money. You don’t need a lot of resources. You don’t have to be super-duper professional right out of the gate. Work with what you have, and then don’t waste money on less important things. Focus the little bit of money that you do have to get your website going, to get your email list going, to get your online marketing going, and to start building up referrals and things like that. Don’t waste it on things that don’t matter at the very beginning, like paint and carpet and gadgets, and expensive real estate, and things like that. Work small. Work from your house. Work with what you’ve got. It might take you a little bit longer, but remember there’s no rush. Just take your time and enjoy yourself when you do this. It’s better to go slower, to start out lean and mean, than to never get started teaching guitar at all. So, do it. Don’t use it as an excuse. And if you’re completely broke, if you don’t have two pennies to run together, then just start teaching anyway. Inaction, just sitting there, making excuses or complaining about your finances is not going to get you anywhere. Go out and talk to everybody that you know, and find two or three students and go. Don’t let lack of money stop you or keep you from getting started or make you procrastinate, because the sooner you start teaching, the sooner that you start getting some actual paying students, the more money you’re going to have. If you keep waiting around for more money, then chances are you’re not going to make any because you’re not doing anything to earn the money. Go out and teach some guitar lessons, make some money, and then you’ll have some money to pour into your business. Don’t use the lack of money as an excuse. I hate that excuse. It’s a lame excuse. If you’re making it, and I know because I’ve made all of these excuses myself at one time or another, and I’ve learned from them, so I’m passing this on to you. Don’t let a lack of money stop you from getting started as a guitar teacher. Excuse #2 – I’m Too Busy Excuse number two: “I’m too busy to start teaching guitar.” You’re too busy, hm. Well, let me see. If I look at my life, I am one of the busiest people that I know, and I have time to teach guitar lessons. So, if I can do it, you can do it too. You know what. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. I have the same 24 hours here, in Colorado Springs, that you have wherever you live, and you can accomplish a lot in 24 hours if you take the attitude of someone that’s going to be effective. So, we all have the same 24 hours a day. The question is what are you going to do with those 24 hours. What are you going to do with that time? Well, let’s talk about time for a second. You can’t buy more time. So, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to make some. That’s what everybody else does who starts a business. They make sacrifices. They give up other things so that they have time to make their business get off the ground. So, what do you do? Well, turn off the TV. You know, I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but a lot of people, most people, unless you’re Amish or something and you don’t have a TV, but most people spend way too many hours watching TV. Two, three, four, or five hours a day watching TV, watching Netflix, watching videos on YouTube, watching broadcast television. You know what. Turn the TV off. I mean even if you just cut that in half, if you spend five hours a day watching TV, only spend two and a half hours a day watching TV and spend the other two and a half hours teaching guitar lessons, or planning your business, or doing something that’s going to get you close to your goal of being a guitar teacher. Don’t let the TV hold you back. Another thing you could do is stop hanging out with your friends, socially, quite so much. Now, I’m not telling you to give it up completely, but if you go out with your friends three nights a week, and you go and drink beer, shoot pool, throw darts, or whatever it is that you do, watch sports, you know, maybe only do that one night a week or two nights a week and dedicate the other night to teaching guitar lessons. I don’t know. It sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Another thing you could do is you could stop sleeping so late or going to bed so early. Now, I realize you can’t necessarily teach guitar lessons first thing in the morning or last thing at night before you go to bed unless you’re doing Skype lessons with someone in a different time zone, but you know, there’s a lot of planning and a lot of actual execution work that you could do to get your business going if you get up a little early or go to bed a little bit earlier than you normally do. Sleep a little bit less. As long as you’re getting seven or eight hours of sleep every night, you’re good. Your body is not going to shut down. You’re not going to fall asleep in the middle of the day, at work or something. So, dedicate an hour or two every morning when you get up, before you go to work, or before you start your day and work on your business. Work on your teaching skills. Work on putting your curriculum together. Work on building your website for your teaching studio. Work on gaining more knowledge about how to be more successful as a guitar teacher. Listen to one of my podcasts. Another thing you could do, and this is why I record audio podcasts, is you can listen to them in the car on your way to work. So, you can kill multiple birds with one stone. When you’re driving, when you’re commuting, when you’re going to the store, when you’re going to work, bring your iPod with you, plug it into your car, and listen to the podcast. Listen to training materials. Listen to inspiring, motivational business materials when you’re doing other things. When you’re mowing the grass, when you’re doing things that don’t

35 min

The Start Teaching Guitar Podcast

Episodes

STG 140: G4 Guitar Network – Interview With David Hart

STG 136: Beginning Guitar Teacher Questions Answered

STG 132: Busting Some Common Myths About Teaching Guitar – Part 1

STG 128: Cracking The Code – Interview With Troy Grady

STG 124: Guitar Advice From The Pros, Volume 1

STG 120: 5 Must-Have Mobile Apps For Teaching Guitar

STG 116: 5 Methods For Mastering Money In Your Guitar Teaching Studio

STG 112: Growing Your Teaching Studio $5 At A Time

STG 108: How NOT To Teach Guitar Lessons

STG 104: 7 Guitar Teaching Excuses I Never Want To Hear Again

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Information

The Start Teaching Guitar Podcast

Episodes

STG 140: G4 Guitar Network – Interview With David Hart

STG 136: Beginning Guitar Teacher Questions Answered

STG 132: Busting Some Common Myths About Teaching Guitar – Part 1

STG 128: Cracking The Code – Interview With Troy Grady

STG 124: Guitar Advice From The Pros, Volume 1

STG 120: 5 Must-Have Mobile Apps For Teaching Guitar

STG 116: 5 Methods For Mastering Money In Your Guitar Teaching Studio

STG 112: Growing Your Teaching Studio $5 At A Time

STG 108: How NOT To Teach Guitar Lessons

STG 104: 7 Guitar Teaching Excuses I Never Want To Hear Again

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