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