How to Become a Great Guitar Teacher (and Start a Successful Guitar Teaching Business)

A good guitar teacher is someone who needs to have certain qualities, characteristics and attributes. I’ll try to list these down in this article, not in any order though.

For starters, one of the biggest hallmarks of a good guitar teacher is that he or she is always a specialist, who specializes in one or two (at the most) genres of music. A good guitar teacher can never be someone who ‘knows it all’. He’s a specialist – a country music specialist, metal specialist, rock or jazz guitar teacher, etc. This genre is his forte, his domain, and he is the best in when it comes to this style of music.

In order to become a good guitar teacher, the best there is, it is essential to establish yourself as a specialist, and then advertise yourself as one in order to attract budding musicians looking to learn how to learn this style of music. Musicians will always look for professionals who are specialists, rather than someone who ‘teaches all kinds of music’ (or claims to do so).

The second biggest thing a great guitar teacher has in his or her arsenal, is experience. But it is not to say that inexperienced guitar teachers are rubbish. Experience, quite naturally, comes with time; someone who has been teaching the guitar for 10 successful years will quite obviously be a better teacher (and hence a more attractive proposition to students) than someone who has the same amount of skills and proficiency, but has zero teaching hours under his belt.

As with everything in life, experience is key. Having the power of experience behind you, as well as a successful track record of teaching the guitar to a fairly large number of students should give guitar teachers a competitive advantage over their peers.

Good guitar teachers have a lot of knowledge about guitars and guitar-playing, and the ability to show this know-how on their instruments. Guitar playing is their passion, their life. They’re dedicated musicians, they are exceptional guitar players. Teaching something – anything – requires you to attain a certain level of proficiency. Good guitar teachers are always exceptional guitar players, who have theoretical and practical knowledge of a wide range of things related to playing the instrument.

However on the flip side, this does not mean that being an exceptional guitarist qualifies one to be an exceptional guitar teacher. Like I said in the beginning, being an exception guitar teacher requires involves many other elements.

Some of these elements include being patient person, being self-motivated, being a good communicator and a good speaker, having the ability to teach and getting your point across to many different types of people, having a pleasant personality, being a thorough professional (this is very important!), and as explained above, having the ability to be exceptionally good with playing the guitar.

Good guitar teachers should devise ways to deliver the content or teach the guitar. A sign of a good guitar teacher is that he or she tailors his or her lessons according to the requirements of the student. This is usually done by knowing a bit about each individual student, his/her level of proficiency and guitar technique, musical tastes and preferences, and finally (and perhaps most importantly), musical goals and aspirations. Great guitar teachers usually take each of these factors in consideration in order to develop their lessons and start teaching the guitar. Without knowing the answers to these crucial set of questions, there is absolutely no way a teacher will be able to ‘teach’ the guitar.

A good guitar teacher is a good marketer. He knows how to attract students, and market, promote and grow his business in parallel with teaching and taking classes. Remember that both are different elements of being a great guitar teacher (1. Teaching the guitar, and 2. Working on the ‘business’ side of things) which need to be managed simultaneously, and in an equally good manner.

One of the biggest aspects about the business side of things will be money. As a guitar teacher, you’ll need to be good with money. You can use technology, and various tools to aid you here, such as cellphone apps, automated methods of receiving money and email-based receipts, and the like. And here’s a tip: always charge for lessons in advance.

One of the biggest and the best things that any guitar teacher should have, is a unique selling proposal. Something that makes you stand out. Something that makes you distinguishable, and different from the rest of the pack. Something that gives you a competitive advantage. And something that actually urges prospective students to come to you, rather than go to your competition. If you think about it, there are probably many other guitar teachers in your vicinity already, many of whom probably have first-mover advantage and an upper hand when it comes to experience.

When such a scenario presents itself, it could be very fruitful to have something that no one else offers. Something that puts gives you a real advantage over your competition. For instance you could partner with one of your local guitar stores, and offer a discount on guitar equipment to your students (it’s win-win, since the guitar store gets free publicity and more customers). Or you could spend some time recording lessons or a series of guitar lessons, which could then go up on your website and be offered to your students free of charge. You could also use your website as a lesson and payments management portal, which your students can access in order to look at information about the coursework and making payments over PayPal.

Of course, these are just some examples, and I’m sure you can think of many things that would add a  certain amount of uniqueness to your lessons, giving you an edge over the others.

Speaking of a website, a good guitar teacher needs to have a presence on the internet. For this purpose, make sure that you have a website or a blog, preferably a YourName.com website. Nowadays, websites are super-easy (and not to mention, super cheap) to set up, and get up and running. It is important to have presence on the internet, because you maximize your exposure this way, allow people to find you on the internet, and of course, having a professional-looking website leaves a good impression on prospective and current students!

A good guitar teacher usually uses a wide range of teaching methods and has a number of teaching resources at his/her disposal. Practical, books, theory, videos, Youtube, online lessons… the whole deal.

Lastly, a good guitar teacher concentrates on keeping dropouts at a minimum and concentrate on student retention. This means having long-term students, who stick with you, as opposed to having a large dropout rate.

EDIT: Just came across this great piece on Live4Guitar that says a lot of things I went through in my article. Check it out.