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, at least two or three times to go to seminars and work with different people on different things. And that’s part of why I wanted to connect with you, and you know, we’ve got a great friendship now, because you’re very knowledgeable.

You know this industry really well and, you know, you and I are sort of bouncing ideas and sharing things. Yeah, so that’s what I’m all about. That’s how I work these days.

Donnie: Yeah, that’s great. That’s another thing we have in common, because I’m a pretty avid reader of business and self-improvement books, especially in the mindset area as well. It makes all the difference. It really does. And one of the things that you touched on that’s so important is being willing to reach out and ask for help, but also being willing to pay for it, you know, because a lot of people, teachers in particular, just figure that they just have to figure it out. And if money is tight, you know, I’m not going to invest any money in hiring a coach or somebody else to help me, and it never really ends up working out. So, that’s a huge thing that I agree with you on one hundred percent.

David: Yeah. Yeah, because I’m not saying you can’t get great free advice. You can. There’s plenty of great free advice to be had, but the reality is, is that if someone is not invested in you, so when you go to a coach, then they’re invested in you. When you go to a restaurant, you know, the people who are waiting your tables and making your food. If you aren’t going to pay for that food and pay for that service, I don’t know that they’d be that keen and they’re certainly not invested in you. And you know, great coaches, as far as I can see, really do deserve to be paid because we want them doing more of what they’re doing. We want them positioned where they can.

This is not saying, again, and I do quote a lot only because I think, you know, clichés are quite powerful, and that is that, you know, you pay for your education one way or another. You either pay for it in the beginning or you pay for it in the end through mistakes. You know, and I did that earlier and I’d rather pay for it upfront, go: “All right, you know, you teach me how to do it.” If you think of all the timesaving things that you’ve learned along the way, you know, one coach that I had that’s worth mentioning is Jay Abraham. Incredible coach, and you know, what he taught me about business and, you know, marketing was just mind-blowing. You know, his kind of exponential strategies of growing a business and, you know, here I was, plugging away, putting ads in the local newspaper, and you know, maybe on a directory or something, but this kind of pre-Internet, and he comes along and just blows my mind away with all these marketing strategies.

He’s worked at all the big companies. Lots of big-name people. So, you know, I spent four thousand dollars or something doing a kind of four-day event with him, and I made that four thousand dollars many, many times over.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah, that’s usually how it goes.

David: Yeah.

Donnie: Yeah. So, what made you decide to start helping other guitar teachers? How did you get started being a coach yourself?

David: I guess I kind of fell into it. You know, when I look back, I think there was no intention there in the beginning because I mean this is for a lot of guitar teachers. Their intention is to play guitar and, you know, I was in high school, doing my high school diploma, and at that time, I was playing in bands and gigging already. And I sort of decided that, you know, I wasn’t going to go to University because I wanted a career in music. That’s where I was heading. And as I came out, the gigs were good, but you know, we were the young guns and, you know, we got paid the bottom of the barrel. We were the band that they called upon. We were young and dumb and had no sort of pull in the industry.

But we had – you know, not myself because I was a very average musician at that time and I’d only been playing guitar for really about a year and a half when we were doing this, but the drummer that I had was only 13, but he was incredible. He was just a kid that was just amazing on the drums. Still is, but he doesn’t play commercially. But him, and then we had a bass player, who was older, who was about 30 at time, and then my brother on vocals. And my brother was a really good frontman. He’s great, getting the audience. He’s done a lot of acting and drama, and stuff like that, plus he’d done a lot of what we call talent quests in Australia, where he had to get up and perform in front of an audience. Bit like The Voice or one of those things, but he used to win them all the time.

So, he was all about winning the audience over, and I wouldn’t even say he was a great singer back then. He’s improved a lot these days, but even back then he was a great singer, but he was a great performer. He could really get the audience in and he loved Elvis. You know, he was kind of a big Elvis fan. So, we had that band and we would get paid, but not much. You know, we’d cover our petrol. We’d cover our basics, so there wasn’t much money left. So, I had to kind of get a job in retail to support that, but the teaching was something that I started doing because it made money, and that was the only reason.

And then, as I made more money through teaching, what had happened, because my experience in retail, I developed sales skills and business skills. Mostly sales skills, but I was able to take those sales skills and apply them to my guitar teaching business, and so I was enrolling students quite quickly. Anybody who was ringing up, I was getting students. The sales weren’t the problem. Just about everybody that called I could enroll, and so I realized: “Wow, this is building quickly. I don’t need my retail sales job anymore. I can now do teaching.” And that’s kind of where I sort of got into the teaching.

The next step on that was that it became lonely. I felt very alone because there were no other. You know, I was working in a retail sales team, playing in a band. Used to play in sports teams. I was all about team playing, and the reason I started a school was because I felt lonely. That was really the bottom line. So, I opened a school and brought in a couple of other teachers, and that really worked for me. That was where I felt at home, because I had other teachers to bounce off. And really the growth for me of the teaching was initially for the survival of the business, because if you even have good teachers, if you have a good program, you weren’t going to teach students and it was very hard.

You know, it’s okay when you’re teaching at home, but you don’t have really any overheads. But when you’re in a commercial premise, when you’re paying a rent, you’re paying wages for staff, etc., you need to teach students if you want the business to grow. So, that’s where I really got kind of stressed, let’s say, because it wasn’t working and I had to lay people off, and then, you know, all sorts of problem, but then it’s when, like I said, that kind of Anthony Robbins moment of starting to learn and get other help and advice from others that I really started to step up. It’s a long story, but I won’t go into too much detail, but that gives you an idea.

Donnie: Yeah. So, that’s a great transition into what you’re doing now with G4 Guitar Network. There’s probably a few people at least listening to this or watching it on YouTube that have never heard of G4 Guitar or what you’re doing. So, for anyone like that, can you just kind of give us an overview of what G4 Guitar Network is all about and what you’re doing?

David: Sure. G4 was kind of an extension of, if I can add to that thing about being lonely and not wanting to do it by myself, but wanting to play on a team. When I say alone, I don’t mean I was sort of sad and lonely and depressed. I just was itching to play on a team. And so, I went, you know, through the years. I had schools and, you know, ended up with, and still is, the biggest suburban musical school is Sydney, Australia. But what happened there is, in about 2000, I decided that I needed a change. I needed to do something different. I’d done this. It was all good and I wanted to be able to go to another level. And when I stepped out of that, I sold the business and then moved on. In about 2003, took a couple of years off, and really developed G4 because by that time I was getting a lot into, you know, reading about people like Steve Jobs and learning from those kinds of guys about how, you know, you should really focus on one area. Don’t try and be everything.

And so, I got away from this musical school of teaching every instrument and just focusing on guitar and developing a program, and that was another thing, which was advice that I got about develop a program. You know, you can’t just be Dave’s Guitar School. What is Dave’s Guitar School? You’ve got to have a product. You know, when you think of Apple, they have products. They have an iPad. They have an iPhone. You think of McDonald’s. They have a Big Mac. So, you’ve got to have some kind of product, and that was where okay, so I need to take what I do and put it into a system because it’s working for me. If I could systemize it and, you know, I got this kind of from the e-myth. Put it into a system. That’s where I spent two years developing the G4 Guitar Method. Even though I’ve been developing it for years before that, I really got it together, and then I went in and started the first school.

But to carry on from what I was previously doing is that I then, at that point, decided I was going to open a location, so I was going to have a chain of schools. And so, within that two years of opening, it went from literally zero in a new area. Nobody knew me. I had no sort of, you know, reputation because I sold my other business. I couldn’t open anywhere near there because I had a legal obligation and a moral obligation. I wouldn’t do that. I would go into competition with a business that I’d sold. So, I went across to the other side of Sydney, complete other end, and started from scratch.

And within two years, I had five schools and we’d enrolled over three thousand students. And so, at that point, again, I was becoming overwhelmed and stressed because I had all these people to manage. I had 20 teachers. Five schools. And it was just growing at a ridiculous rate because the system was working, but it was kind of like I’d launched this rocket into space and now I didn’t know where to go. What do I do now? And that’s when the idea for the network, which I’d had before, but this was when I really could of realized it was time for, because having a network was going to put me in contact with teachers around the world, who had a similar idea and a passion, but were owners of their business. I wanted them to have an ownership. I didn’t want it to be where they were an employee, and that’s why I went for the network.

And it’s just working out beautifully. We’ve got now around 40 odd teachers. And last year, at this time, we only had one or two teachers who weren’t in Australia. They were all in Australia. So, in this last year, we’ve now got 20 odd teachers in the US and the UK and one in Canada, and it’s just exploding. In the last couple of months, it’s really starting to take off because we relate. It’s been a whole series of steps to get where we are now, but it’s pretty well in place. Just got a guy from New York joined two days ago, which is exciting because now we’re in the Big Apple. So, we’ve kind of got, you know, guy in California. A guy in Seattle joined only last month. You know, Pennsylvania. Maryland. So, yeah, we’ve got popping up everywhere. Arizona.

So, it’s really starting to come together nicely.

Donnie: Yeah, that’s great. So, sounds like you have this International movement that’s starting up here with G4. That’s cool.

David: Well, it’s a bit like that. Yeah, it’s kind of the, you know, guitar players, guitar teachers that want to play on a team really, and that’s how I would put it. I would just say that we’re coming together, we’re networking, and we’re sharing our kind of passion for teaching and learning from each other because, you know, most guitar teachers operate like Islands. You know, they’re very much isolated, doing their own thing, and they’re reinventing the wheel often. So, you know, there’s a lot of work in setting up a business and to pull all that work that you’re putting into sort of growing your name, your brand, building teaching lesson plans – everything is so huge, and to be doing it for one person, it’s like building a restaurant to feed one person.

You know, it’s a lot of work just for one teacher. So, that’s where we kind of unite. And I spend, you know, my time, literally ten hours a day, developing G4. You know, making it easier for these teachers to operate, which is like them having a full-time employee with 30 years of experience in the business, working behind the scenes for them. And yeah, that’s how I see it.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah, so could you give some more details about specific ways that G4 can help guitar teachers be more successful?

David: Sure. Sure. I think, well, the number one thing that teachers struggle with is time. You know, when I talk to the average guitar teacher and probably the average person these days for that matter, it’s the time that they struggle with. I don’t have enough hours in the day, you know, trying to do all these different things. And time is not equal for everybody. And so, if someone like a Bill Gates with Microsoft can run a multibillion-dollar business as well as one of the biggest charities in the world, he can be, you know, speaking on stages. Every week you’ll see him speaking on a different stage somewhere. So, if someone like him can manage all that, plus he’s a family man as well – he’s got time for his own kids and his wife -, we could say, oh, it’s because he’s got money. He’s got privilege. He’s got all those things.

And perhaps that helps, but it comes through leveraging and leveraging is really what G4 – the bottom line of what G4 is about. And it’s leveraging your time, your brand, everything. And so, if you think about a guitar teacher and the time they spend as a G4 guitar teacher, they often say to me, “I want to do this or I want to do that,” and I can say, “We’ve already got that done. Here it is,” or if we don’t have it, let me put it on the project list and I’ll work on it. And a recent example would be, you know, a lot of the teachers were talking about parenting, working with parents. You know, parents. We want them to do their bit at home with the kids, and the reason the kids drop out and give it up and stop or quit is because the parents are not there at home, helping them with their practice and supporting them.

How can we make this easier? And I was giving them lots of advice and, you know, one teacher said, “That’s great advice. You should put it into a book or something that we can give to the parents to read.” And great idea. Bang. Let’s do it. So, we got down and it was really three of us that worked on it. When we put this parenting guide together, nine to ten-page guide for parents on how to work with their child, from young children – three to four-year-olds – up to sort of teenagers, and that all came together in a matter of a couple weeks. And that wouldn’t have happened. You know, the amount of time and work that goes into putting something like that together. You know that. You know, putting a book together or something like that takes a lot of time and effort to get it together.

And to know that all the guys in the network can now benefit from that without having to do anything. You know, they can even just make a suggestion and if it’s a good suggestion, everyone agrees on it or a few of us agree on it, then we can have them. So, it’s the prime thing that G4 will do for teachers. Number one is leverage. The second thing that I would say is the network effect. And the network effect is often severely underrated and underestimated as to the power of the network effect. You and I are here, speaking on Skype today due to several layers of the network effect. The Internet is the first example. The Internet wouldn’t exist without the network.

You know, if there was only you and me, this connection would cost millions of dollars to setup.

Donnie: Yeah.

David: But because there’s millions of people, around billions of people around the world using the Internet, the Internet comes to us at a very low cost, very cheap, and that’s the network effect. So, the more nodes that come into a network, the more value it offers for each person and at a reduced price. So, you know, mobile phones are an example. When mobile phones first came out, the first ones were big, chunky things that were very expensive to run and were only privileged to the royal family and perhaps the US President, and a few people like that. But then, now, look at today. You’ve got guys in Africa, who, on one hand, are starving and on another hand, they’ve got a mobile phone in their hand. Like that’s how cheap the mobile phone has become.

So, this is the network effect at work, and that’s really the effect of G4. As more members come into it, the cost is lower for us and the effects and the benefits go up. So, yeah.

Donnie: Yeah, that’s great. You’re doing some really great things. Yeah, I can honestly. Just from getting to know you over the last several months and learning more about what you’re doing with G4, I would highly recommend any guitar teacher out there, who is interested in taking things up to a higher level and kind of adopting a franchise model with systems and everything kind of pre-built that you can just plug yourself into, you guys have the perfect solution for that.

David: Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Donnie: Yeah. So, kind of just to wrap the interview up a little bit, what advice would you have for somebody who would like to get started teaching guitar lessons for the first time? Maybe someone who is a player and looking for ways to kind of monetize, you know, their guitar habit like we have. What kind of tips would you have for someone just wanting to get started?

David: Okay. The first tip that I’d give is to go and observe other teachers in action. And this is something that, you know, I was late to the game on, but by watching other teachers, I had an experience of where I met a Suzuki violin teacher who was actually the parent of one of my students. This is way back in my 20s. And she taught me an enormous amount, and through her, I started looking at Suzuki and the kind of things, and I had a lot of inspiration from Suzuki and I have the greatest respect for Mr. Suzuki and his whole program and what he’s done. And that’s where I really got the initial seeds of structure. You know, having a structured program.

But when I started bringing in other teachers in part of this sort of running of schools is that I was able to observe piano teachers and, you know, violin teacher and cello teachers and drum teachers, and just different teachers from different backgrounds, doing different things. And a lot of the teachers that I had were, you know, University grads that were working in high schools and so forth, and doing teaching after schools or on weekends. So, I was able to. I learned so much from observing, and this is something that I think a lot of teachers don’t do. I don’t think that they go out of their way to observe.

Go and watch some early development classes for kids. You know, go and spend time in a classroom. There are some amazing school teachers out there. And you know, there are a lot of videos you can watch online as well without even having to walk out of your house. But observing, yeah, really will make a big difference and build your confidence to be able to teach, especially group teaching because I promote group teaching a lot, which I know you do as well because, again, that’s an example of leveraging. You’re going to earn more money and you’re going to be able to help more people. Even if it’s not about money for you, that’s fine. If you’re a great teacher, then you should be helping as many people as you can, and that’s where group teaching.

So, a lot of guitar teachers: “Oh, you can’t teach guitar in group. You know, you’ve got to give everyone one-on-one. You know, it’s all about what they want to do, etc.” Well, go and watch some groups and go and watch them in action. Watch schoolteachers and you’ll see that they very successfully teach almost anything that you can imagine in a group scenario.

The other tip that I would give is to dive into your marketing. Don’t wait for your marketing. This is, I find, kind of a classic where a lot of teachers will say, “Look, I just want to work on my teaching and learn, you know.” Sometimes when they come in, you’ve got, “I want to learn about your program for a while. So, I don’t want to let anyone know. I don’t want to tell anyone what I’m doing until.” And my thing is, is you’re going to learn much faster. It’s like learning to swim. Get in the pool. You know, you’re going to learn. Don’t stand on the edge of the pool and watch. Even if you get in the shallow end, it’s better to be in the pool and to start, and that’s with your business. Marketing is where you’re probably going to have the biggest challenge, especially in the early stages.

You’ve got to get students. You’ve got to get them through the door. And then, once you get them through the door, then you’ll be presented with the problems and the challenges, and that way, as you solve them, that’s where you improve in teaching. And also, you’re learning the marketing at the same time. So, you’re learning the essential skills of marketing, selling, and teaching. You already can play guitar, I’m assuming, so yeah, these are the areas – marketing, selling and teaching – that you need to be working on.

So, they’re probably the two best tips I would give.

Donnie: Okay. So, how can people get a hold of you, David, to get the latest updates and to find out more about G4? How do they kind of get looped into your communications?

David: The best way is just for G4 Guitar, and you can go to G4GuitarMethod.com, and that’ll take you to the website. And on there, you’ll see teach. At the top, there are a couple options. Just click on the teach, and that will take them to the page where they can subscribe and get more information. And there’s a free book there, which is the Essential Guide to Teaching Guitar, which they will get access to when they join, plus they’ll get a whole series of emails and free information on teaching guitar generally and the business involved. And if they want to email me directly, they can do that as well. G4Guitar1@Gmail.com. That’s probably the easiest way to get me.

Yeah, so easy pretty to find. Just search David Hart Guitar or G4 Guitar. You’ll find me.

Donnie: Great, and I’ll put a link to your web page in the Show Notes as well. Make it a little easier for people.

David: Thanks.

Donnie: Yeah. So, do you have any parting advice for the guitar teachers who are going to be listening or watching this?

David: I think yeah. My sort of final advice would be if you’re going to do it, then do it full on. Be passionate about what you do. I think the reason people struggle, and especially a lot of guitar teachers, is because they’re not really committed to what they’re doing. They may want to be musicians and they’re just trying to teach to make a bit of money, which is cool, but you know, if you’re really going to succeed at something, the way that I see it, you know. You see, for lack of a better example, you know, if you look at war. When they go into war, the first thing they do is they set up supply lines. So, they go into a place and they set up a supply line, protect the supply line, so then they can sustain their position.

And so, from a strategic point of view, if you do this with your guitar playing, and a lot of guitar players go: “I want to be a session player. I want to do this or do that.” Well, you’ve got two choices. Of course you can just full on being a Joe Satriani, but Joe Satriani was a teacher, by the way, and still is. He still loves teaching, and his mother was a schoolteacher I think. But the idea is that by setting yourself up, you know, with something that’s going to keep the money coming in and keep you at a secure position, then you can focus on your guitar playing and all that.

So, especially if you’re young and you’ve got plenty of years ahead of you, if you just spend a couple of years setting up your teaching business, which is an easy, secure way to earn money as a guitarist, opposed to becoming a rock star or a session player, which is highly competitive, highly risky, just spend a couple of years setting up your business and what I do is I will actually show you how to setup your business and even put a teacher in there, so then you’re free to do whatever you want. You can operate from the Internet if you like and be anywhere in the world. You can be touring, but you need to focus those couple of years on doing it. And you know, it’s the same with the guitar students. If you look at learning guitar, it’s like a guitar student coming to me and saying, “I want to be a rock star,” and I go: “Well, that’s great, but first you need to learn to play guitar.”

So, how about we just focus? Spend all your time. You know, four hours a day, practicing guitar. Get really good at guitar. Let’s do that for a year or two. You’ve got your guitar skills down. Now you can start becoming a rock star because you’re solid. You don’t have to think about skills. And that’s the kind of approach to the G4 Guitar Method, by the way, but with the business approach, it’s the same. Just focus a couple of years. Get your teaching business up and running. Get one hundred students. Have one hundred grand coming in. Use 30 to 40 grand of that to pay another teaching. You’re still making 50 or 60 grand, and then you can do whatever you want, rather than trying to do both, which is what I see all the time. I made that mistake.

Donnie: Yeah.

David: You know, doing gigs. Practicing guitar. You know, running a school. And all these things, trying to, and I never got very good at any of them. Focus on one mountain climb. That mountain first. Set up a supply line, like I said, and then go from there.

Donnie: That’s excellent advice, and I love that plan. Get one hundred students. Make one hundred grand. Hire another teacher to work for you, and then you can do whatever you want.

David: Exactly. The entrepreneurial mindset.

Donnie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, cool. I just want to say a lot of people might think that I’m crazy for having you on the Start Teaching Guitar podcast because looking at it on the outside, we might appear to be direct competitors, but we really do kind of offer two separate things to two separate groups of people. I mean if someone is looking for a business model and a franchise that they can join themselves up to and become a part of a larger network, you know, where a lot of things are done for you, then G4 is perfect for that, whereas I kind of focus more on the individual, one-off teachers out there who are struggling, and who just need to learn how to operate a business.

And you know, they really just want to maybe not be the best fit for something like what you’re doing, but want to try and make a go of it on their own. So, I think we really compliment each other very well.

David: Totally. I think, you know, and it sort of goes both ways because, in your case, there are a lot of teachers out there and probably the great majority of teachers out there who don’t want to be part of franchise, who just want to run their own little guitar school, and that’s great. And that’s what you do. What I do is I’m about franchising. I’m about, you know, playing on the G4 Team, and that’s not for most teachers. It is for some teachers, but not for most. And you know, I come back to never fear your competition. You know, your competition are your allies and your best friends. They’re the people who are going to be of the most value to you overall because I go back to the days of, you know, when I had my early sort of music schools. I bring up a local music school down the road and say I’ve got a student for you, and they go: “What? You’re the competition. What are you doing, sending students to us?”

And I said, “Because the student is not right for us. They’re not suitable, but I think that you can look after them.” But you know, it’s all about making the pie bigger. It’s not about this one pie and then we’re fighting for this pie. It’s that by working together we make the pie bigger, and I would urge any guitar teacher out there to make friends and connect with the other guitar teachers in the area because each of you have different strengths and together your big competition is YouTube. That’s where all your students are. YouTube is your competitor if anybody. It’s not the guitar teacher down the road.

Donnie: Great. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, so I think we’re kind of modeling that with our relationship and with kind of the cross-pollination that we’re doing. You had me on your weekly show that you do, and now I’m having you here on mine. So, hopefully the guitar teachers who are watching this will take cues from that and go out and network with people, and be more successful as a result.

David: Excellent.

Donnie: Yeah. So, hey, I just want to thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast. It was great talking with you, and catch you next time.

David: Absolute pleasure, Donnie. Absolute pleasure. It’s great talking to you every time. You know, the last thing I’d say to the guys out there is that we catch up about once a month and yeah, we’re always sharing ideas. And yeah, it’s always good talking to you.

Donnie: Great. Thank you, David.

David: Thanks, Donnie.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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 lessons or something like that. You can start out with a lower rate if confidence is a problem. If you feel like you’re not sure if you can deliver the value that you think you can, you can start out charging less. And that can help you build your confidence and you can always raise your rates a little bit more later, but again, this is a mindset thing that a lot of people thinking about teaching guitar deal with it and it stops them dead in their tracks because they’re like: “Because I don’t have a music degree, because I don’t have formal training, why would anybody want to study with me or why would anybody want to pay money to study with me?” And I’m just going to say that those two things are just negative beliefs that you have to deal with. You have to come to the point where it’s like: “I may not have a degree from Juilliard, or something like that, but I am qualified to teach other people because I do have value that I can bring to the table that’s worth paying for.”

That’s the bottom line. It’s not your qualifications and your credentials. It’s about do you have value that people are willing to pay money to receive. And if you’re a good player and you have a good understanding of how the guitar works, and you care about people and you have basic communication skills, you can be a guitar teacher. You’ve just got to believe that you can be a guitar teacher. That’s the important thing. You can’t let thoughts like this, these limiting beliefs and these myths that a lot of people tend to believe. You can’t let that control the situation and determine what you do. You have to believe that you can do it. So, the answer to that question is yes, you do have the right to charge a fee for guitar lessons even though you haven’t had any formal training.

Question 3: How Do I Attract My First Guitar Students?

The next question. So, I kind of tried to organize these in a progression that kind of makes a little bit of sense. So, the mindset stuff is settled. So, now, once you’ve settled that and it’s like: “I deserve to be a teacher. It’s okay for me to be a teacher. I have permission to be a teacher. Donnie said it was okay for me to be a teacher,” okay, we’ve settled that. You can teach. You can charge money for your lessons. Now, the next question: “I’m new to teaching guitar and I don’t have any students yet. I have a website. I have business cards. I’m wondering what’s the best way to get the ball rolling and get my first students. If you have any advice, I would appreciate it.”

This is another very common question that I get asked pretty often by people that are thinking about teaching. And my advice is I would suggest that a good place to start is to send an email to everybody that you know explaining that you’re teaching guitar lessons now. So, the best thing to do first, with any kind of business venture, is to ping your social network first. So, your family, your friends, your associated, your co-workers – anybody that you know. Send out an email to them, and social media makes it extremely easy to do this. So, if you have a Facebook account and you’re connected to everyone that you know that’s on Facebook, then you could easily post something on your Facebook page and tell everyone that you’re teaching now. And the reason you want to do that is you’re asking them to spread the word for you and to tell everybody that they know that you’re teaching as well.

The idea is that you may not have some people in your immediate circle that would be interested in taking lessons with you now that you’re just getting started, but they may know someone who is. So, by posting this to everyone you know at one time and asking them to let everyone that they know about what you’re doing, there’s a good opportunity that someone in that circle of connections is going to be interested in taking lessons. So, here’s the kind of stuff that you want to put in that post so that your family, friends, and other people know what to look for. So, you want to tell them what kind of students you’re looking for, so say, “Hey, I’m going to be teaching blues guitar, for example, and I’m really looking for some good beginner-level students. People that are interested in learning blues that have never really played before, and I’m also looking for people that live in the Denver, Colorado area,” for example, if that’s where you’re teaching.

You want to be kind of specific about what kind of referrals you’re looking for, and then you want to also mention what you can do for those referrals. So, you could say, “I have this really cool approach to teaching blues that cuts down on the learning curve and helps people get started really quickly playing songs and stuff.” And talk about the benefits of studying with you and what makes you unique. Kind of put a little bit about that in that email that you send out or that social media post so that you also give them some reasons to recommend you. Not just hey, my friend is starting to teach guitar lessons, but hey, my friend is teaching guitar lessons, but he has a really cool approach that can help you with [blank] or that can help you with one, two, three. That kind of helps give some weight to those referrals and give people more incentive to contact you.

And then obviously you want to say how they can get in touch with you, so at the bottom, at the end of it, put something like: “Email me at [your email address] or call me at [your cellphone number],” or whatever as a call to action. And then just put that together as a social media post or an email, and then send it out. And you might be surprised at how many people in your extended circle, maybe not people you know immediately, but people that they know that you may not have met yet – how many of those people might just be interested in signing up for lessons or at least talking to you about it. So, that’s a great first step; is to ping your social network.

If you can reach out to everyone in a circle of acquaintances of everybody that you know, that can be quite a big group of people. It could be surprisingly big. And usually your friends and family are going to do this for you at least once when you’re just starting out. Now, this is the kind of thing you can’t really do more than once. You can ask them the first time. Maybe three or four months later you can ask them again just to remind them, but if you start doing this kind of stuff all the time, people are going to ignore it and it’s going to make you look desperate. So, this is kind of just an initial thing that you can do to kind of help launch your business when you’re just starting out, and it’s just a good way to help you spread the word and get some early traction.

So, that’s my advice. Then you have other types of marketing that you can get going. Your website. You know, search engine marketing and you could do paid ads online, and things like that, that will help, but leveraging your social network is a great way to actually get some traction when you’re first getting started. Now, if you’re completely new to this, there’s another kind of twist that you can take on this social networking thing. You can offer to teach a few lessons for free in exchange for feedback and, most importantly, testimonials and referrals. So, you could put a spin on it and say, “Hey, I’m offering three free guitar lessons to the first ten people that contact me,” or something like that, and you agree to teach three or four lessons to a few students.

And at the end of that time period, they’re going to do three things for you in exchange. Number one, they’re going to give you a review of how you did, so they’re going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly of their experience taking lessons with you so that you can learn from that and make improvements. Number two, they’re going to write up a testimonial for you that you can use in your marketing. You use it on your website. You use it in your ads. You maybe even get them to add reviews on Yelp and Google, and places like that. And then the third thing is, in exchange, they’re going to recommend three friends that they know who might also be interested in taking lessons with you, assuming they had a good experience.

So, you give three free lessons away. You get feedback, testimonials, and referrals in exchange. That’s not a bad way to get started either because it helps you on multiple levels. Another thing you could do is if you belong to any clubs or groups or organizations, like maybe you’re the member of a church, you play on a sports team for recreational purposes, or something like that, then you could also spread the word there and see if anybody is interested too. Ideally those people would be included in your social network, but maybe you can put something on your church bulletin or you can put up a flyer at your church, or something like that if that’s something that you’re a part of. But if you’re a part of any kind of club or group, that’s also another good source of potential students or referrals.

So, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. Ways to kind of get students quickly when you’re first starting out. Now, you probably won’t be able to fill your studio with this tactic, but you should be able to get three, five, maybe ten guitar students out of it and it’s a great way to get started.

Question 4: What Location Should I Use To Start Teaching?

The next question is: “I don’t have a lot of money to start my teaching business, to invest when I’m just starting out. And I’m a little bit leery of bringing strangers into my home, so do you have any ideas for startup locations for my teaching studio?” That’s an excellent question.

So we’ve established the mindset stuff. We’ve talked about how to attract your first group of students. Now, I don’t want to teach out of my home. Where do I do this? Well, I can see the concern that some people might have about opening their home to essentially what are strangers. Especially if you’re like a female guitar teacher or you’re a younger person, maybe a teenager that’s interested in doing this, could see the concern there. But what you really need to do before you bring anybody into your home is to pre screen them before you give them your home address. This is kind of the same tactic that you use whenever you post an ad on Craigslist to sell something at your house.

Like for example, we’re trying to sell something not too long ago and I didn’t put my home address in that Craigslist ad, simply because I don’t want people, total strangers, knowing where I live and just showing up at my house unannounced. So, what I did was I put the nearest cross streets that we live on, which happen to be about a mile and a half away because I live out in the country. Kind of the nearest major cross streets, so that way people have an idea of where you’re located. They kind of know the general geographic area. They can determine whether it’s going to be convenient for them to go there once a week or not, but they don’t know exactly where you live.

Now, if you have a commercial space that you can go and teach out of, then you could put that address out there. That’s fine, but if you’re teaching out of your home, I don’t recommend that you advertise your home address as your studio location. Instead just put the nearest major cross street so that people can know where you are. That’s important for marketing purposes and stuff like that. So let’s say that someone responds to your ad. Now you want to pre screen them before you give them your home address. Eventually, when you meet with them, you’re going to have to tell them where you live and bring them into your home, but there’s no reason to do that until you screen them first.

So, maybe talk to them on the phone first to get a feel for them. Maybe if you want to meet with them, if you’re really concerned, maybe you can just meet with them at a coffee shop or something to talk about lessons, or at a music store, or at another place, but you can kind of get a feel for people before you bring them into your house. And if you don’t feel comfortable with that person, then you don’t have to teach them at all and you don’t have to tell them where you live and you don’t have to bring them into your house. But unfortunately the reality is, just starting out, you’re probably going to have to teach out of your home, unless you know somebody who would rent you some space for cheap or if you have, like I mentioned before, a membership in a church or some other organization or a school that would let you use one of their rooms. Your home might be the only reasonable option. So, that doesn’t mean you have to just totally put yourself out there and be dumb. You can screen people. You can be a little more cautious and make sure that the people that come to your house are people that you actually would want to have in there in the first place.

Hopefully that helps kind of give you some wisdom to follow about bringing people into your home, and 99 out of 100 people are not going to be a problem anyway. Most people that are interested in guitar lessons are going to be great people that you’re going to want to work with and stuff, but it never hurts to kind of be on the safe side. So, I mean that kind of answers that question, any other ideas for startup locations. I mentioned a few. A lot of times you can work out deals where if someone wants to study with you, you can maybe even barter free lessons in exchange for space that they may have or may know about. There are different things you can do if you think it through, but nine times out of ten your home is going to be the best option when you’re first getting started.

Question 5: Are There People I Can Teach During The Day?

Okay, next question. “What kind of adults would be available to learn guitar during the day and would it be safe as a woman for me to open my door to strangers, particularly males, when nobody else is home?” So, this kind of feeds into the same question that we just talked about. There are actually two questions here. The first one is the part about, as a female teacher, bringing men that you don’t know into your house when nobody else is there. Probably not the best idea. What I would recommend in that case is to try to find some place other than your home to teach. I mean depending on the climate, you could even teach in a public place. Some teachers teach guitar lessons outside, and that works really well. You could teach in a public park. There are different things you can do.

Another option is if you are going to be teaching from your home and you’re concerned about this kind of stuff is to find someone that can be there with you so that you’re not by yourself. You’re not going to be teaching lessons, you know, back-to-back all day long. They’re going to be scheduled ahead of time, so see if you can get a friend or family member to come over to your place and do it with you while you’re there. That can kind of help alleviate some of those security concerns.

Now, the second part of that question is: “How do I find people to learn guitar during the day,” and it sounds like this person was interested in teaching adults. I would suggest maybe broadening that a little bit and, for adults, try to find some retired people that don’t have day jobs anymore, that have the flexibility in their schedules that they could come during the day. Another group that might be a possibility is college students, because just like they schedule their classes during the day, they could schedule their lessons with you too and a lot of times fit those in, in the morning before class or in the middle of the day, or something like that. College students typically have a pretty varied schedule of their classes and things that they have to do, so that might work.

For working adults, you have some options. You could do some 7AM to 9AM lessons and catch people before they go to work. You would only obviously have a couple of slots available that early, but there might be some people that would be interested in taking guitar lessons before they start their day. You could also check with some local businesses in your area and see if they might let you teach some guitar lessons onsite during their lunchtimes. So, maybe you could rent or use a conference room and teach lessons to employees that work there, or something like that, during their lunch breaks. It’s just an idea.

Probably the best way to do this though if you only want to teach in the morning hours, for example, if you really want to control your availability, then offering lessons online using Skype is a great way to go because you can match your daytime working hours to students that are in a completely different time zone from you that matches your availability. So, I don’t have the math in front of me as far as which time zones are which, but let’s say that you want to be able to teach from 9AM to noon mountain time, which is Greenwich Mean Time -7. That’s my time zone. And you can’t find a lot of people in your local area that are available in the mornings to study. So, what you could do is you can pull out a time zone map or use a website that helps convert time zones. There are a few of those out there. You can Google to find them and say, “If the best time for people to take lessons is between 6PM and 9PM, Monday through Thursday,” for example, then figure out what area that time zone would line up with yours.

So, you know, maybe it’s an extra six hours ahead or something like that. So, what countries are in a time zone that is six hours ahead of you? And if the ones in there are English-speaking countries, which chances are pretty good that they will be in some cases. Maybe not time zones that include Russia and China, and things like that, but you could do marketing online to try to reach students in that time zone so that those are the people you teach and then, when it’s the morning for you, it’s the early evening for them and it’s a perfect match, and you can try to get all your students from that time zone. That’s another way you can do it.

There are a lot of different options. You have to be kind of creative with some of this stuff. Any time you run into challenges when you’re starting a new business, there’s almost always some kind of work around that you can come up with to make it feasible to do. You’ve just got to think it through a little bit. So, those are just some ideas of how you could be a little more flexible with your lesson times.

Question 6: How Do I Put Together A Curriculum For My Lessons?

And then I have one last question, and this is a big one. “Can you help me to make a good study plan/curriculum for my guitar students? Should I teach theory first or should I just teach them songs in the first month? How should I put my curriculum together?” That’s an excellent question because, you know, if we follow our progression here, you take care of your mindset and beliefs. You found your first students. You found your place and your times to teach. Now it’s like, what do I teach these people? I’m going to give you some of my thoughts on this topic.

I definitely recommend teaching songs and the building blocks that make them up first, before you get people into music theory, sight reading and other more advanced musical topics. People take guitar lessons because they want to learn the songs that they love. There’s a small group of people that are interested in guitar for academic purposes, but I’m going to say probably 90 to 95 percent of the people out there want to play songs. And if you help them learn how to do that as quickly as possible, they’re going to be a lot more likely to get hooked on the guitar and become a student of the guitar for life.

Now, once they get hooked, they’re going to be more interested in things like music theory, sight reading, and all of that later on, but for beginners you really want to make sure you give them what you want first. You want to turn them into guitar players. Once they self-identify as guitar players and get hooked, then they’re going to be more open to more technical, more dry, more advanced-type stuff that requires a little more work and effort to learn and understand. You can help them become accomplished musicians later. Musicianship is important. I’m not negating that at all, but you want to turn them into guitar players first, and then later on you can turn them into well-rounded musicians.

All that music theory and all the fundamentals in the world aren’t going to matter if that student gets bored or they get overwhelmed and they quit taking guitar lessons and do something else. So you’ve got to lead them along a little bit with the stuff that they want first. So, to put your curriculum together, what I recommend – I mean there are some different options here. Some people teach you that you should just go out and use a premade curriculum. I’m not one of those people. What I really recommend is that you put your own curriculum together and that you do that by starting out with making a list of all the things that you’ve learned about the guitar yourself.

So, you take out a pencil and a paper and you make a list of all the stuff that you know how to do, so you break it down into styles, into techniques, into concepts, and kind of organize everything into a list. And then kind of shuffle that and prioritize everything chronologically from beginning to end, and then you should end up with what should be a logical progression of musical concepts for the guitar that you can use with beginners. This is going to kind of be your road map, the curriculum path that you lead your students through as you teach them in your lessons. Now, I have done this. I have a document with this all broken down that I could give you, but the real value in doing this is that it helps you start to think about playing guitar in a linear fashion.

So, it helps you organize it in your own mind a little bit better, so you know what to start with and then what to do next and what comes after that, and all the way down the line. And this thinking work here actually helps you to become a better teacher. It helps you understand what you’re doing a little bit better, so that’s why I recommend that you do it yourself. Now, if you have a list of concepts like this already laid out and you want to compare it with mine, I’d be happy to share it with you, but just giving you my list is not going to be as beneficial for you as if you take the time to do it yourself. So, that map is important. It’s just kind of a skeleton of what it means to learn the guitar over the period of three, four, or five years or more.

So, now that you have that skeleton in place, now it’s time to kind of fill in the gaps. So, next you want to take each step, each item that you put on that list represents a step of the musical journey. Take each one of those steps and then put together a basic lesson plan for it. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be all polished. Just write down, under each one of those things, how you plan to teach it. How did you learn how to do it? What kinds of things really helped you to learn that better? Fill in each category that way, and then that’s going to give you a game plan when you get to your lessons so that you don’t have to worry about feeling lost. You know, you could also pull supplemental materials from some guitar method books that you like and actually use those materials to fill in the gaps too.

So, that way you have the best of both worlds. You have this customizable curriculum that you put together yourself, but you have the best teaching resources out there incorporated into it so that you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel. So, if you’re looking for recommendations on good method books, I have a list of them on my website. Recommend teaching books under Free Stuff. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, so you can check it out.

So, I mean this may sound a little bit overwhelming. It may sound like a lot of work initially. And I’m going to be honest with you. It is a little bit of work, but it will really help you to understand what it means to play the guitar and it will make you a better teacher than if you just use a beginner’s method book for every lesson with your students and flip them through the pages. You’re not going to get as good results if you do it that way, so put your own thing together. And the work that you put in now is going to make you a better teacher for the long-term and it’s going to help you be more successful in your studio and with your students, and it will also help you teach guitar the way you see it and help you be unique more so compared to the other teachers in your area.

So, you want to pour your personality into this. You want to pour your perspective into this. And if you just teach through a method book, you know, you’re teaching somebody else’s perspective. So, why not put together your own? You can take lessons from the method books and use them from time to time where they fit best, but people want to study guitar with you. They don’t want to study guitar with Mel Bay. So, put your own curriculum together. You know, take a few hours and sit down and do this exercise, and you’re going to really benefit from it and so will your students.

To wrap this up, if you’re interested in teaching guitar, I just want to encourage you. Don’t let fear stand in your way. Don’t let any obstacles that you perceive that may not even be real – don’t let those stand in your way and don’t let any other hang-ups stand in your way either, whether it’s space or curriculum or finances or marketing, or anything like that.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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, especially those three critical areas; there are others too, but those are the three big ones. How are you going to make money? How are you going to get students? How are you going to pay your bills? If you don’t figure that out, then there’s a very low probability that your business is going to be successful. So, here’s a good word of wisdom, a good tip, a good piece of advice for you to take with you. Never start a business without proving that it will be viable first. It’s so easy to start a business today. All you’ve got to do is put out an ad on Craigslist and, you know, then you can start teaching guitar. You know, you can throw an ad in the newspaper. You can post something on social media and say, “Hey, I’m looking for guitar students.” I see that all the time on Twitter.

And you might get some responses. You start teaching. You start collecting money, but that’s cool if all you want to do is just teach a few lessons here and there and make some extra cash. But if you want to get serious about this, if you want to be successful, if you want your business to last and you want it to grow from level to level to level and become something that can provide for your family for the rest of your life, then you need to start out with a plan. If you don’t, anything beyond starting out with a plan and proving that your business is going to be viable first, anything less than that is not a business. It’s a hobby. Even if you get paid a little bit of money, it’s a hobby that brings in extra cash until you put together a plan.

So, for those of you listening to this that have believed that myth that says whatever you need to know you can figure it out as you go, there is an element of truth in that, like there is to every myth, but honestly if you want to be successful as a guitar teacher for the long-term, you need to put together a plan so that you can get ready, so that you can aim, and that you can fire and you can be successful. So, that’s the first myth I want to bust. Don’t jump into this ignorantly or haphazardly. Put together a plan first.

Myth #2

Here’s the next myth, and this is one that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I can totally understand why people buy into it. Myth number two is you can and should teach everybody. I’ve done entire podcast episodes about this topic, but so many people don’t understand that you have to be selective in the students that you teach. You can and should teach everybody is the mindset. You know, it seems like common sense. Hey, somebody comes to my studio. They want to give me their money. I should take it.

But too many teachers out there operate out of a mindset of scarcity and the belief that there are not enough students to go around. That’s kind of the root of this. You can and should teach everybody. Well, I’m going to tell you that that is a myth. You should not. You can’t teach everybody and you should not try to teach everybody. There are plenty of students out there, and you will be better served in the long run if you are selective about who you take into your studio today, even when you’re first getting started, even when your studio is small and you’re just looking for any student you can find to help you increase your income.

If you will be selective and you’ll be careful about the students that you accept, there are a lot of benefits to that. Before I get into that, I’m getting ahead of myself. A lot of teachers make this mistake. They accept any student who walks in the door, even if it would be a terrible fit. A lot of students are a terrible fit for your teaching studio. They don’t show up. When they do, they don’t show up on time. They don’t pay. And when they do, they don’t pay on time. They don’t practice. They don’t work. They don’t put in effort. All of those things add up to a recipe for disaster and huge headaches for you as a guitar teacher, and nothing good comes out of that for your teaching studio, for your business, or for you or for the student.

I’m of the opinion that you should only be teaching the kind of students that allow you to do your best work. Now, think about that for a minute. You should only be teaching the kinds of students that let you do your best work. Whenever you’re doing your best work, when you’re in the zone, when you are at your absolute, one hundred percent best as a teacher and a business owner, you get more fulfillments and more satisfaction out of what you’re doing with your life, which is hugely important. You get more referrals because you’re doing such a knockout job with the students that you have. They can’t help but go out and tell everybody that they know about what’s happening, what you’re doing for them, and it just organically generates all of these extra word-of-mouth referrals. When you’re doing your best work, you become remarkable.

You give your students better results, they learn and they grow, and they just expand their musical ability so quickly when you’re doing your best work, when you’re working with someone that you have a perfect connection with. And if you put all of that together, you have a more successful business overall, just by choosing the people that you work with. Working with poor quality students that are a bad fit just to get a little bit of extra money today can really wreck your business in a lot of ways. One of the obvious ways is that when you deal with someone that you don’t want to teach, but you’ve got to sit in front of them every week, you’ve got to track their payments down, you’ve got to track their appointments down, you’ve got to track their practice and assignment stuff down, and you’re always trying to get them to do what they need to do to be successful, the first thing that’s going to happen is your motivation is going to get damaged.

You are going to start to dread sitting down to teach lessons to these people, and then pretty much, after a while, you’re going to start to dread teaching guitar at all and you’re going to try to find something else to do. Whenever you work with students like that, your good reputation in the community doesn’t grow, so that word of mouth thing, you know, that works in your favor doesn’t happen if you work with students that are a bad fit, hardly at all. And if it does, you’re just going to get more students like them and it’s going to make the problem worse.

Another thing that’s kind of sad and insidious is that mediocrity starts to creep into your business. It starts to infiltrate your guitar lessons and you start to kind of develop this mindset, if you’re not careful, that if my students don’t care, why should I care. If they don’t want to put in the work, why should I put in the work? And you might not be saying that out loud or thinking that directly, but a lot of times it happens, all because you work with the wrong people. And then eventually, like I said before, you start to hate teaching guitar. You’re like: “Why did I ever want to do this? Why am I wasting my time with people that don’t appreciate what I’m trying to do? And you know, it’s not working out. I’m going to find something else to do.”

So, most of that stuff could be avoided if you just choose more carefully who it is that you’re going to teach. So, I’m kind of beating this to death, but hopefully you’re understanding where I’m coming from and you realize that what people say that you can and should teach everybody is just a myth. It’s not true. You really do need to be selective. You need to put together a process when you’re doing your marketing that lets you screen out the crappy students. Not to offend anybody. I know that some people are better students than others. But you want to weed out people that are going to have a problem paying you and people that are going to have a problem with their time management. You want to screen out people that don’t really want to be there and don’t really need to be there, and then only work with people who meet your standards.

If you just make that commitment to yourself, identify who you want to work with, and then make a commitment that says okay, if anybody doesn’t meet this standard, I’m going to refer them to someone else, it’s going to pay off in spades in the long-term. Your business is going to be a lot more successful six months and a year and five years from now. It may take you a little more time at the beginning to get momentum rolling and to build your business, but if you are very careful about who you accept over time it’s going to pay big dividends for you. So that’s myth number two busted.

Myth #3

Your students will always like you. Whenever I got into teaching, I always tried to stack the deck in my favor and work with people that I knew would be easy to work with and would be nice to me, would like me, and would do what I say when I was a younger person, you know, and I learned pretty fast that your students aren’t always going to agree with you. They’re not always going to affirm you and they’re not always going to listen to you and follow your instructions.

People are people. You know, that’s just how it is. If you go into teaching knowing that it’s not always going to be a bed of roses, you know, I just talked a minute ago about bad students. Well, even if you have the best quality students that are a perfect fit for you, some days they’re going to challenge you. Some days they’re going to make you rethink some of the things that you’re doing, and that’s not always a bad thing. But if you go into it knowing that there are going to be days when things are difficult, whenever you’re not going to be able to solve a problem, when you’re going to have communication problems, those happen between the best of people.

You can prepare yourself for those days when it might not be the best. And luckily, if you work with the right people, those days tend to be few and far between. But yeah, it’s kind of crazy when you think about this because a lot of people subconsciously think: “Oh, all of my students are always going to like me.” Well, we all want to have a good relationship with our students. It’s very important, but sometimes you can’t be a teacher and a friend at the same time, just like you can’t be a parent and a buddy to your kids at the same time all the time. Sometimes you just have to put your foot down and lay down the law, and things like that.

But some guitar teachers – I know this is true because I used to be one of these kinds of people. I’d done a lot of work on myself to try to overcome it, but some guitar teachers are approval addicts. Like I said, I was an approval addict. I always could not handle rejection from people when I was a younger man. I could not handle it when I felt someone was displeased with me or didn’t like me or didn’t think I was doing a good job, which led me to being a perfectionist and to filtering out people that I thought would threaten my false sense of self-esteem. As a guitar teacher, it’s easy to do that, but it’s not cool. Some teachers are approval addicts. They can’t handle it when a student is displeased with them, because what happens if you operate that way, number one, you’re never going to be happy until you kind of go in and fix that deep issue that’s causing you to seek that approval from everyone around you.

I know from experience. When teachers feel like that, they are super cautious about everything that they do. They don’t take risks, and then they tend to give their students anything that they want. So, it’s almost like every student who walks in the door, they get to write their own lesson policies whenever they become a student, or they get to write their own curriculum. It’s like yeah, whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. You know, you want to change that. Oh, sure, we’ll change it. Yeah, you don’t want to pay me this week. Oh, that’s fine. You could pay me next week, and then it turns into the week after that and, you know, the guitar teacher becomes like a doormat. Not cool.

If you need approval from everyone that you come into contact with, you’re probably not going to make a very effective guitar teacher, or maybe you will, but you won’t stay in business if you don’t have clear policies and know how to enforce them. You know, boundaries and consequences are so important in every relationship to make it structured and to make it something that’s beneficial for everybody involved.

So, the thing that helped me is when I finally realized that if somebody doesn’t like me, it’s not personal. I mean if they have a problem with something I’m trying to teach them or they don’t like the way I run my business, or there’s something about me that they just don’t connect with, it’s not personal. You know, your lessons don’t define you as a person. The number of students you have doesn’t define you. Your monthly and annual income as a teacher doesn’t define you as a person. You are not the way you teach. The way you teach doesn’t make you who you are. Your identity as a human being doesn’t change just because you’re having conflict with a student or with someone else that you’re working with.

It’s not personal. Once I learned that there’s difference between the way that I interact with people and my identity as a human being, as a person, my value and worth as a person, those are two separate things, then my life got a lot easier and I was able to start doing a lot more cool and exciting things because I wasn’t afraid to take risks. If something didn’t work out, it didn’t crush me at the core of who I am and shake my entire sense of being. It was just a setback or it was just something that I could learn from, to do better the next time, but it doesn’t change who I am. So, like I said, if you want to be successful, you really need to implement some good policies in your studio and you need to enforce them.

Your students may not always like it. They may not agree with you one hundred percent, but that structure that you provide in the way that you build your business is going to make them feel safe and it’s going to give them a good environment to learn the guitar in so that you can, again, do your best work. If you’re constantly making exceptions for people, if you’re constantly bending over and giving people whatever they want, then it’s going to be really difficult for you to have confidence in what you’re doing, for you to be comfortable with what you’re doing as a guitar teacher, and people are just not going to respect you. They’re going to walk all over you. It’s not a good situation to be in. So, have good boundaries. Have good consequences. And when there’s a legitimate reason to make an exception, that’s fine; do it. But in general, as a rule, always enforce your lesson policies no matter what your students think about it. So that’s a myth there that’s busted. Your students will always like you. They won’t. Everything is not always going to be a bed of roses.

Myth #4

I’ve got two more myths for you. Myth number four: technology will put you out of a job. That’s a myth. A lot of guitar teachers out there, a lot of people email me. Several people have emailed me lately about new technology developments and they’re like: “Donnie, what do you think about this?” And I’m like: “It’s awesome.” You know, you don’t have to be threatened by technology. There are lots of new guitar teaching technology things coming out these days. Software. A couple years ago, Rocksmith came out, and before that it was Rock Band and Guitar Hero. You know, I remember when those came out. People were like: “Oh, is this going to be the end of guitar lessons, because people can just learn on their video games.”

It’s like what? No, it’s not going to be the end of guitar lessons. It’s just a cool way to get involved with the guitar. They just came out this week. Apple came out. It’s not an Apple product, but they’re going to be selling it. It’s called Jam Stick. It’s a little, short guitar-like thing with real strings that plugs into your iPhone or your iPad, and it’s like a controller for guitar software. And you can record using that. You can play along with songs, and there’s even lessons that’ll show you on the screen where to put your fingers and kind of teach you some of the basics about playing guitar.

And you know, I was asked, “What do you think about that,” and you know what. I think it’s freaking awesome. I think I want to buy one myself. For one, it’ll be a perfect travel guitar. You know, it’ll fit in a backpack and you can take it with you places and have something to use to practice certain things and to record with, and stuff like that. So, it’s awesome. I think I want one. Is it going to replace the need for a guitar teacher? Absolutely not. You know, and then ten years ago they started coming out with websites, like JamPlay.com and GuitarTricks.com, and sites that have all this video recorded lesson content that you can access for a monthly fee and get all this cool stuff under different topics and genres of music and things.

I have a JamPlay.com membership. I love it. I go through every time I start to get stale in something. I want to learn something new on the guitar. I’ll go out in there and start working through one of their video lessons, and learn something new or brush up on something that I need improvement on. So, you know, the sites are great, you know, but I still take lessons sometimes. I still teach people that are members of GuitarTricks and sites like that. You know, so it’s real easy to feel like these technology breakthroughs are your competition. You know, some people are like: “Oh, the writing is on the wall. It’s only a matter of time before nobody is going to need a local guitar teacher anymore.”

Well, the truth is technology like this does not replace the need for a guitar teacher. Software and video sites are like a gateway drug. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s like a gateway drug that can get people interested and hooked on playing the guitar. It’s like taking the cookie jar and putting it on the bottom shelf, you know, so that people can reach it. And they get in there and then they get hooked, and then all of a sudden there’s all these other cookie jars up on the top shelf, so now they’re motivated to climb up there and reach for them, whereas before it would seem to high, lofty of a goal. It was too intimidating. It seems impossible. Too hard. Too difficult.

But if you can plug your guitar into your Xbox and you can play along with Rocksmith and learn the basics of how to fret notes and how to pick and how to play the parts to songs, and it’s a fun and engaging way to do it, sure, you’re not going to learn everything you need to know about the guitar. Sure, you’re going to make some mistakes that are going to need to be corrected in your form and technique. That’s why guitar teachers exist. But if it wouldn’t be for a game like Rocksmith or product like Jam Stick or video sites like JamPlay and GuitarTricks, where you can learn some basics at your own pace and get interested in the guitar to the point that you want to pursue it further, there would probably be a lot less guitar students out there for us to teach.

Gateway drugs. Think of them as gateway drugs. Ways that people can get interested and hooked on playing the guitar. Then eventually they’re going to need a real teacher to get structure, accountability, feedback, troubleshooting, inspiration, you know, connection with other students and musicians. They’re going to need all of that stuff and you and I are going to be the teachers that they go to, to find it. So, things like this don’t replace guitar teachers, but what you should be doing is you should embrace technology. You should look for ways to incorporate these kinds of things into your studio, but don’t feel threatened by them. Leverage them instead to be more successful.

I’ve always said that putting together like a Rocksmith group class would be something so fun to do, where everyone who has a copy of Rocksmith at home can come into your studio and you can work with everybody on the songs that are in the software so that they could do better, and then go in and do better at the game. You know, and their practice times consist of playing Rocksmith. I’m sure you can do the same kind of thing with Jam Sticks. You could have everybody bring their Jam Stick and their iOS device into a group class, and everyone uses the Jam Stick together. You could do really cool stuff like that. So, leverage technology. Look for ways that you can incorporate it to make yourself more successful, but don’t feel threatened by it. So, that’s myth number four, and it’s busted.

Myth #5

All right, the last one. Myth number five. Kind of ties in a little bit. Myth number five: nobody wants to learn guitar anymore. Some people are starting to believe that. Nobody wants to learn guitar anymore. The truth is people still want to learn guitar. They just don’t want to learn the way that they used to. So, things have changed because of technology, because of different generations of people. A lot of things are changing in society. The way people want to learn guitar has changed a bit too. So, it’s not that nobody wants to learn guitar. It’s just that the ways that they are looking to learn are not always the traditional ways that we have come to know and expect.

So, if you’re a subscriber to the STG Newsletter that I send out every Thursday, I actually wrote about this in the newsletter last week. Bill who’s a guitar teacher, a member of the STG community, sent me a link to a blog post on the Music Composition Blog. And he asked a very important question in that blog: “Is it still possible to make a full-time living teaching private guitar lessons?” So, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, so you can read it, but the author mentions a noticeable decline in the number of people asking about guitar lessons.

So, in his own teaching studio, he noticed that there were fewer and fewer people inquiring about lessons, so he did some research to see if anybody else was experiencing the same thing. So, he posted to some LinkedIn guitar teacher groups and the responses he got back showed that at least 45 other teachers on those groups had the same experience. And I know several of you listening to this have experienced the same thing. It used to be really easy to get students and you had more students than you could teach. You know, you had a waiting list, but now it’s like you’re getting fewer inquiries. Things aren’t as hot and exciting as they used to be. It seems that there are less people interested.

So, it’s obvious that things are changing in the guitar teaching space, but thing you’ve got to understand is that things always change. Everything happens in cycles. Nothing stays the same forever. So, that’s only a problem though if you don’t change too. Whenever you stay stuck in what was working three or four cycles ago, then you can’t expect to have the same success today that you had back then, because people have changed. The market has changed. You have to change and adapt along with it. So, I think what’s happening here is that music and the lesson market for guitar lessons has changed, but many teachers haven’t adapted to the new changes. They’re still doing things the way that they did 10, 15, or 20 years ago and they’re wondering why it doesn’t work anymore.

Well, maybe, you know, there’s just no point in teaching guitar because I can’t get students using my Yellow Pages ad anymore. Marketing isn’t a typical strong point for most music teachers anyway. Almost every music teacher I talk to, probably 99 out of 100 of them, don’t have the knowledge and plans that they need to make their marketing successful. It’s a weak area for a lot of guitar teachers. That’s why I started Start Teaching Guitar, to help with that. But you know, it’s already a weakness and besides that you’re trying to get the same results you got ten years ago, using the same tactics from back then. That’s not going to work today.

You’re going to see a decline in interest. I mean word of mouth is still going to be there, but all of the other stuff is probably going to go away to some degree if you keep doing what you did ten years ago, expecting the same result today. It’s more important than ever to keep your finger on the pulse of what your students need, what they prefer, and for you to do what you can to adapt your studio so that you can stay up with the times. So, a perfect example is what I just talked about with Rocksmith and Jam Stick. So, instead of complaining about it, instead of commiserating the end of guitar lessons as we know it, why not bring those tools into your studio and build a program around them?

Leverage them. Adapt your studio to the changes that are going on around you that fit with teaching guitar, and then you’re going to be able to bring in students and ride those waves of change, where everybody else is going to just be, you know, swamped over by them. So, look for ways that you can elegantly integrate technology into your studio. I just gave you some ideas. There are a lot of other ways. Look for ways to do it. Create opportunities for social connections between your students. It’s another very important thing that’ll add a lot more value to what you do as a guitar teacher. Put together events, where you bring all your students together and give them opportunities to get to know each other.

Do open mic nights. Do jam nights. Do student recitals. Do barbecues. I mean do something so that everybody can come together and get to know each other, and do ice breakers and try to cross-pollinate all of your students with each other. It’s going to create an incredible sense of excitement in this awesome social atmosphere that’s going to make them want to keep learning and growing and bringing their friends. Another thing you could do, well, that you have to do is you have to know where your potential students are in 2014, the year that I’m recording this. You knew where they were in 2004. Where are they today? Your potential students are out there somewhere. Find out where they are, and then make sure that your marketing efforts reach them there.

If they’re not looking at flyers hung up on telephone poles, you know, then don’t put them there. If they’re looking on Facebook, then run your ads on Facebook. Reach your potential students where they are. Figure out where they are. Figure out who they are, figure out where they are, and then make sure your marketing efforts reach them there. Anything less than that is not going to be successful. And then another thing: consider specializing so that you’re not just another guitar teacher. If all you are is somebody that offers guitar lessons, then you are seen pretty quickly as a commodity. You don’t want to be seen as a commodity because people that are looking for a commodity, all they shop for are price. All they’re going to want is the lowest price because it’s not going to make any difference if I study with teacher A or teacher B or teacher Z. So instead, consider specializing on one particular group of people or in a specific genre or a specific area so that there is something about you that is different and unique. Then you won’t be seen as much as a commodity, because they won’t be able to find the same thing from some place else.

But anyway, back to that article. The author of that article summed it up pretty well. He said, “The future isn’t bleak. It’s just different.” And I agree completely. It’s not that there are fewer people who want to learn guitar. The problem is that there are fewer teachers providing lessons in the way that students want to consume them. So, something to think about. I don’t have all the answer. You know, I can’t tell you exactly what to do to get around this. You just have to look at what’s going on in your local market and adapt to it. A big secret to success in any kind of business though is keeping an eye on your market and reinventing yourself in small ways and sometimes even big ways whenever it’s appropriate to do so.

But this comes back to you. You have to be willing to keep learning and growing and to pay attention to what’s going on around you if you want to be successful in any business. Teaching guitar is no exception.

So those are the five myths I wanted to bust in part one. I’m going to do five more next time in part two, and then I’m going to wrap it up with another five in part three. But next time I’m going to cover five more common myths about teaching guitar and why they’re wrong assumptions and what the truth is. So, if you can learn the truth about this whole world of teaching guitar, you can be more effective, you can make fewer mistakes, and you can be a more successful guitar teacher.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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 research went into coming up with this material? I mean it’s amazing. I’m just curious. How long did it take you to put all of that together?

Troy Grady: Oh God, sometimes I feel like the Charles Goodyear or something, trying to get rubber working and been doing it my entire life, and started wearing rubber hats and rubber shoes, but yeah, I’ve been doing this for a while. It was really a hobby at first and it was sort of a weekend thing, and then I put up the website and started posting pieces of the research that I was doing, which, at the time, consisted of a series of interviews with legendary players using a slow motion camera rig that I had come up with that attached directly to the guitar and allowed me to fill right-hand, picking hand close-ups with the players that I was interviewing.

And again, I did all this on the side, on weekends and evenings, outside of an entirely different career that I was working at the time. And that in itself was an outgrowth of the personal playing and research that I had done years before, attempting to sort of crack the code, as it were, of advanced picking technique, the first breakthrough of which we actually see at the end of season one in the show, in college, and you and I were talking about this earlier, where I sort of accidentally stumbled across what turns out to be one of the most important techniques used by Yngwie Malmsteen to play incredibly fast things with great clarity and accuracy across the strings.

And that’s this technique called downward pick slanting. So, that was kind of the splitting of the atom for me. Once I had figured that out, and that again was a combination of observing and listening, and specifically utilizing Yngwie’s instructional video that he released in the late ’80s, or it was actually early ’90s that turned out to be the Rosetta Stone, if you will, of how his technique actually works. It’s not something he talks about. It’s simply something that you can reverse engineer by watching the video and looking very closely at what his hands are doing. And so, once I did that, I was off and running, and then the slow motion camera came about ten years later when I realized that this could be done in a way. Rather than relying on VHS tapes from 20 years prior, we could actually go out there and meet some of these players, who I think are probably more accessible now thanks to the Internet than they’ve ever been, and actually get an incredible close-up view of their technique that you simply couldn’t get any other way.

And so, that’s when this thing really took off.

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, so you mentioned the special guitar-mounted camera bracket.

Troy Grady: Right.

Donnie Schexnayder: So, that’s how you were able to identify some of the picking secrets of some of the players, and I’ve seen some of the videos on your website with people like Steve Morris and Tommy Emmanuel, and some of those guys.

Troy Grady: Yeah.

Donnie Schexnayder: And the camera allowed you to capture things that they didn’t even realize they were doing themselves. Right?

Troy Grady: Right. That’s one of the core findings I think; is that guitar players are very much gifted athletes in the same way that a Michael Jordan is a gifted athlete. The analogy that I always make is his sort of fade-away jumper. Just the perfection of the way that that’s executed. You think about all the moving parts of that. He’s got a player in front of him that is defending him, and he’s got to do three or four or five other things to get away from that player, leap backwards in the air, launch the ball with exactly the right amount of force and the exact right amount of curving trajectory so that it lands square in the basket from almost straight above, so you get the widest amount of angle of attack on the hoop. Right?

And there’s all this incredible physics that have to go into that, but it’s something that he does by feel in a matter of probably less than a second, from when he pivots, launches, and takes that shot. So, in the same way, most of the great players that we grew up listening to are not fully aware, and we wouldn’t really expect them to be either, of all the moving parts of this super complex system that gets activated whenever they play really fast things. Really slow things also, but really fast things with pick particularly, which turns out to be a pretty complicated, mechanical solution.

Donnie Schexnayder: Right.

Troy Grady: So, yeah, it’s fascinating to think that something that is clearly an engineering process at some level might be going on at a level that is below the level of consciousness. And when I first thought about making this statement on a website or as part of the mission statement of the show, it wasn’t my intent to be provocative necessarily. It’s just this is how things actually work, and I think it’s important that we know that because otherwise, if we sit back and say, “Well, my teacher never taught me that, therefore it doesn’t exist,” then we don’t have progress. You know, the entire history of technological innovation is that we build on what has come before.

And we can’t be afraid of that or threatened by it. This is the natural way of things, and it is not in any way, I think a slight to the abilities of an Eddie Van Halen and an Yngwie Malmsteen that we may know more about what they do than they do, because their artistic achievements stand and will stand forever based on that alone.

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah. So, I can’t help but thinking, as you’re describing this, how awesome it would be to have a camera bracket like that that I could use in my teaching studio. Are you guys working on making a version of that available for the general public?

Troy Grady: Yeah, we are. In fact, the original camera that I used for the initial round of interviews ten years ago was more than a bracket. In fact, actually the bracket part of it was a bunch of spare parts that I picked up at B&H here in New York, which is a well-known photographic supply company. And it was a bunch of Manfrotto arms that I had sawed apart and connected together to get this thing mounted on a guitar body and hanging right over the fret board, looking at the picking hand. The hard part was the camera. The camera, at the time, was a two or three-thousand-dollar industrial camera that was intended to be installed in factories, observing assembly lines.

So, a scientific or an industrial application, where you need a camera that can film really quickly, so you have Cheerios or widgets or something rolling off this. Soup cans rolling down the assembly line, and you want to make sure that none of them fall off and you need to be able to step through that footage in super slow motion. And that’s what this camera did, and for the time, it was a super advanced thing, but the actual specs of the camera aren’t. They pale in comparison to what you’re carrying around in your pocket now.

So, that camera was bigger, bulkier. It connected by fire wire to a laptop, and we had to write custom software to actually get it to work. I wrote the sort of UI element of that, but that allows you to stop and start recording, and review movies and save them and so forth, but it was a whole affair. Now, fast-forward ten years later, you’ve got a phone in your pocket than can film at 120 frames per second, which is 20 frames faster than the camera I used ten years ago. It does it in HD, it does it in full color, and the phone itself can play it back in slow motion. Of course I’m referring to the iPhone specifically in this case, although this capability is now available in a variety of A-list smartphones. The high-end smartphones, almost all of them, have now the slow motion capability.

And the UI that the phone has, just inside, just right on the tiny little screen is really quite amazing. You set your in point and your out point of where you want the slow-mo part to begin, and it’ll play it at normal speed until it hits that first mile marker and then it instantly ramps down to the slow speed, plays till it hits the end point marker and then instantly ramps back up again. So, it’s really quite incredible, and we thought: “Well, this is the latest and greatest camera for guitar analysis of this sort,” so we’ve been working on an neck-mounted system for mounting smartphones so that you can film your own technique.

And that’s up on our website. We actually used it in an interview with Rusty Cooley earlier this year, who is probably the single fastest player that I’ve interviewed. Just as a point of example, I actually never measured this before, but we had to produce tabulator for this last interview that I did with him, and towards the end of the interview, he just started, because he’s a super enthusiastic guy, and he said, “Well, you know, we’re trying to crack the code here.” I was like: “What are you doing? We’re done.” He’s like: “No, no, no, we are cracking the code.” So, I had taken the camera down already and he just starts picking as fast as he can, so I ran over and put the thing back on. And when I tabbed it out later, it was like 16th notes at maybe 245 beats per minute, which is a good 20 or 25 beats per minute faster, I think, than what you will hear comfortable from even really great players like – I don’t know – John Petrucci or Michael Angelo Batio.

And again, it’s not all about speed, but I mentioned this in the context of what were talking about earlier as far as athletic ability. There is something that some of these players bring to the table that is special. That is like a Usain Bolt-level of athletic skill that just comes from somewhere that maybe the rest of us can’t replicate. We know how Rusty’s technique works though, the cleanliness and the accuracy part of it. That’s what we talk about in Cracking the Code. Whether you actually get up to that speed or not, that’s an athletic issue and I think I don’t know how much control we really have over that, but it’s fascinating to watch.

And the phone – this is where I was going with this – actually captures it. You can slow it down. You can see individual pick strokes that Rusty is making, which are just a blur to the eye. You can stand there a foot away from him and see nothing but just like a yellow blur of his pick moving back and forth, and the phone, if you give it enough light, will increase the shutter speed to such a high level that you will get crisp movement even at those speeds. And the phone is really kind of miraculous. The phone is really the best guitar camera I could possibly imagine. It’s got a screen. It’s got a battery life that last for hours. It can film in slow motion for hours. It’s got a built-in light, which is amazing. You can click on that LED flash on the top of the phone, and it perfectly illuminates the picking hand when you line it up right.

It’s almost like they designed it specifically for guitar students and guitar teachers. So, you could do it right now. You could put it on a tripod and point it at your picking hand, or your fretting hand for that matter, and you can get this footage. It’s just tricky to stay lined up right because if you move at all when you’re playing, and most of us do, then the angle changes and you can’t quite see what you’re doing. So, the bracket that we’ve come up with grips the neck right at the body joint and just you slide the phone into the slot, you clamp it in, and the camera points exactly at the picking hand, or you can flip it around and then film the fretting hand.

So, it’s super useful. We use it in our own productions. We just released a series of slow motion clips using it, demonstrating different musical styles or picking techniques in different musical styles. So, it’s pretty cool. We’re excited to get it out there, but we don’t really have any experience doing a full-on production run of that sort of thing, so we’re kind of investigating that process now.

Donnie Schexnayder: Cool. Yeah, looking forward to that one for sure. So, the way that you’ve analyzed and broken down all the virtuoso guitar technique that we’ve been discussing into these basic, understandable concepts, it’s really pretty revolutionary.

Troy Grady: Thanks.

Donnie Schexnayder: But now that the concepts have been identified and kind of broken down, what kind of advice can you give us for applying them and integrating them into our own playing? So, I guess I’m asking how can you practice this stuff?

Troy Grady: Right, how do you practice it and also how do you teach it, right?

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah.

Troy Grady: The most important thing is to become comfortable in doing them. Right? And there’s no mad rush to do it because this stuff is, even though we’re learning about this by observing legendary players who are known for fast playing, one of the other sort of fundamental tenets of what we’re doing in the show is that everyone does this stuff at some level already. You wouldn’t be able to play otherwise. This is sort of the fundamental laws, as it were, about how guitar playing actually works. Guitar picking let’s say.

So, the good news it that you probably already do some of this stuff, and part of the challenge is simply recognizing that you already do and utilizing some of the mechanics that may already come naturally to you. This concept of downward pick slanting, if you really think about it, we’re talking about the way that you angle the pick to enable clean string changes. So that if you’re playing really fast on one string, you can move to another string without making mistakes. Well, if you really think about it, it’s pretty much impossible to hold the pick perfectly straight, perfectly perpendicular to the guitar body, because if you imagine the pie slice of 180 degrees, let’s say, that represents a totally flat angle downward and a totally flat angle upward where the pick would be, let’s say, laying against the guitar body in both of those cases, there’s only one spot dead-center along that entire travel where the pick would be perfectly perpendicular.

And it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to be in exactly that one spot where the pick is totally neutral. More likely than not, most players already do use some type of pick angle or what I call a pick slant. It’s just a matter of recognizing what that is. So, if you use downward pick slanting, you are a part of probably the biggest branch of the family tree of legendary guitar players. That is the most common pick angle in the history of let’s say virtuoso picking. Everybody from Django Reinhardt to Tal Farlow, George Benson to Joe Pass, even great jazz players use this technique almost universally, and then the rock greats that we all look to for incredible picking. Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai. These guys are all downward pick slanters.

So, really realistically there’s a good chance that you do this stuff already. So, how do you begin to take charge of that? Well, in the case of that technique we talk about in the first episode of season two, the pattern that I learned, which is an Yngwie Malmsteen picking pattern that really kick-started this whole process for me, which was a 6-note pattern. We call it the chunking lick. I forget what the name of the scene is, but basically it’s this classic 6-note scale pattern that repeats in one position. And it begins on a down stroke, six notes long, and it ends on an up stroke. And so, that pattern, even though regardless of whether or not you aim to be a shreddy kind of player or a fusion player, it’s a good practice vehicle for simply getting your head and your hands around how these techniques actually work, because it’s really easy to do.

It doesn’t move anywhere. You’re just in one part of the guitar neck, on one string only, but the sort of mystical properties that this lick has, and indeed any lick that has an even number of notes to it that starts on a down stroke, is that once you nail it in one position, you can easily move it to other positions on the same string and then easily move it to other positions on different strings. So, that’s the progression then too. The short answer to your question in terms of the natural way of things would be to learn one of these licks that is specifically engineered to be clean. Learn them in one spot on one string. Then learn them in multiple spots on the same string, and then start moving it from string to string.

And that’ll get you started. It’s very simple to do it, and if you’re already an experienced player, you may be doing it within minutes, honestly. That’s how it happened for me. I had been struggling with this stuff forever. I already had plenty of hand speed. There was just clearly something getting tied up in knots whenever I tried to move from one string to another, although it didn’t occur to me at first that that was the problem. So, the good news here is that I think, especially if you’re a guitar teacher and you have a lot of experience, you probably are very close to attaining a level of speed and clarity in your playing that you may not have realized.

Donnie Schexnayder: That’s great advice, Troy. I tell you what. Let me shift gears. I have a different kind of question for you. You talk a lot about guitar super powers in the videos.

Troy Grady: Right, exactly. Yes.

Donnie Schexnayder: That reminded me a lot of a line from that animated movie, The Incredibles, where the bad guy says if everybody is super, then no one will be. So, what happens when a hundred thousand guitarists apply your information and everybody starts learning how to shred?

Troy Grady: Right, then they become piano players. That’s what happens. And I’m not even joking. I’m joking, but I’m not joking. What I mean by that is that what we’re not really doing is we’re not really taking average players and making them unbelievable. We’re simply eliminating the difficulty that guitar players have, the crutch that we have that players on other instruments do not have. So, again, piano players of course fetishize technique the same way anyone else does, but the difference is they’re not faced with these insurmountable obstacles that make it impossible to achieve it. It’s really on guitar that we have this great divide between a small number of people with incredibly clean picking ability and then everybody else who is assumed to be less good than that.

So, what we’re really saying here is yeah, the so-called guitar gods do have special abilities, but it’s not that you can’t do what they do. It’s that their special ability was they figured it out without anybody teaching them. So, the rest of us, who are normally skilled people, can still play the same stuff that they can. We just need to know how it works. And it’s kind of like it took an Isaac Newton to figure out calculus, but now high school kids take a test on it. Right? A smart one. A smart high school kid can pass a test on it. So, the stuff we learn in eighth grade or sixth grade now in Earth Science would’ve been stuff that blew minds five hundred years ago, but again, that’s the way the technology evolves. We proceed by building on what we used to know and what came before us, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing in terms of building our real world guitar super powers.

So, really you’re going to see that guitar playing as a pursuit becomes a lot more linear so that you don’t hit a wall and give up, which really is a very, very common story in guitar playing. You practice for a million years. You don’t get any better. You get frustrated. There’s all kinds of strange almost mythology around developing picking technique that says well, you have to play this exercise or use this metronome thing and increase the speed slightly. All these things, and they’re all little bits of the truth. It’s not wrong, but they’re just incomplete. Yes, starting slow and getting faster works, and it works on a racetrack too, but there are actually shifting and steering techniques you have to learn to be able to do it. Right?

That’s really what we’re trying to do here; is just to make the path a little bit more straightforward. Whether you choose to get all the way to the end and become Superman is entirely up to you. Maybe you just stop at whatever level you’re comfortable with that allows you to write the kinds of songs and play the kinds of songs that you really want to play.

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, that’s great, man. Yeah, I can hear where you’re coming from with that because five years from now, we might have this whole new level of guitar playing where it’s similar to piano players, where there’s tons of people who have great technique. And they can focus on other things.

Troy Grady: That’s the key, right? We want to get past the mechanical because guitar players are overly focused on the speed thing. And ironically, once we make that not that big a deal anymore, then we actually start to focus on the creative thing, which is more important. Right? You know, piano players sit around talking about harmony all day, because why? Because moving your fingers fast is not that big a deal for them. Even when it gets to the level of playing like Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude or something, still there’s a million kids in music school that can do that. So, that’s not impressive. What’s impressive is having written it, or what’s impressive is coming up with that cool riff that you play with your band or that awesome song that takes off on YouTube, or whatever the case may be. We want to get beyond the plumbing. You know, put the plumbing back in the walls where it belongs.

Donnie Schexnayder: Awesome. So, here’s a question for you. What’s the most surprising thing you learned through the process of making this series?

Troy Grady: About guitar playing or about the show?

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, about guitar playing.

Troy Grady: About guitar playing. I think it was just really I never seize to be impressed by the fact that this stuff has remained sort of obscure for as long as it has. You would think that if there’s a secret missing manual to guitar playing that we all need in order to be able to do this stuff, why isn’t it there yet? Right? And what I’ve discovered by interviewing players at this level, elite players, legendary players, is that they really aren’t aware. I used to think it was some kind of crazy conspiracy. Right, like I would meet with Yngwie and they would be like: “Listen, you’re going to shut up about this stuff.” Right? But it’s not the case.

These guys are some of the most open, friendly, sharing people ever. They’re just not out there giving guitar lessons on a regular basis because they’re rocking arenas, but never once in an interview did any of these guys ever say, “Well, really, let’s not talk about that lick because that’s my secret stash.” It’s never happened. And so, it’s very clear to me that if they were aware of this stuff, we’d all be learning it. We’d all be studying it. It would be in their instructional videos. It’s not some sort of tacit agreement among A-list players to keep the rest of us in the dark. So, endlessly fascinated by this because, again, you would think that we would know more about this, but I just think that at the level that a lot of these players operate, they’re going by feel. They’re going by intuition.

And also, the thing I was thinking about earlier is when you’re born with incredible ability, you don’t realize how difficult it might be to attain that stuff for other people. So, it doesn’t have the resonance of pain that the rest of us suffered through. You know, like playing that scale thing and trying to get a few points higher on the metronome. A lot of these guys just think they struggled, but they struggled for two years when they were like 14 to 16 or something, and then the next thing you know they’re amazing. So, maybe it’s just a perfect storm of happenstance that we have arrived at this point where we aren’t more knowledgeable about this stuff, but again, the whole point is let’s get knowledgeable and let’s get beyond the plumbing.

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, absolutely. So, what’s up next for Cracking the Code? What else can we expect over the coming months?

Troy Grady: Well, we just launched the first episode of season two yesterday actually, which the first part of the story was this nostalgic and fun flashback to the ’80s, and this part of the story is the technical part. So, our big challenge now is getting the show through season two. It’s eight episodes. It’s a huge amount of technical material. And in fact, when I sat down to write it, it was 16 episodes originally, and then we just realized we would be doing this for the rest of our lives. So, we condensed them into eight episodes. They’re still very long. We kind of trimmed a little bit here and there, but not much. It’s kind of hard to take away some of this stuff because you need some of these concepts to build to understand the later ones.

So, we have eight really long episodes and really detailed episodes that we need to get out, and I think really the main challenge of doing that: we have our production process down now. We’ve been doing this for a couple years. The real deal is to get the word out. Honestly we need people to know about this show, to be interested in it, to order it, to share it on various social media channels so that we can come to work every day and keep making it.

Donnie Schexnayder: Cool. Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I invited you to be on the show. I want to help you spread the word because I believe you’re doing a great thing here.

Troy Grady: Super, and I really, really appreciate it.

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah. So, how can people get a hold of you to get the latest updates, to purchase seasons of the show, and find out more about “Cracking the Code”?

Troy Grady: Well, you shine the bat signal on the clouds, and then we will see it. Actually it’s a pick. It glows. You shine the symbol of a pick on a cloud cover. Well, I guess the main avenue for that would be our website. That’s TroyGrady.com. You can also catch us on our YouTube channel of course. The YouTube account is simply Troy Grady. And really it’s an interesting time to be doing media because obviously, and you know this, 20 years ago, we wouldn’t be broadcasting ourselves. Right? So, it’s a pretty cool time to be doing this, and you can get us in all kinds of different places. Obviously, on Facebook as well. I think it’s just Cracking the Code, is the Facebook account.

Donnie Schexnayder: Awesome. So, okay, I seriously want to encourage everybody who’s listening to this right now to go over to Troy’s website and purchase the season pass. Not only can you download the episodes as they get released, but you get lots of other bonus content that can help you learn and understand the techniques better. And most importantly, you’re going to be helping to fund this project and get the rest of the series produced, which is going to help all of us.

Troy Grady: Indeed.

Donnie Schexnayder: Yeah, I want to encourage everyone to do that. So, our time is just about up. I just want to say thanks for taking the time to be on the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast, Troy. I really appreciate it.

Troy Grady: Oh, fantastic, and thanks so much for having me.

Okay, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Troy Grady. That’s all for this episode of the Free Edition of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast. If you’re ready to energize your teaching business and take it to a whole new level, then head over to STGAllAccess.com to claim your 14-day free trial STG All-Access Membership. STG All-Access members get a full length, ad-free podcast episode every single week, covering more detailed how-to topics along with access to my notes and outline for each episode. Members also get access to a ton of other cool things that can help you build a successful teaching studio, like the STG All-Access Podcast Archive, which includes the first 25 episodes of the show that are no longer available to the general public, access to the STG Community Forums, where you can connect with me and other guitar teachers to get help with building your studio, and a whole lot more.

Just head over to STGAllAccess.com to start your free 14-day trial membership today. So, I just want to thank everybody for tuning in. This has been the Free Edition of Episode 128 of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast with Donnie Schexnayder. Until next time, keep on teaching.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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.

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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 remember just, you know, playing this guitar so much and I remember watching MTV while I was practicing, and then all of a sudden, I wasn’t really paying attention to the guitar, but all of a sudden effortlessly. Very smoothly. And I was like: “Wow, it’s working.” So that was kind of like the very first milestone that I ever remember. And then, from there, I took lessons for about four years, and then I realized that what I was doing with lessons wasn’t really advancing me on the right path that I wanted to be, because I was playing and my teacher did a very good job of, you know, showing me the importance of learning cover tunes and, you know, learning riffs via cover tunes, but I wasn’t learning the how and the why of guitar.

You know, I’m doing this, but why am I doing this? How does this happen and how can I change it to make something else happen? So, I started going down a different road by myself to try and figure out the theory. And I started doing that. I was okay with theory. You know, when you don’t have a good teacher to teach you theory and you’re learning from books and DVDs, and those kinds of things, there’s only so much you can learn.”

Okay, so Dave had some great things to say, and his experience is kind of the opposite in my mind of what most students go through. So, he took guitar lessons for about four years and obviously, for someone to develop as quickly as he did and accomplish all the things that he’s accomplished as a player with his career, he has tons of natural talent. He’s a really smart guy with a lot of musical abilities. But if you take a look at his experience, the first four years of lessons, it was all about songs and riffs. And that’s how it should be at first. For beginning to intermediate level guitarists, it’s all about context. It’s all about learning how to play other people’s music and being able to emulate the songs and music that you love and enjoy so that you can get a basic vocabulary of guitar skills.

But at some point, it has to change. It has to transition and shift. You eventually have to get into the how and the why of playing guitar and of music, like Dave mentioned. And that involves music theory and all of those kinds of topics that are very important. So, what happened was Dave kind of outgrew his guitar teacher. He started getting interested in why this song works the way it does and why this sound, you know, gets created when you play it over these chords, and things like that. So, he started studying music theory. He started reading books. He started doing all these other things, and he eventually ended up at Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, and that’s kind of where he developed more and his career kind of took off.

But this is a great example of adapting the lessons to what a student needs and wants, and then also, when the time is right, transitioning into more technical things. So, most students need and wants songs, like I said, in the earlier stages, but if they advance far enough, if they stick with it enough and they’re serious enough about the guitar, there’s a time to shift gears and start teaching them how music really works. Very good example of how lessons work whenever they’re done correctly.

Lee Ritenour

The next clip I have for you is by Lee Ritenour. And Lee is a Grammy-winning guitar player. He is a longtime jazz and fusion guitarist and session musician. He’s a founding member of the Jazz quartet named Fourplay, which was very popular in the 1990s. And currently Lee is producing solo albums and everything, but he also runs The Six String Theory International Guitar Competition. International Music Competition. There’s a guitar part, and then there’s a rhythm section part, and you could check that out at SixStringTheory.com, and you could find out more about Lee on his website, LeeRitenour.com.  So let’s hear Lee’s clip.

“Well, I think with all the amazing young talent out there, I think the most important thing is still education. You know, the Internet and YouTube and everything else has really helped speed up the quality and the intensity of learning, but you have to mix that with good music education. That’s the only insurance a musician has in his life; is the music education. So, just study as much as you can. Especially when you’re younger, you have more time. And try to find your own voice. You know, copying one guitarist and sounding like another guitarist is not a great idea. You know, there’s only one Jimi Hendrix. There’s Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Wes Montgomery, or George Benson out there. You need to have your own voice. And you know, the Scofields and the Methenys, and all these other players that have their own distinct voice have the most distinguished careers.”

All right, Lee had some great things to say. YouTube and online learning really are not enough if you want to be a well-rounded, full fledged, successful, good guitar player. There’s a lot of stuff you can pick up online. You can learn skills and you can even learn some theory and some other things like that by watching videos online and reading blogs and websites, but there’s really no replacement for immersing yourself in music education for an extended period of time.

Now, Lee has some great advice to do that when you’re young, before you have a family, before you have responsibilities, before you have a ton of bills to pay. That’s great advice, but that doesn’t mean that just because you’re in a different stage of life that you can’t immerse yourself in music; that you can’t study music to a deeper degree. That you can’t connect yourself with other musicians that want the same things that you want, and all learn and grow together, but he had a great point that your music education is your own insurance policy as a guitar player. I never really thought about it that way, but it does definitely open doors for you and help you be able to make transitions in your career pretty quickly if you have a higher level of skill and knowledge on the instrument. So, great advice from Lee right there.

And he also said what a lot of these guitar players have said, and that is to try and find your own voice on the instrument. You probably won’t have a successful music career if all you do is imitate other players. Now, there’s a place for imitation. Like I mentioned before, you have to learn and you have to emulate what other people are doing. It’s kind of like baby steps and copying, you know, words and sentences that you hear your parents say whenever you’re a baby, but at some point, you’ve got to learn how to talk on your own. It’s great to learn from other people, but at some point, you have to try to discover who you are on the guitar and what your voice is on the instrument because that’s ultimately what it’s all about. It’s not about imitating anyone or anything like that. It’s about expressing your soul through music on the guitar.

Tony MacAlpine

The next clip is from Tony MacAlpine. Now, you probably remember Tony is you read Guitar Player Magazine and Premier Guitar, and all of those, Guitar World – those magazines that came out in the 1980s and 1990s. Those older editions had Tony’s face on advertisements all over the place. He had early training as a classical violinist and pianist, and then he eventually made it big when he got signed to Shrapnel Records. I think it was around the 1984 timeframe. Something like that. And he put out a bunch of albums on Mike Varney’s Shrapnel Record label, and those got featured in guitar magazines all the time. He’s a very influential shred guitarist, but I hesitate to use the word shred guitarist because he doesn’t play like a shred guitarist. He plays like a classic composer, but he’s got virtuoso level technique. He’s a monster player.

He’s placed with bands like CAB and Planet X. He’s performed on the G3 Tour with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. You could find out more about Tony by visiting his website, TonyMacApline.com. So, let’s hear what Tony had to say about playing the guitar.

“The main thing is it’s hard really because I don’t know the level of where people are at. You know, if you’re starting out, if you’re a beginner, you know, it’s important to have a really good teacher, somebody that can guide you into a direction where it comes more academic and you learn some of the values of music. I mean if you’re already a (Unclear 16:11.2) and you’re playing, you’re playing well and things are going the way that, you know, you want, then you just have to realize there will be some difficulties that you might have. So, again, that’s where a teacher comes in. I just think working one-on-one with somebody else outside of yourself is the best way to really hone in and correct some of the problems that, you know, become these things that get in the way of what we’re trying to do musically.”

So there’s a common thread coming through a lot of these clips. It’s really cool to me to see this, but his main advice was if you want to improve on the guitar, find a good teacher. It’s all about finding someone that can help you. Don’t try to just teach yourself online. That’s a recipe for frustration. I mean if someone has a ton of natural ability and drive and determination and motivation, you can learn a lot and figure a lot of things out on your own and using online resources and books, and things like that, but don’t try to teach yourself. If you get frustrated, you know, and it’s just not working for you, it’s probably because you’re trying to be a self-taught guitarist.

Don’t do that, if you can help it. There are a very small percentage of people that have the innate musical abilities to be successful when they’re self-taught. People like Eddie Van Halen and guys like that. They were just born with a gift, and their brains work in a way that music just makes sense to them from beginning to end. But if you’re not like that, then don’t try to teach yourself. This is something that a lot of potential guitar students need to understand. Know when to get help. You can’t get to the level of someone like Tony MacAlpine without some serious study of the instrument. And like he said, having someone work with you one-on-one is definitely the fastest way to develop your guitar skills.

Nuno Bettencourt

Now let’s hear from Nuno Bettencourt. Everybody’s probably heard of Nuno Bettencourt before. You’ve probably seen his Washburn Nuno Bettencourt model guitars. He’s an amazing player. This guy has got technique that is just unbelievable, but he was the guitarist for Extreme, for kind of the pop metal band that was big in the ’80s and ’90s, and he’s done all kinds of stuff. He’s done solo albums. He’s played with all kinds of people. Most recently he’s toured with the pop R&B Rihanna and a bunch of other people. You can find out more about Nuno just by doing a Google search or you can go to Extreme-Band.com. Let’s hear what Nuno had to say about playing the guitar.

“No, you know what. I think the main thing is, for any guitar player, don’t just be a guitar player. Don’t be obsessed with guitar only. Be obsessed with guitar, but also be obsessed with music and rhythm playing. You know, solos are just a small portion of the song. You will make your own history and be yourself amongst how you can play in a song. That will separate you from everybody else. You know, your rhythm playing. Your writing. Your ranging. Your songwriting. Your melodies. Your things, and be a musician. Don’t just be a guitar player. You could still be the greatest guitar player in the world, but people will just consider you as a guitar player, and then there are a lot of great guitar players in the world, but if you can be a well rounded player and do something really special like that, people will remember you for the rest of their lives. You know?

 Pierre: And so, how is it possible to progress as a musician, because the technical or the mechanical part of the guitar playing, I mean is if you practice a lot, eventually you’re going to be able to play fast. But to grow as a musician, it is something really difficult and sometimes  especially. Not only on the music part, but also, as you just said, on the rhythm part. Young kids just want to play fast as hell and that’s it.

Well, it takes the kids or whoever is starting to be inspired. It’s to be inspired by what they’re listening to. If they’re only listening to, you know, shredders, let’s say, and instrumental records, then forget it. It’s a diet. It’s all about your diet. You know, if you don’t take any kid to McDonald’s, you’d be surprised how much they don’t eat McDonald’s. It’s a very simple math. You give kids vegetables when they’re three or four, and they grow up, thinking vegetables are actually what we’re supposed to eat. They’re not supposed to be disgusting and gross. It’s really how. Sometimes it’s your older brothers. It’s your parents. It’s what they feed you and what they inspire you. If somebody grows up on Queen, they’re going to be like: “Wow, what the heck is this?”

Pierre: This is the standard.

This is the standard. This is music. This is melodies. This is incredible. There is an incredible guitar player who’s doing layers of guitar and beautiful things. Same thing with Van Halen. Van Halen wasn’t just an instrumental band. The guy’s a great rhythm play, so I recognized that. There were still harmonies in Van Halen. I recognized that. So, I think it’s important. I think it’s even important that guitar teachers. They have a responsibility to make the player aware and the young player aware that yeah, I know you want to learn Eruption by Van Halen, but don’t forget to study the rest of the record. You know, study it. Listen to it. Enjoy it. And one day, they’re going to go: “Wow, you know, this is what it’s about.” You know?”

I love the contrast here. So, Nuno is like one of the most prolific guitar soloists on the planet today, and his advice to up and coming guitar players is don’t just be obsessed with soloing. Learn more important things. Learn how to write your own music and compose. Learn how to be an amazing rhythm player. Learn how to write and play melodies on the guitar and be more melodic. I love how he’s just not focused on shredding and not focused alone on technique, but he’s really encouraging guitar players to be a well rounded musician. Be yourself. Make your own history. Be well rounded. Those were the bits of advice that Nuno was sharing, and I couldn’t agree with him more, because we need well-rounded guitar players.

We don’t need people that can just shred or just play riffs or just play cover songs, or whatever. We need people that can express themselves on the instrument. And there are so many more important things than just being able to play fast and just being able to play solos. So, if you really can tap into who you are as a guitarist and what your voice is, you know, and then you really can make your own history, like he talked about. And I love the part where he said that teachers need to inspire their students with new music and new ideas. So, he called out guitar teachers in that clip and he said that we need to. We have a responsibility to expose our students to great music that they may never otherwise listen to.

Remember one of the students I taught was like an 11-year-old kid who had a pretty good amount of natural talent on the guitar, but all he listened to was Buckethead all the time and all he cared about was guitar tricks and being able to play fast, and stuff like that. So, one of the things I tried to do was to expose him to other kinds of rock music that he could learn and kind of absorb and be influenced by, and also other kinds of music too, like fusion and even some classical music and things that I thought would help him, and even blues, because he was so focused on technique that his feel left a lot to be desired. So, listening to some great blues players was something that was able to help him develop a little bit better as a player.

You know, so we need to do that. We need to expose our students to music that they may not otherwise listen to or ever even have heard of. And it’s also great whenever we can highlight the more musical aspects of great guitar playing. You know, like I love how he said, “Yeah, if you want to learn Eruption, that’s cool, but don’t just stop with Eruption. Learn the rest of the album.” Learn how Eddie wrote those songs and learn how he approached his rhythm playing, and all of those different things too. Those are equally important with the soloing, if not more important. It’s not just about flash and techniques, so some great advice from Nuno, who’s one of the most flashy and technical guitar players on the planet.

Guthrie Govan

The next clip is by Guthrie Govan. Guthrie plays with a trio called The Aristocrats, and he is an amazing guitar player and amazing composer of music from the United Kingdom. And he played with the band Asia for about six years as well. You could find out more about Guthrie at GuthrieGovan.co.uk, but let’s hear what Guthrie has to say about playing guitar.

“I think it’s really important to have a bigger perspective. I mean everybody who plays an instrument needs to ask themselves at some point, “Why am I doing this? What are my goals?” Short-term girls, fair enough. I need to be 10bmp faster by this time next month, but I mean long-term goals. Like what do I really want to get out of my relationship with the instrument? And as long as you can answer that honestly to yourself, you’ll know what to do. But the problem that sometimes arises with this technical kind of guitar playing, sometimes a young player will become blinded by the technique aspect and it will distract them from the bigger picture, which is of course you’re meant to write music and play music with other people, and play music to other people.

I worry when someone who stands up, confined in a bedroom with only a metronome for company, and that becomes their whole relationship with music. I think that’s unhealthy. Technique is just a means to an end. I know I play too many notes, but I can’t help it. The music I hear in my head has too many notes in it. The fact that I’m able to play some of that stuff is not necessarily because I focused exclusively on technique for years. It’s just because I’ve played for a long time. I’ve always tried to find the easiest way to do things. And if you play something in a way that feels easy for long enough, then, in the end, you’ll be able to do it faster because it feels natural. So that’s a big part of my approach to the whole technique thing. And if you want to practice one basic thing, practice making every note you play sound perfect. I think that’s a healthy attitude to have.”

Great advice there. Guthrie is just a hilarious guy. You really need to go back and listen that entire interview. He’s actually got two interviews with Guthrie on the podcast. This clip is from the first of the two, and he’s really hilarious, man. He seems like the kind of guy that I would love to meet and hang out with and just kind of clown around. But I love how his approach – well, his advice as far as an approach goes to learning the guitar – was to figure out what you really want out of the instrument. Why do you want to play? Why are you doing this? That’s a question we need to be asking our students pretty frequently, especially when they first sign up for guitar lessons. Why do you want to play the guitar? Why do you want to do this? What is it about playing that motivates you and drives you? Why are you interested in this?

It’s very important for them to figure that out because whatever is driving them is also going to be what motivates them to continue lessons and to make progress on the guitar. So, find out why they want to do it. If all they want to do is play fast, then that’s not a very good reason. They’re probably going to get sick of that pretty fast and hopefully they’ll discover something else about the guitar that they love, but if all you’ve got is technique, you know, you’re not really a well rounded musician and it’s not enough to just be able to play fast. Why do you really want to do this? And I love his advice. Again, Guthrie is one of the faster guitar players on the planet, and he says don’t get blinded by the pursuit of technique. He said, “Technique is just a mean to an end.”

His technique was developed simply so that he could play the things he heard in his head. It’s all about self-expression for Guthrie, and that’s what we should communicate to our students too, as guitar teachers. And I love his last bit of advice in that clip. “Practice making every note you play sound perfect.” He said that that would give you the best results in your practice times. More so than just working on technique, make sure all your notes are clean. Make sure you have good finger tone. Make sure you’re picking every note correctly. That it is clean and plays and sounds perfect. That’s a great thing to practice. I don’t think we pay enough attention to that sometimes, as guitar teachers. We’re focused on exercises and tempos and BPMs and metronomes, and things like that, and we don’t drill down and make sure that our students can play beautiful sounding notes on the guitar. So, great advice from Guthrie.

Eric Bibb

So, I have a couple of more clips for you here. This one is from Eric Bibb. Now, Eric is a finger style acoustic blues artist. He plays acoustic blues finger style-type guitar. Kind of a throwback to earlier eras of the guitar with also some newer and a little bit of world music influence thrown in, and he’s a little bit older. He’s been active since the early 1960s, but you can listen to some of Eric’s music. It’s really great music, and you can find out more about him at EricBibb.com. So let’s listen to this clip from Eric.

“I think it’s important to listen to a lot of music, be exposed to a lot of music, and discover what really rocks your soul. And when you’ve discovered some sounds, styles of music that really move you; and when I say move you, there’s many kinds of music that can move you, but I don’t always want to play a certain kind of music. I like to listen to certain music, but I’m not interested in playing it, but the music that I love to listen to and also want to play, I would say that’s a good starting place. Focus on that music because you will have so much energy, excitement that it’ll make you apply yourself and learn quickly. I think you need to be passionate about what you’re learning, and the best way is to find out what really you go back to and want to play over and over, can’t get enough of. That’s a good starting point.”

So, Eric Bibb. He’s a great artist, but he also strikes me as a bit of a musicologist. If he listens to his interview, he’s done a couple interviews too. This is the first one on The Guitar Channel Podcast. But he seems to know a lot about different genres of music and different artists in different genres. He’s well listened and a well studied musician, and it was just a pleasure to hear him talk about different things in such an expressive way, but I love his advice to be exposed to as much music as you can. I love how he says discover music that rocks your soul. What moves you as a guitar player? Those are the things that will set you on fire for music, and those are the things that you should focus on. Those are the things that you should learn. Those are the things that you should get your guitar teacher to work with you on.

So, that’s a secret to motivation right there and a secret to producing better guitar players in your studio; is finding out what motivates them. Find the music that rocks their soul. Find out what they’re passionate about and weave that into their lessons so that whenever they play, they’re passionate. Whenever they have their lessons and they study with you, they’re passionate. Whenever they’re practicing at home on their own, they’re passionate. It’s connected to the soul level of being a musician and it’s not about what you do with your fingers. It’s not about what you’re looking at on a sheet of paper. It’s about connecting your hands, your brain, your voice, and your soul all together at the same time so that you can pour your soul out through the guitar. I love that advice. That’s what it’s all about.

Marty Friedman

And now the final clip is from Marty Friedman. Now, you’ve probably also seen Marty Friedman in the guitar magazines from the late ’80s, early ’90s. He started out on the Shrapnel Records, kind of like Tony MacAlpine did. He was a duo called Cacophony with another amazing guitar player, Jason Becker, who, because of his disease, is no longer able to play, but he’s still able to compose. And I think there’s a new Cacophony record that was recently released, where Jason wrote the parts and someone else played them for him. But Marty Friedman also went on to play with Dave Mustaine and Mega Death, and he’s a great guitar player, and you could find out more about him at MartyFriedman.com. Now let’s listen to the final clip of this episode, Marty telling us his thoughts about how to be a good guitar player.

“This is a good one. I’ll tell you an important thing, and it’s very important. If you’re a guitar player, and a lot of times guitar players think that they have to be able to play everything that exists. They have to know how to play everything. They think that they have to know how to play like this guy. They have to know how to play like this guy. They have to learn all of these different things, and that’s totally not true. All you have to do is be able to play your own music really, really, really, really well. Like for example, I could never, ever play like Jeff Beck. If I practiced every day for years, I could never, ever play like that, or Eddie Van Halen, or anybody. I could never, ever do it.

But at the same time, I know for sure that Jeff Beck could never, ever play like me. Eddie Van Halen could never, ever play like me. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because they wouldn’t want to. They would have no desire to play like me. So, of course they could probably mimic me pretty well. They could do a phrase that sounds like something that I would do, but to really, really play like me, they would never be able to do that. I think the only person who can really play like another guitarist is a super, super fan of that guitarist. Like I’ve had some fans of mine who really, really analyzed my playing, and they sound pretty close to me, but what I’m trying to get at is it’s never really important to play like anybody else or think that you have to be able to play everybody’s different style.

All you really have to do is develop your own style and play what you like to play, and then you don’t have the pressure of having to, you know, think you have to be as good as everybody else. I mean if I thought that I had to play like Eddie Van Halen, I’d give up guitar because I could never do it. You know? And it’s just not something I’m interested in doing, luckily. I mean I’m glad that I don’t have the interest in doing that. He’s a fabulous guitar player, but there’s no reason why I have to be able to do that too. You know, so what guitar players need to know is guitar players think that I can play everything, but if they saw me trying to play like Van Halen, they would laugh so hard because I suck so bad. So that’s what a lot of young guitar players don’t know.

I mean I remember when I was like 14 or 15. I thought every professional guitar player – they can just play everything. They just know how to play everything because they’re so good. Just because you’re really, really good doesn’t mean necessarily that you want to play everything. I mean there’s a lot of great guitar players. I just love to listen to them, but I don’t have to play like them.”

Once again, we have great advice from Marty, and it’s a common thread that flows through all of these interviews. Just be able to play your own music really well. I remember when I was a young guitar player. It was all about competition. It was all about whether or not I could play as fast as this other person, or whether or not I knew as many chords as this other guitar player, whether or not I could play this style of music or that style of music. I was constantly comparing myself to other guitar players. And my self-esteem like totally went down the toilet because of that.

And I think that’s a common problem with a lot of younger players and even some older players. They think their identity and their worth is so tied to playing the guitar that they feel like if anyone is better than them that it devalues them as a person. Well, I love this advice from Marty, who has reached a level, you know, pretty much as high as you can get of virtuosity and as a great career. You don’t need to master every flavor of guitar. There’s no pressure on you as a player to conform to the way anybody else does anything. You don’t need to be as good as anybody else. You don’t need to be exactly like anybody else. Just be you.

Take what’s inside of your soul and release it through your guitar. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not a competition. It’s an art form. It’s an artistic expression. That’s what playing the guitar is. So, it’s not about trying to imitate other players. It’s about finding your own voice, and that’s something that I think we all need to impress our younger guitar students, because if all you see and know about the guitar playing landscape of the world is what you see in guitar magazines and what you watch in YouTube videos and what you hear on albums, and things like that, then you never get this piece of advice that Marty so eloquently shared. That, you know, people think that because he’s this pro-level virtuoso player that he could play anything by anybody. Well, he, quite honestly, said, “No, I can’t play like Eddie Van Halen. I can’t play like all these other players. I play like me, and all I have to be is the best me that I can be.”

That is excellent advice and it’s an attitude that we need to impart to our students that they need to be original. They need to be individuals. They need to be able to express themselves on the guitar. Great advice from Marty.

Conclusion

To wrap this episode up, the common thread running through each of these interviews in my mind was the word originality. You don’t have to play like anyone else. Be the best you that you can be. And if you work hard at that, people are going to eventually pay attention. Those of you teachers who are also performers, great advice to follow and definitely something great to impart to our own students. If we can really internalize this, it would change the way we teach lessons, I think, to a large degree.

So, inspire your students to be the most well-rounded and expressive guitarists that they can be. Teach them how to discover the music deep within their own souls and to let it out upon the world. Instead of just creating shredders, focus on creating real musicians and you’ll be helping to make the world a better place through your guitar lessons.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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 actually write your lesson notes  into Evernote, and then have them sync, and then you can even share different notes in Evernote. I think sharing is a paid upgrade, but you can share notes with your students just by sending them a link to the note in your Evernote account.

You can store lists of things that you want to do someday, like books you intend to read, movies you want to watch, TV shows you want to watch, and places you want to travel to. The cool thing I really like about Evernote. I can go on and on about this app, but it lets you record audio  into Evernote from your phone. So, you can record your lessons as audio files. In Evernote, just hit record, and then boom, it records you entire lesson. The quality may not be perfect, but it’s an accurate representation of what went on, and then you can send your students the link to the file in Evernote and they can open it from wherever they are.

I use it to capture songwriting ideas on the go. So, if I’m driving in the car or if I’m someplace where I don’t have a guitar or I don’t have my computer, I just pull out my mobile device, and then I’ll just either sing the line into Evernote, or I’ll hum it, or I’ll play the guitar right into Evernote, and then throw a few notes in there and then I can always go back and find that musical idea when I want to work on it later. Another cool thing is you can take pictures in Evernote. So, anything you see that strikes your imagination, you can take a picture of it and save it for later.

So, you could do all of these cool things with Evernote. It’s one of my all-time favorite apps. I use it all the time. I highly recommend it.

2) Guitar Toolkit Plus

App number two must have mobile app. This one is a little bit different. It’s called Guitar Toolkit Plus. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Guitar Toolkit Plus costs $9.99, but that is a small amount to pay whenever you hear what I tell you in a second about all that it can do for you. Your arsenal of guitar teaching mobile apps wouldn’t be complete without a Swiss Army knife-kind of tool to replace what used to require a whole gig bag full of stuff. So, let me tell you the cool things about Guitar Toolkit Plus.

The first thing is, is a chromatic tuner. Now, there are a lot of tuner apps out there for mobile devices. Some of them are free, like gStrings and some of the other ones, but this is cool. It’s a very nice tuner. It works really well. It supports standard tuning and alternate tunings, and even custom tunings that you create yourself. So, it’s a tuner. The microphone picks up the sound made by your guitar, and it works just like a tuner. It’s a tuner that’s software-based that is on your phone, so you don’t need to carry around a tuner anymore if you have this app.

It also includes an advanced metronome. What do I mean by advanced metronome? Well, it’s not just a click. It’s basically a drum machine on your phone. You could create custom patterns on the fly. You can tap tempo. You can adjust the tempo. You can change the time signature and the beat divisions, and all that stuff, and it comes loaded with some built-in patterns too with realistic drum samples. So, not only can you use it to practice, but you can use it in your lessons as a metronome.

Not bad for ten bucks, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s still got all this awesome reference material in it. So, there’s a chord library function that has over two million chords in visual format. You know, that’s a lot of chords. You’re probably never going to play 99 percent of those, but if you ever need to look a chord up, it’s there on your phone. They have chords for bass, chords for guitar, chords for banjo, chords for ukulele, chords for mandolin, and all these different stringed instruments, all in this one little app. And then you can just pick the chord that you want and the key that you want, and then the tool will give you 24 different ways to play it, including inversions and even including alternate tunings.

You can strum the chord on your mobile device to hear what it sounds like. You just swipe your finger across the virtual guitar strings, and it’ll play the chord so that you can hear what it sounds like. You can even use a virtual capo and pick which fret you want to put it on, and then it’ll recalculate and play the chord for you as if it was capoed on your guitar. You can even type in the fingering of the chord that you’re playing if you don’t know what it is, and then the app will tell you the name of the chord. It’s a very cool, very useful tool. Instead of pulling out a big, fat chord dictionary or something, it’s all there on your mobile phone.

The next piece of Guitar Toolkit Plus that’s cool is the scale arpeggio library. So, just like with chords, this tool has over nine hundred scales in what they claim are 16 million playable position combinations. 16 million playable position combinations. That’s unbelievable. And then, for the arpeggios, they have over 70 different arpeggio shapes with more than two million position combinations for those, for the various instruments that I mentioned before. They have the same cool functions as a chord library. There’s the Virtual Capo. You can tap to hear the scale. You can tap the individual notes of the scale to hear them, and it even supports alternate tunings. So, it’ll show you scale patterns in tunings other than standard, which is very cool and useful.

And then the last cool piece of Guitar Toolkit Plus is the thing they call Chord Sheets. You can use all of these things – the chord library and the scale arpeggio library – to put together pro-looking chord charts on your phone, and then you can print them. If you’re on something like an iPad that has a connection to a printer, you can print it directly to paper for your students, or you can actually email them, to your students, as PDF files from inside the app on your mobile device. How cool is that? So, this actually could be one of the best ten dollars that you ever spend for a mobile guitar app. It’s really cool. I like it a lot.

 3) Garageband

App number three. Drum roll please. The third app is Garageband. I bet you didn’t know. Well, if you have an iPhone, you already knew this. but the Garageband app that I’m using now to record this podcast episode, there is a mobile version of it that is completely free that you can install on your iOS device, on your iPad, your iPod Touch, or your iPhone. Sorry, it’s an Apple app. It won’t work on Windows phones or Androids, but if you are an Apple user, you can install this and use it for free.

The Garageband app is the best all-around creativity and performance app that I’ve ever seen. And if I had to choose just one music or recording app, it would probably be this one. You can use it basically in two different ways. You can use it as a performance tool, because there are lots of software instruments built into the app and you can just pick one and then start playing on your phone. There are little keyboard interfaces, drum kit interfaces, guitar strumming interfaces, and things like that, and you can use Garageband and your phone as a music instrument.

The instruments even come in two different flavors. There are the touch instruments – keyboard, guitar, and drum kit. You just touch the screen to play it. And there are also virtual versions of instruments, and you know, smart instruments is the other category, and that basically takes those same instruments and it kind of dumbs them down so that if you’re a beginner, you can play them with only one or two fingers, which may or may not be useful to you.

But the other cool thing about Garageband is it’s really a cool, portable recording studio. You can lay down tracks there on your phone, using the touchpad or the smart instruments. You can record your voice into the phone’s microphone. You can record your guitar. You can make use of built-in loops and create music  in Garageband. It’s really cool, and it’s hard to believe that this free, but it’s one of the cool things Apple does. They make add-on software either free or very inexpensive to reward people for purchasing their computers and devices.

Another cool thing: if you buy a little bit of extra hardware, then you can actually connect a midi keyboard or a USB microphone or a guitar. You can plug an electric guitar into your mobile device and record. You can use something like a USB mic or get an adapter and plug in something like a Rocksmith cable, which is a quarter-inch analog guitar cable on one end and a USB connector on the other, and your signal gets converted from analog to digital along the way. And if you buy some adapters, you can plug that stuff r into your iPad, into your iPhone, and you can play your guitar directly in and it sounds amazing. I record a lot of demos that way, just plugging my guitar directly into my MacBook Pro, using a Rocksmith cable. It works great. So, you could do that with the device in your pocket. Very cool.

So, how can you use this in your lessons? Well, first, you can use it to record your guitar lessons. If you want to get a little better quality, you can hook up a USB mic to your mobile device and use Garageband to record your lesson. A good omnidirectional mic would pick up everything going on in the room and be great quality. You can edit it and tweak it and EQ it and cut out bits if you want to, and then share it with your students. Very cool. It’s also a good way to manage backing tracks during your lessons. You could record your own backing tracks and load them into Garageband and use them in your lessons. So, cool stuff.

4) Dropbox

App number four. This one is similar to Evernote, but it has a different use, but I, again, use it all the time. I use it to communicate with my assistant, who lives in a different country. I use it to transfer files between all my devices. That application is Dropbox. Yes, Dropbox. The basic version is completely free. I believe they give you 2GB of storage space for free to start out. But if you recommend Dropbox to your friends and they sign up using a link that you provide, then you get free space for every person you know that signs up. So, if you want to send a little bit of love my way, then go to StartTeachingGuitar.com/Dropbox and sign up for your account, and then I’ll get some free space too. Share the love.

You don’t have to do that. If you want to, that’s awesome. But just like Evernote, Dropbox is a must-have app. I’ve seen Dropbox described as a magic pocket that lives on your mobile device, but you also install it on your desktop computer and on any other devices that you might have because, just like Evernote, you can log into Dropbox and access your files over the web, but it synchronizes everything you drop into these folders that it adds across all of your devices. Any file that you drag into Dropbox on your desktop computer is going to magically appear in Dropbox on your iPad, on your iPhone, on your Windows device, on your Android, and on the Dropbox website, and on anybody else’s computer that you share a Dropbox folders with, no matter where they are in the entire world.

I use it to transfer all of the files that I do on my mobile device back to my desktop. Again, when I take pictures on my phone, I have them automatically copied to Dropbox, which syncs them and then they’re available on my desktop computer. It backs up all your stuff that’s put in there. It’s great. There are other ways of transferring files like this. I mean you can use email to transfer files and stuff like that, but Dropbox really makes it simple and easy. You just drop a file into the folder on your desktop and it gets wherever you want it to go. It’s really cool.

So, how can you use Dropbox? Well, Dropbox is great for moving large audio and video files back and forth between your devices or sharing them with other people. Stuff like Evernote is great and Google Drive is great for files that are pretty small, but when you start dealing with big audio and big video files, the sizes are too big to be handled effectively by those applications. That’s where Dropbox really shines. You can use it for sharing lesson audio and video with your students. So, let’s say you setup a video camera in the corner of your studio and film lessons. Well, you can take that file and reduce it down to a manageable size, and then stick it in Dropbox. And then, whatever you put into your Dropbox Public Folder, you can right-click on that and then there is a Share link that you can just copy and paste, send it to someone, and anyone who has that link will be able to download that file and open it.

It’s a very cool application. It saves me tons of time, and it’s a great way to share large files and do different things with your students.

5) Ultimate Guitar Tabs

App number five. This is another great app. It’s Ultimate Guitar Tabs. I’ll put a link to these in the show notes. Ultimate Guitar Tabs costs $2.99. What do you get for $2.99? Well, with more than 300 thousand tabs available on UltimateGuitar.com, this mobile application is the largest tabulator bank in the entire app world.

So, I’m sure you’ve used UltimateGuitar.com before. There are lots of tabs on there. Some of them are good. Most of them are crappy, but they are there if you need them as a reference or to quickly figure out what’s going on in a song, or whatever. So, this app basically takes all of those tabulator instances that are user-generated and brings them all into this mobile interface where you can easily find them and bookmark them and stuff. So, you can access your favorite tabs either by artist or by song title. You can search based on guitar, bass, drums, just the chords, on the part of the song, the difficulty level of the song, the tuning, the community rating, or they also sell tab packs that you can get through the application that’ll organize everything for you, and I think they’re a little bit better quality tabs. I’m not sure.

But the thing about UltimateGuitar.com is that there are so many tabs on there that it’s hard to kind of sort through all of that stuff sometimes. So, if you’re just looking for something interesting to play, there’s a random tab button on the homepage. So, you can just push it, and then it’ll pull a random tab out of that archive and you can just play along with that or use that in your lessons if you’re looking for something crazy. You might have to tap it a few times, but it’s an interesting way to find something that you weren’t necessarily looking for.

So, how would you use this? What I would use it for is to pull up a rough and dirty tab kind of instantly whenever you need to inside your lessons. The quality of the tab may not be the best. That’s what’s kind of notorious about sites like UltimateGuitar.com; is that the tabs are created by the people that use the site, so there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be exactly what was played on the record, but the basic information is very valuable if you need it. And this mobile app makes it easy to find all in one place.

Honorable Mention: Music Teachers Helper

So, that’s my number five recommendation for a must-have mobile app. Now, I do have an honorable mention for you, and that’s Music Teacher’s Helper’s mobile app. If you’re a Music Teacher’s Helper user, the app won’t do you very much good, but if you go to StartTeachingGuitar.com/MusicTeachersHelper, you could sign up for a free account that you can use for up to five students. And if you use the promo code, 3B007F, you can save 20 percent off of your first month if you decide to go with a paid level of the app.

But this info that I’m about to share is from the Music Teacher’s Helper website. The specific features may have changed since then, but on the Music Teacher’s Helper Mobile App, you can review your student lists and their contact information from your phone. You can see a list of your upcoming lessons and your past lessons. You can reconcile your lessons. You can view a summary of each student’s billing status and see who owes you money and who you need to collect payments from, and things like that. And you can see your studio’s financial transactions, payments, invoices, and all of that valuable information. You can access it on your phone through this mobile website.

Now, currently, the mobile app only supports teacher logins. The full version of Music Teacher’s Helper, your students can login too and manage their stuff there, but that part, as of the time of this article that I found, wasn’t available in the mobile app. That might have changed now. But the combination of these six apps – the five that I recommended and then Music Teacher’s Helper – lets you do almost anything you want to do for your studio from your mobile device.

Conclusion

It’s time to bring your studio into the information age. Using mobile apps on your iPhone, your Android, or your Windows device can save you tons of time and help you run your teaching studio more effectively.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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 lives.

2) Lack Of Self-Confidence

The second reason is a lack of self-confidence. This is one of the biggest reasons why guitar teachers are underpaid. The reason they’re underpaid is because they don’t believe in their own worth. That’s quote worthy right there. The biggest reason why guitar teachers are underpaid is because they don’t believe in their own worth. If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else is going to believe in you either. I’ve said that before, and it is so true. The beliefs that we have about ourselves are that we project onto the people around us, and they more often than not will adopt those beliefs themselves, concerning us. So, what have you got to do?

Well, you’ve got to stop thinking less of yourself, you have to stop standing in your own way, and you’ve got to start believing that you are really worth being paid adequately as a guitar teacher. And again, you have complete control over what you believe about yourself. This belief stuff, this attitude stuff, this mindset stuff that I’m talking about – nobody can control that, but you. And even though it’s hard sometimes to go against your emotions, it’s hard to go against preconceived ideas and things that you’ve believed and held on to your entire life, you have the power to do it. You can control what you think. You can control what you believe. It all comes down to a choice.

And once you choose your feelings about yourself, your feelings about money are going to change and fall into line after the fact. Okay, you can’t just say, “Well, that’s not what I feel.” You make the choice first, and then your feelings come into line afterwards. So, what do you do? You choose to think better of yourself. You choose to expect more from yourself. You choose to reevaluate your own value and worth as a person and as a guitar teacher. Once you do that, then you start to envision yourself operating on a higher level, where you have more respect, where you have more income, where you have better quality students and more attention and more authority and expertise in your community, and a more thriving and successful business. But none of that can happen unless you believe in yourself.

That one simple choice can change everything for you and start giving you the courage that you need to take the bold actions that will bring you success. So, do it. Start believing in yourself. All of that head trash, all of those negative voices and tapes that keep playing in your head – turn them off. Tune them out. Start believing the truth about who you are and about your potential, and you’re going to start to see some amazing things change. For some of you, it might take more than just a choice. Some of you might have chronic problems with poor self-confidence and stuff. If it takes more than just making a choice, then you’ve got to start looking for ways to prove it to yourself.

Start looking for easy ways to increase your level of confidence. And some easy ways to do that is to identify what some people might call low-hanging fruit. You know, some easy wins that you can shoot for in your studio to help you build your confidence. So, if you’re really having a lack of confidence, dealing with your students or dealing with your business, or something like that, then find some easy ways that you can get wins under your belt and start to build your confidence one step at a time. Also, you can find someone that you can talk to about this, who believes in you and who’s going to encourage you to reach for more, and who will tell you the truth about what you’re really worth and who you really are as a person and as a guitar teacher.

So, one of the things that I love to do with the people that I work with is I just love speaking truth into people’s lives. Sometimes that truth is correction and constructive criticism and things that they need to improve and ways that people are holding themselves back and standing in their own way. Other times it’s just speaking the truth about who they are as a person and letting them know that they have value and worth, and something amazing to offer that people are willing to pay them money for, and that it’s more money than they think that they deserve at this point. And I love to just pour truth into people’s lives so that they can start to believe that truth and see positive change take place. It’s one of my favorite things to do for people, and it’s one of the most powerful things that you can do for your students too.

Alright, so I’m getting into a different topic here. I should do a totally different podcast episode about that, but another thing you could do to boost your self-confidence is to write out a detailed description of what you want out of your teaching studio, and then describe the kind of person that you’re going to need to be to get those things. So, visualize and write out exactly what you want out of your business, and then start describing the kind of person you’re going to have to be to get it, and that’s going to show you the path forward, the things that you can start working on. And then get a mentor or start reading books, or do things that will help you develop those areas of your life until you have confidence in them.

The point is just to shake yourself out of your old self-limiting beliefs and start to expect more. More. Don’t be satisfied with mediocrity. Don’t be satisfied with struggling to get by and barely making enough money to pay your bills. Start to expect more out of your life and more out of yourself and more out of your teaching studio. If you can do that, chances are you’re going to get more. All right? You might never reach one hundred percent of all of the things that you want to see, but if you can expand yourself and get 50 percent of the way there or 75 percent of the way there or 90 percent of the way there, you’re going to be so much better off than if you would’ve just settled for whatever it is you had at the time. So, believe in yourself and start to expect more, and chances are you’re going to get it. This is good stuff, man.

3) Lack Of Appreciation And Respect From Others

And then the last reason why that I want to go over today is why a lot of guitar teachers have trouble with money and with things like that. It all ties together, but they have a lack of appreciation and respect from the people around them. So, as of the week that I’m recording this – this is actually Teacher Appreciation Week, here in the United States. This week, for five days, students in school are supposed to bring gifts and presents and cards and write nice notes to their teachers to show how much they appreciate them. And I honestly think that guitar teachers should be included in this Teacher Appreciation Week too.

I think that, as teachers, we deserve to be appreciated by our students. And if it’s not happening in your case, if your students don’t appreciate you and they don’t value and respect your time and your experience as a guitar teacher, this is usually a result of the other two things that I just mentioned: the poverty mentality and the lack of confidence. You know, you could tell whenever your students don’t respect you because they don’t pay you on time. They don’t show up for their lessons on time. When they are in their lessons, they don’t pay attention to things that you’re saying. They’re not engaged. They don’t completely the assignments that you give them. They don’t practice at home. And then, ultimately, they don’t stay with you as a student as long as they probably should.

And honestly, I mean I know that there are problem students out there. I’m not taking the blame off of them completely, but this kind of stuff, a lot of times, is the natural result of not respect yourself. Do you remember how I said a few minutes ago that the way you feel about yourself is the way that we project that onto the people around us and then they start to feel the same way about us, but we’re the ones who started it? Well, that happens a lot of times in your teaching studio. If you want your students to respect your time and your expertise, then you need to start by respecting yourself. That aura of self-respect, if I can use that word, will get subconsciously communicated to your students and everyone else you come into contact with. The same is true if you don’t respect yourself. If you don’t have confidence, if you don’t believe in your abilities as a teacher, that is going to get communicated subconsciously to everyone else, too, and they’re going to adopt whatever you project a lot of times.

So, improving your self-respect will open the doors for you to take on leadership roles in your studio and in your community. If you respect yourself and you project that self-respect to other people, other music teachers in your town are going to look up to you with respect, which opens up a bunch of doors and opportunities for you. Your students are going to feel lucky to be able to study with you and they’re going to view their lesson times as a privilege instead of a chore. Doors for more prominence in your local community are going to open up for you so that you can start to take leadership roles and do things that will give you more respect and success as a business owner in your town. Your value and your lesson rates accordingly will keep increasing. The more you respect yourself, the more leadership you assume, and the stronger of a person you become, the more value you’re going to have to offer other people and the more you’ll be able to charge for that value.

Okay, so I hope you can see how these things all tie together, how they’re all based on your mindset and how they are all things that are within your sphere of influence to change. All of these things stem from our inner beliefs about ourselves, and good news: this is something that you can control and change. Nobody else has the power to define who you are and what you are worth. Listen to me right now, as I say that one more time. Nobody has the power to define who you are and what you are worth. Nobody outside of yourself. A bad student can’t define it. Your parents can’t define it. People that you respect that don’t treat you the way that they should have no power to define who you are and what you’re worth. Only you can do that, and you have complete control over who you are as a person.

You get to write your own price tag. Think about that. You get to write your own price tag. So, since you get to write it, you get to determine your value and your worth, what will it be? How much are you really worth? You get to decide. So, become the powerful, engaging, and successful person that you were born to be. Choose this for yourself, and your teaching studio and your life will never be the same. I hope you’re catching a vision for this. I believe this stuff so much and it’s changed my life, honestly, over the last ten or 20 years. If you would’ve met me ten years ago, honestly, I was one of the most insecure people that you would probably ever meet. And I’ve done a lot of work on myself over the years.

I still deal with some insecurity and I still have problems with this, but my value and my belief in myself has risen to an entire new level over the last ten years, and the same thing can happen to you. If I would not have done that work on myself, if I would not have chosen to believe differently about who I am and what I’m capable of, and what I’m worth and what I deserve, then Start Teaching Guitar would not exist today, because I never would’ve had the courage and the self-confidence to attempt something like this. But because I changed my beliefs about who I am, it made it possible.

5 Methods For Mastering Money

Alright, so I’m going to get down off the soapbox now and I want to teach you a few things. There are five methods for maximizing money in your teaching studio, for mastering money in your teaching studio, and they’re five things I want to give you as I wrap up this episode. And if you do any one of them, they can help you. Okay, some of them can be done in a progression. Some of them can be done on their own. But wherever you are in your journey here as a guitar teacher, just take whichever one or more of these five things apply to you the most and start working on them.

Method #1 – Work On Your Mindset

To summarize everything I just said, work on your mindset. You’re never going to feel confident about charging what you’re really worth unless you believe that you’re really worth it. So, what do you do? You root out those negative beliefs that are sabotaging your success, you start believing in yourself, and you replace those negative beliefs with the truth. What is the truth? The truth is you are worth a lot more than you think. The truth is your services are more valuable than you think they are. The truth is you no longer have to stand in your own way and sabotage your own success. Believe the truth, work on your mindset, and it’ll make all these other things possible.

Method #2 – Expand Your Horizons With The Guitar Teaching Income Calculator

The second thing you can do is you can play around with my guitar teaching income calculator. So, I’ve put together this calculator that’s available for free on the Start Teaching Guitar website, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes so that you can check it out, but all you’ve got to do is you type in different numbers for how many students you want to teach and what your tuition rate is, and then it’ll show you exactly how much money can make as a guitar teacher. Why am I telling you to play around with that? Well, some of you listening to this don’t see how you can make a prosperous living, teaching guitar lessons. You don’t see how you can attract enough students. You don’t see how you can charge enough money to possibly be as successful as you want to be.

So, use this tool to prove it to yourself. Go over there and type in 30 students and then type in the hourly rate that not what you’re charging now, but what you think you should be charging, and then see how much money you could make when you reach that goal. It might just blow your mind. So, check it out and let it expand what you believe is possible for yourself.

Method #3 – Do A Rate Survey

Okay, and then the next thing – number three – is do a rate survey of your local area to see what the other teachers in your area are charging for lessons. Some of you have never done that before, so you don’t know how much you should be charging because you don’t know what other people are charging. The way you fix it is you do a survey. You find out what they’re all teaching, whether it’s 30-minute lessons, hour-long lessons, classes or whatever, and what they charge, and then figure out the hourly rate that’s average for everyone, and then position yourself accordingly. So, if you’re a beginner or intermediate-level teacher, you want to be somewhere kind of just above the middle of the average of everybody else in your town. If you’re below average, then you’re underselling yourself. You’re not getting paid what you’re really worth.

Even if you’re a beginner, as long as you have something to offer, or you’re an intermediate-level teacher, you want to be somewhere above the middle of the pack there for tuition rates. Now, if you’re an advanced-level teacher with a strong reputation in your community or if you specialize in a certain area of teaching guitar, then you should be towards the upper side of the range of lesson prices in your area, maybe even the most expensive at some point. So, what do you do if you’re charging too little? Find out what you should be charging and then raise your rates. Okay, that’s number three.

Method #4 – Make It As Easy As Possible For People To Pay You

Number four: you want to make it as easy as possible for people to pay you. These are all things that will help you with money. Make it as easy as possible for people to pay you. We live in a convenience-driven culture. People don’t carry their checkbooks around like they used to. People don’t carry around a wallet full of cash like they used to. So, what do you do? You start accepting credit cards. Check out PayPal.com or check out Square or some other good solution like that, that will let you swipe cards right into your smartphone in your teaching studio. It’s inexpensive, there’s a slight fee that you pay for each transaction, but it’s well worth it to make it easy for people to pay you. And then the easier you make it for people to pay you, the less trouble you’re going to have to deal with, trying to collect payments. It’s just that simple.

Method #5 – Eliminate Money Hassles Before They Begin

And then number five. The fifth thing that you can do is eliminate your money hassles before they even begin. How do you do that? Well, that means you just become proactive and you deal with the biggest irritations related to money and payment in your business before they even happen. These are all things that are based on your lesson policies. So, redefine your lesson policies to eliminate the money hassles for you as much as possible. Go with a fixed monthly tuition rate instead of doing what everybody else does and charging by the hour or charging by the lesson and getting paid every week when the student shows up. Instead of doing that, charge the same amount each month. Figure out what that would cost if the student stayed with you four weeks.

So, just divide 52 weeks by whatever you would normally get paid in a month. Make it the same amount of money each month to make it easier for your students to budget, and charge them the same amount per month no matter what. Instead of charging by the lesson or charging by the hour, charge by the month and make it a fixed monthly tuition rate. And then you want to collect the money for the whole month in advance. At the first of the month, you collect the money for the next four or five lessons. Why do you do that? Well, this is the only real protection that you have against people not paying you on time or not paying you at all.

If you already have the money and they don’t show up, you don’t lose. See, it also protects you from no-shows and last minute cancellations. But unless you have the money upfront, you have no protection against those things, and you have to deal with stress and you have to deal with hassles and you have to deal with heartache from students who aren’t paying you. Now, thankfully not all of them do that. Most people do have a little more character than that and they pay on time and they show up, but for the ones that don’t, you want to have a way to protect yourself, and this is the best way to do it. And for the ones that do, they’re not going to care. They already pay you on time. Whether they pay you once a week or pay you once a month, it’s not going to really matter to them. You just communicate the new policy and then that’s the way you do it from then on. And all of a sudden, most of your money problems go away.

Another thing: you want to set up automatic billing, if you can, so that you don’t have to ask your students for money ever again. So, auto-charge their debit or credit card, or do auto bank drafts from their checking account. If nothing else, do an automatic PayPal recurring payment for their tuition amount every single month. You don’t have to send out invoices. You don’t have to track down payments. You don’t have to mess with any of that stuff if you set up auto pay for them. And it’s easy. It doesn’t have to cost a whole lot of money and you just make it one of the conditions of doing business with you. It’s just the way you operate so that you can focus more time, energy, and attention on teaching good guitar lessons.

And then another thing you could do is you could offer discounts for people who commit to multiple months at a time. So, if someone says, “Yeah, I want to sign a three-month commitment or a six-month commitment or a one-year commitment,” you can lower their tuition rate a little bit for each additional commitment level they take. And that helps with student retention and a lot of other things too, but those are some examples of how you can eliminate your money hassles before they ever even become a problem in the first place, so be proactive.

Alright, so in conclusion, you may be a victim of your own negative beliefs right now, but you don’t have to stay that way. Poverty, lack of confidence in yourself, and disrespecting yourself are all learned beliefs that you can unlearn. You can figure out how much you should be charging and then you can raise your rates. And if you raise your rates, you’re going to raise your fortunes along with them. You can change the way that you run your teaching studio and you can eliminate many of the money hassles that I just talked about by being proactive. If you tackle your studio’s money problems from all of these different angles, you can really see the success you’ve been looking for in your money and in your life.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

There are a lot of cool websites out there, but the coolest site for small business owners has got to be fiverr.com. There’s no place else on earth where you can get almost anything done that you could imagine and only have to pay $5 for it. There are LOTS of valuable services on fiverr that can help you grow and build your guitar teaching studio if you know what to look for and if you know how to engage fiverr sellers in the most effective way.

In this episode, I’ll give you some specific examples of the kinds of services you can buy on fiverr.com that can benefit your teaching studio and you as a guitar teacher. I’ll also give you some tips and best practices you can follow to make sure you get MORE than your $5 worth and don’t get burned by a bad seller. I’ll even share a cool strategy with you that can help you seriously skyrocket your studio’s growth, once you get to the right level to implement it. If you’re ready to start expanding your teaching studio on a shoestring, this episode – and fiverr.com – can help you do it.

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 – Fiverr.com
Link – Fiverr’s Music & Audio Category

Podcast Transcript

Fiverr.com is one of the coolest sites on the web for a small business owner. You could go check it out by typing into your web browser, www.Fiverr.com. And on this website, Fiverr.com, you could pay someone to do almost anything for only five dollars. Yes, you heard me correctly. Everything on the site has a five-dollar price tag on it.

On this site, they call these five-dollar services gigs, so for five bucks, you can pay someone to actually do something, to perform a service for you in a number of different categories, many of which are useful for growing your teaching studio. There are actually over one million gigs posted on Fiverr.com at any one time. Everything from website design to article writing to video editing, and a whole bunch more. I’m going to get into a lot of specific examples of how this will benefit you as a guitar teacher.

And I know a lot of you listening to this have used Fiverr.com before for various things. Some of you probably use it quite a bit, like I do, but some of you may have never heard of this site or, if you did, you never realized how useful it could be to you as a guitar teacher. So, in this episode, I’m going to tell you all about Fiverr and, in particular, how to use it to grow your teaching studio one five-dollar gig at a time. So, purchasing small services for five dollars can help you get your teaching business up and running more quickly, and it can enable you to do things that you couldn’t do on your own.

Why You Should Care

Okay. So, before we dive in, let’s talk about why you should even care about Fiverr.com. Why you should even care about paying other people to do things for you in your business. Well, here’s why. The first reason is it increases your capabilities. Nobody is an expert at everything. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. And you shouldn’t try to be an expert at everything. If you’re trying to do everything, then you end up not doing anything well. You just, you know, are jack-of-all-trades, master of none. So, instead of wasting your time whenever you could be doing things more valuable to your business and instead of trying to learn how to do everything yourself, it’s a much better strategy to pay someone who already knows how to do it.

And you don’t have to pay them a lot. It doesn’t have to be as expensive as you might think it does. But if you pay someone else to do something and you don’t have to do it, it gives you capabilities that you didn’t have before. This lets you focus on the core things that only you can do to make your teaching studio successful. You can focus on teaching lessons. You can focus on marketing. You can focus on being a leader to your students, and you don’t have to worry about dumb things like creating logos and, you know, all the other stuff I’ll get into in a minute. So, it increases your capabilities as what we call a “solopreneur”, a one-man operation or one-woman operation in a teaching studio, or even if you have other people working for you, a lot of the things you can delegate are better done by someone else so that you can focus on what can make your business more successful.

The next reason you need to think about this is it saves you time. Even if you know how to do something and you can do it really well, that doesn’t mean that you should be doing it. As a business owner, you have to learn how to delegate other things so that you can spend time doing what really matters. Every minute you spend on something that doesn’t make you money is cutting into your studio’s profit. So, everything from office tasks to admin tasks to marketing support tasks to website stuff – you can delegate all of that. You can outsource it to someone else for really cheap. You would be surprised how cheap you can get some of this stuff done, and save yourself a bunch of time. I know that everyone listening to this is probably busy all the time with stuff related to teaching. This could take a lot of stuff off your plate.

Another reason why is it saves you money. If you outsource mundane tasks, things you don’t like to do, things you don’t know how to do, things that you do know how to do, but you don’t have time to do, you can save a lot of money. Fiverr.com can save you a ton of money on things like design work. Technical support. There are guys on there that’ll fix your WordPress site for you or your website. Online marketing. There are a lot of gigs on Fiverr, where people will actually do things that can help you with your marketing too. If you just need something simple done, I’m not talking about this elaborate project, right? You can’t work miracles with a five-dollar bill, but if you need something simple done, rather than pay some local expert in your town to do it that’s going to charge you an arm and a leg, just get someone on Fiverr to do it for you and save the money.

And then the last reason why you should consider this is that it’s a cheap way to try outsourcing. Outsourcing and delegating tasks that you don’t have to be doing and that you don’t need to be doing is a big key to growing your teaching studio. Now, there are going to be some new skills to learn if you want to do this right. You can’t just throw five bucks at someone and then, you know, ask them to do something and then forget about it, and come back and expect to get the result that you originally had in mind. There are some skills that are involved with managing outsourcers, but Fiverr.com makes it easy to try out outsourcing small tasks so that you can get a feel for it, and then there’s low risk in doing so because all you’re risking is, you know, five bucks.

So, it’s a very cool thing. It’s a very cool way to get your teaching studio kind of to another level. So, now, I know what you’ve been waiting for. You want specifics, so let me tell you some of the specific things that you can pay someone to do on Fiverr.com for five dollars.

Graphics and Design

Okay, the first category is Graphics and Design Work. How about getting someone to build a logo for your teaching studio for five dollars? It’s there. How about getting someone to design pieces of your website for five dollars? There are people out there who will do it. How about if you need a banner or a header graphic for the top of your website? Fiverr.com can hook you up. Landing pages. They’ll make them for you. How about if you just need to get a cool-looking flyer designed for your teaching studio because you’re going to go and hand some of those out? Get someone on Fiverr to design it for you for five bucks instead of spending two hours messing with it yourself.

They will design business cards for you. They will design stickers for you. They will do custom illustrations based on what you ask them to do. So, if you say, “Hey, I want a picture of a squirrel cutting a back flip and landing inside the sound hole of a Martin Dreadnought guitar,” they’ll draw it for you. It’s just up to your imagination and whenever you want it to get done. Just look in there and you can see. These are just examples that are useful. And if you look through their listings, you can probably find other things too.

They will Photoshop pictures for you. Let’s say you’ve got this great photo of yourself, but there are shadows or there’s something about it that you don’t like that you want to put on your website. Five bucks. They’ll fix it for you. You don’t have to buy the tools. You don’t have to mess with it. Someone on Fiverr will do it for only five dollars. There are people on there that, for five bucks, will draw a cartoon or a caricature of you or one of your students, or anyone that you send them a picture of. Very cool.

Now, after I give you each little section here, I’m going to also give you some caveats. Some best practices that you need to be aware of when you’re using this, because yes, it’s cheap. Yes, it’s easy. But if you want to get the result that you’re looking for, you’ve got to be careful. So, best practices for graphics and design: you want to make sure that you have a unified theme for all of your design work on your website and on your cards, and your flyers. Anything that you do. Stickers. You want it all to kind of look the same and have a similar theme, because that’s a big part of your brand.

So, what you want to do is make sure that you don’t use 30 different designers and have each one of them do a different piece of it, because then your brand is going to look like Frankenstein. Try a few different people out. Get some work done, and then try to get either all your work done from the same group of people, a small group, or maybe the same person, or give them examples of pieces of your design that you already like and make sure that it flows and blends with what you’ve already got. Okay, it’s an important piece. So, that’s a big best practice. You want a unified theme for all of your design work, and then you want to be careful about getting everything from a different designer so that your brand flows and has kind of a common theme to it.

Online Marketing

Okay, the next category is Online Marketing. These are gigs that you can hire people to do on Fiverr to help you with your online marketing. They will do web analytics for you. They will setup Google Analytics. They will give you advice on interpreting what your analytics mean. They will make sure that your analytics is working right, and troubleshoot it and fix it if it isn’t. They will help you setup reports in Google Analytics. Cool stuff. Five bucks each. They will do keyword research for you for five bucks. They will put together SEO reports for your website for five bucks. Now, these probably are not going to be as detailed and in-depth as you would pay a professional for, but for five bucks it’s good information.

They will help you do online advertising. They will help you get listed in local search. They will help you get backlinks to your site for five bucks. They will setup your social media profiles for you for five bucks. They will even get you social media followers for five bucks.

Now, here are some best practices for outsourcing your online marketing. Many of the tactics that you can buy on Fiverr are going to be considered black hat and they can get you penalized in Google, so you want to be careful. Do some research before you hire someone to send traffic or links to your site, because this is a mistake I made in the early days of Start Teaching Guitar. I wanted to get my site ranking, so I paid someone to create links. It wasn’t a ton of links. It was a small amount, but eventually STG got penalized by Google because I did that. So, just be careful. Before you hire someone, a lot of the advertisements for gigs make it sound too good to be true, like: “Yeah, I will get you one thousand backlinks to your website for five dollars,” or whatever. Be careful. A lot of times, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. So, buyer beware.

Writing

The next section is Writing. Fiverr.com. You could pay someone for five bucks to write copy for your website for your teaching studio. They’ll write your homepage. They’ll write your about page. They will write all these different areas of your teaching studio for you for five bucks a page. They will write complete blog articles for you. They will do transcripts of your audio or video for you for five bucks. And actually, I am paying a great person right now to do transcripts of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast. By the time you listen to this, there will probably be a transcript of this episode, and I paid someone five dollars for each 15 minutes to listen to it and type up everything up for me really nicely. You could do the same thing with your audio and video.

They will write press releases for you. They will proofread and edit things that you write or that someone else writes for you. They will even translate your writing into a different language. So, there are all kinds of writing gigs that can benefit you and your studio on Fiverr.

Now, best practices. Obviously you’re going to get what you pay for. So, don’t expect amazing writing for five dollars if you pay someone to write for you. It’s going to be probably decent and you might have to massage it or whatever, or pay somebody else five dollars to spruce it up, but hey, for 10-15 bucks, you have a pretty cool article there that didn’t really cost you very much and you didn’t have to do it yourself.

Another thing: you want to make sure that the writer knows about your topic. So, you might have to dig pretty deep in Fiverr to find someone that’s actually a guitar player or maybe even a guitar teacher to help you write stuff that your potential students are going to actually think is worth reading. And like I said, you’re probably going to have to do a bit of proofreading and some multiple revisions of this stuff, but hey, it’s only five bucks. You’re saving yourself a ton of time and it can work out really well for you if you handle it in the right way.

Video and Animation

So, the next category is Video and Animation. Now, I couldn’t believe this. Other people that are members of STG All-Access and stuff posted some of their example videos that they put on their website in the forums and some of the video bumpers – a bumper is what’s at the beginning of the video and then again at the end to kind of make it look professional. They got their bumpers done for five bucks on Fiverr.com, and it looked really, really good. So, for five bucks, someone will create video bumpers for your website videos and your YouTube videos. Someone, for five bucks, will create a commercial. A video commercial for your teaching studio. Someone, for five bucks, will edit so many minutes of video that you shoot and make it look good.

They will even create video testimonials and reviews of that person actually reviewing and giving a testimonial for your business. They will even do some crazy concept videos on Fiverr for five bucks. They’ll do stuff with puppets. They’ll do stop motion animation. They’ll do computer-generated animation and stuff, all based on what you tell them you want it to be about, for so many minutes for five bucks. It’s crazy.

Now, best practices. Obviously you’re not going to get a long video edited for five dollars, so you want to watch and see. A lot of them are going to have caveats that say, “You know, this five dollars is only for the first ten minutes,” or whatever. So, you’ve got to add up how long your video is and buy multiple gigs for them to do the whole thing. So, just watch out for that. And another thing: don’t use fake testimonials. Okay, you want to keep it real. One of the things they’ll do on there is put together video testimonials for you, and I advise against doing that, just as a point of integrity. When people see those testimonials, you should make sure that it’s from actual students, actual people that have worked with you. They’re going to be more effective that way anyway.

Music and Audio

The next category is Music and Audio. They have people on Fiverr.com that, for five dollars, will do audio editing for you. They will create jingles for you. They will professional voicemail greetings for your phone system or for your cellphone so that when people call to get information about your studio, if they leave you a voicemail, it’s this professional-sounding thing. They will do narration and voice-over work for videos. For things like podcast intros and if you need someone to record cool commercials or something for you, there are people on there that’ll do it for five bucks. And actually, the lady who recorded the narration and voice work for the intro and outro to the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast that you’re listening to right now – I found her on Fiverr, and paid five dollars for her to do it. It sounds great. It’s awesome.

Another cool thing that you may not have realized is that you can also buy and sell music lessons on Fiverr.com under the music and audio category, and language lessons, and anything else, but music lessons. Huh, think about that one for a second and I’ll get back to it a little bit later in the episode.

Now, best practices in this category. You want to try to use the same voice for all of your voice work. If you’re going to hire one person to do your voicemail message and you need them to do other things too, try to get the same person just so that you have consistency. That’s a good point to keep in mind, and when you’re doing any of this stuff, keep it consistent and don’t have like a Frankenstein approach to your marketing and things. Okay, very important.

Programming and Technology

Now, the next category. This is an exciting one. Programming and Technology. For five dollars, someone on Fiverr.com will fix your website problems. They will remove viruses from your computer. They will fix your network problems. Whatever problems you might have. If they can connect into your computer remotely, they can fix it for five bucks. They will even take your website and do user testing and give you feedback on how well they think your site performed. Very cool.

If you’re a WordPress user, which I hope you are, then they will install WordPress for you for five dollars. If it’s too slow, they will speed it up for you for five dollars. They will create a custom theme for WordPress for five bucks. They will create contact forms for you. They will fix errors in your WordPress installation. They will add security to WordPress. They will setup backup plug-ins for you in WordPress. They will run updates and maintain your WordPress site for you. Very cool stuff that all needs to be done and people will do it for you for only five bucks.

Now, best practices with programming and technology. Obviously you’re dealing with strangers here. Okay, so you want to backup your website yourself before you let anybody else touch it to make sure that if they make a mistake, you can roll it back to where you knew everything was working well. Not having a backup has really wrecked a lot of websites because all of that hard work, everything just goes down the toilet if your site crashes and you can’t get it back. So, good backups are critical. Also, you want to setup temporary accounts for them, for them to log into your WordPress site, for example. Just create a temporary account. Don’t give them your username and password because there’s nothing to stop them from using that to do something nefarious after their work with you is done.

Give them a temporary account with their own username and password, and then when they’re done with the work, delete it. And then you want to be careful, obviously, who you give access to your website’s admin section, because somebody that you don’t trust could hack your site. And if they don’t know what they’re doing, they could really mess everything up easily, if you give them full admin access to your website. So, be careful. Make sure that it’s someone that you can tell is competent and trustworthy. They have good reviews. I’ll get into that part in a second.

Advertising

Okay, I’ve got a couple different sections for you left. The next one is advertising. For five bucks, on Fiverr.com, they will actually deliver flyers for you. Someone will be a human billboard. They will spray paint things on their chest or on their back, or they will paint their faces, or they will stand up and hold a sign saying whatever you want it to say, and send you pictures and video of it that you can use in your marketing and advertising. Five bucks. They will create banner ads for you if you want to advertise your website on someone else’s website. Five bucks.

Now, best practices. If you’re going to do any advertising with people online, make sure that the stuff they do is going to reach your target audience. So, if someone’s going to deliver flyers, make sure that they’re going to deliver them in your local area. You know, you might not be able to find someone who lives in your city that would be willing to do that on Fiverr, but don’t pay someone to do it unless they live in your city. And anything that you do, make sure it’s going to appeal to your target audience, because otherwise advertising is just a waste of money.

Business

The next one is Business. Now, in the business category on Fiverr, someone, for five bucks, will write a business plan for you. I’m guessing it’s going to be simple and not a 30-page super-duper document, but hey, it’s cool. Legal advice is available on Fiverr. They have lawyers on there for five bucks that will answer your legal questions. They have financial advisors on Fiverr that will, for five bucks, give you money advice. There are people on Fiverr, for five bucks, who will do market research for you. They will give you branding advice. And there are even virtual assistants that you can hire on a task-by-task basis on Fiverr that’ll work for you for 30 minutes or an hour for five bucks, doing anything that you ask them to do that an admin assistant would normally do. Very cool stuff.

Now, best practices. Obviously you want to make sure that you only take advice from someone who knows the laws in your area. So, if you live in – I don’t know – England, for example, you don’t want to be paying five bucks to get legal advice from someone in California, here in the United States. They’re not going to know anything about the laws where you live. So, make sure that it’s someone who’s good and reputable, and who knows the laws in your state, for example, or your area.

And then, again, the virtual assistant stuff is a perfect way to kind of dip your toes in the water and see how this works. So, I would recommend outsourcing a few basic tasks for five bucks just to see what happens. If you need to have some emails sent out to certain people or you need to get some envelopes addressed, for example, pay someone five bucks to do it on Fiverr. Send it to them and then stamp the envelopes and all that stuff, and then just let them write it out and mail it for you. Five bucks. You know, it saves you an hour or two worth of work, and you get to try this outsourcing deal on and see if it works for you.

Other Categories

So, there are a few other categories. Gifts is one. So, they’ve got people that will send unique gifts to anybody that you want to. So, for your students and things like that, it might be interesting. Under the lifestyle category, there are all kinds of personal stuff related to health and diet and exercise, and anything you can imagine. Romance and Dating. There’s even a section called Fun and Bizarre, where you can pull pranks on people. You can pay someone five bucks and they will pull a prank. They will put together a video or they will do a photo that looks crazy, or something weird that you can pull a prank on someone. So, I don’t know if that’s ever going to be useful, but hey, it’s in there for five bucks, and a lot of other stuff that I didn’t talk about.

How To Use Fiverr.com More Effectively

Okay, so those are examples of what you can do in Fiverr.com. Now, let me give you some good tips on how to use it more effectively.

So, I mentioned before that you can do music lessons on Fiverr. So, why not use Fiverr as a prospecting tool. You could offer your services on Fiverr.com. If you want to teach online lessons, you could offer a 15-minute or a 30-minute introductory Skype guitar lesson for five dollars. And then, at the end of the lesson, make them a special deal for ongoing lessons. Okay, teach them for 30 minutes, or whatever, for five bucks. You know, it’s just like offering a free intro lesson, except you’re doing it online and reaching out to a whole new marketplace you probably never had access to before. And there are a lot of people on there offering guitar lessons on Skype for five bucks. You would be one of several, but if you get a really good rating and if you offer something cool, there’s a good chance a lot of people will take you up on it. And then, at the end, just make them a deal for some ongoing lessons and see how it goes. You want to use the Music and Audio category to post your Skype lessons, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you.

How about this? I mentioned it several times. Use Fiverr to outsource things. Things you don’t know how to do. Things you don’t have time to do. Get into the habit of paying other people to help you. It improves your management skills, so that’s going to help you grow along with your business so that when you, later on, have employees, you can manage them better, and it’s really the only way to grow your teaching studio beyond a certain level. There’s only so much that you can do by yourself. If you get so busy teaching that you don’t have time to actually work on your business, you’re working in it all the time, then it’s not going to grow. It’s going to suffer. You’re going to have problems. So, you need to get into the habit of paying other people to help you do stuff that frees you up to work on your business.

And it’s also a great way to audition potential outsources and find the very best ones to work with. So, these people – they can become a part of your business team. Like I know the person that does my transcriptions for me, I keep using her again and again, and any time I need something transcribed, she’s the person I go to. And it doesn’t cost me a lot and she’s kind of a part of my virtual team now, and I just use her whenever I need her. You can use these same people again and again to do the same gigs for you if you need them to. And if you find someone you really like, you can try to move off of the Fiverr site if you want to and engage them privately as well. You know, it’s just a really cool way to find people to help you that’s affordable.

Now Not To Get Burned

So, let me wrap this discussion up with kind of disclaimer here. You’ve got to be careful any time you’re hiring a stranger to do something for you. Anybody and their mom can post gigs to Fiverr. They may or may not know what they’re doing. You may or may not get ripped off, but you know, realize it’s only five dollars that you’re risking here. So it’s a very low-risk thing, but the possibility is there for you to get burned. So, what you do to protect yourself is you check out the seller before you buy. So, this is what you do. You click their profile link and look through all of their previous gigs. Somebody with a track record and a good reputation on Fiverr is going to be more likely to do good work. Okay, so make sure that they have a good reputation.

And pay attention to their Fiverr level. Okay, there are three levels of sellers in Fiverr. Level one sellers – they’re going to have this graphic on their profile that’ll tell you what level they’re at. Level one means that they’ve been active on the site for at least 30 days, so they’re not brand new. It means they’ve completed at least ten orders and that they have excellent ratings and a really good track record, if they’re level one. Not too shabby.

Level two means that they’ve completed at least 50 orders in the last two months. So, they’ve been really busy on the site, and they also have excellent ratings and an excellent track record. They automatically get branded with level two. And then there’s a top level. Now, this one’s special. You can’t earn top-level status. You have to be handpicked by the Fiverr staff. And these sellers that have top-level status are doing everything right and they are the best sellers out there on Fiverr. So, if someone’s top-level, then you know that they’re trustworthy and they’ll probably do a good job for you.

Okay, and then you also want to pay attention to their rating. There’s a five-star rating system on Fiverr for the seller themselves and for each particular task. So, this represents customer satisfaction. This represents whether or not someone did a good job for someone else. So, if they have a high rating, four stars or above, then chances are they’re going to do a really good job for you. And then you also, depending on what you’re asking for, should view samples of their work. So, if you’re looking for someone to do design work, for example, they’re going to have samples up there and you can email them and ask them for others, but you want to make sure that the work that they’ve done looks similar to what you want to have them create. So, very important to get samples.

You want to make sure they have the skills that you’re really looking for before you hire them. And you want to ask them questions first. There’s a contact link that you can shoot questions to them about anything related to the job. A good seller is going to answer your questions in a timely manner. You know, it’s amazing that someone would do that for just five bucks, but it’s really cool.

And then, once they do work for you, then you want to leave them an honest rating and an honest review. You can leave reviews of the different gigs after you pay someone to do something for you and they complete it. And the thread of a bad user rating or a bad review really helps to improve the quality of the work you get on sites like Fiverr. So, you could read through the reviews and make sure that the person has mostly good reviews. You know, nobody is perfect. They might have one or two times in there that they dropped the ball, but it’s there for you to read. So, check them out before you buy.

And then, to wrap it up, like I mentioned, sometimes the five-dollar price is misleading. Many of the more talented people on Fiverr are using it as a prospecting tool too, just like I recommended to you. They just offer a five-dollar introductory service, and then they try to get you to buy their higher-priced offerings after that, or you have to buy multiple gigs at once to get the thing that you need done, and that’s totally okay. Just read the description carefully to make sure that you understand exactly what you’re getting for the money.

Conclusion

Okay, to summarize this up, if you are a busy guitar teacher, Fiverr.com can help you get the things you need doing done. If your budget is tight, it’s a great place to get the things you need done without breaking the bank. If your studio is growing and you need to start looking at ways to expand your capacity, Fiverr is a great place to start learning about outsourcing in an easy and low-risk way. By following the best practices and tips I’ve mentioned in this episode, you can start being more productive and successful in your teaching studio and start growing things to a much successful level.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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 that one before myself too. This one comes from John Miller on Facebook. John said, “I had a teacher answer a call on his cellphone while he was taking a lesson. I didn’t like that the conversation was about making plans to do something that night with he and his buddies. He also didn’t extend the lesson a few minutes to make up for the lost time. It was the first and last lesson I took from him.” Well, kudos to you, John, because yeah, that’s very unprofessional behavior. I mean you’re going to see a lot of these examples I’m going to give are just flat unprofessional.

You know, if you’re in a lesson with someone who is paying you to teach them how to play guitar, and you answer the phone and start talking to one of your friends, you’re basically stealing money from that student. You know? I mean at least, like John said, go a little bit over and make it up to them, or give them some of their money or something back, man. Honestly, just turn off your stupid cellphone whenever you’re teaching guitar lessons, right? It’s totally unprofessional for you to be distracted and be messing with personal stuff when someone is paying you for your undivided attention.

So, I also did some searching and I found some other examples in some of the forums online about horror stories with guitar teachers. Here’s one. I’m not going to name the people because I don’t really know them. I’m just going to kind of quote what they said online. But one guy said, “What is it about music teachers? What is about guitar teachers? All mine needs is a monocle, a baton, and a pair of jackboots. He seems to live in the 19th century where a maestro can browbeat his students. Just play the notes! Read the notes! You’re busy? I don’t care! You’re going to learn these three pieces by next week! He teaches at several colleges in the area. I normally like him for his dedication to music and his strictness about proper technique, but sometimes he just goes too far. I’m just a guy learning how to play the guitar. I have a full-time job and I’m not a music major. Just need to vent a little.”

So, I loved the way he describes this guy, and there are a lot of music teachers out there and these are people that take themselves a little bit too seriously, I think. But you could just picture him, you know, dressed up as a Nazi, you know, with the monocle and the baton and the jackboots. And you know, I can just hear him. “Just play the notes! Read the notes! You’re busy? I don’t care. Too busy to practice? That’s not my problem. You’re going to learn these three pieces by next week.” So, I had some teachers like that. Not guitar teachers, but I was a music major for a while and teachers like that were the reason that I ended up dropping out of music school when I was 17 years old, because they didn’t care about me. They were just kind of trying to ramrod me through their program, and I had a lot of fears and a lot of insecurity. And when I was in music school, honestly the pressure was so strong on me that I think I almost ended up having a nervous breakdown at one point, because there were all of these proficient musicians that I looked up to and I was trying to impress them, and I was so far behind everybody else. I just didn’t feel like I could live up to their expectations.

So, whenever they would fuss at me like that and kind of browbeat me, to use the words that this guy used, I mean, in their minds, they were probably trying to motivate me the best way that they knew how, but instead it was damaging to me and it was hurting my level of confidence and stuff like that. So, it eventually got to be so painful for me that I dropped out and I didn’t go back to music school. I did something else. So, this is just a note to you teachers out there that, you know, carry an iron stick and stuff. Just be careful how you relate to your students, because a lot of people do not respond well to that kind of stuff. So, put yourselves in their shoes. That’s my advice to you because a lot of times people are not looking to become the next virtuoso guitarist, you know, that plays classical guitar or whatever. They just want to learn how to play. They just want to do something that they enjoy.

Another person online goes like this. He said, “I have a neighbor friend who did some sign work for a local music teacher in exchange for free guitar lessons.” So, he did a barter situation there. He said, “The guy was so impatient and rude. He never bothered going back after the second lesson, even though he had more lessons coming. Now, I’ve been informally giving him lessons.” This is the guy writing this. “More like just showing him songs and riffs, and explaining a little theory too. I’m not a qualified teacher and would not try to pass myself off as one, but he claims to learn more from me in ten minutes than in whole lessons with that other “teacher.”

Wow. Yeah. How many of you guys have known guitar teachers that were impatient with their students or rude to them? Yeah, if you want people to keep giving you money, let me give you a tip. Don’t be rude to them! Treat them like you actually want their business. Treat them like you want them to come back. Gosh, man, I get kind of fired up when I hear stuff like this sometimes. But yeah, there’s the stereotypical impatient and rude guitar teacher that you should do everything you can to not be like.

So, here’s another one from this online forum. “When I first picked up the guitar, around eight years old I think, I went for a time to this horrid, little house with this horrid, fat lady as a teacher. I’d now kill for her guitar. It was archtop Gibson from the 1950s with one or two P90s in it. Little aside. She had me sight-reading and picking one-note songs from a book. My Dog Has Fleas, La Cucaracha, and songs like that. Might have been the May Bel Method, I don’t recall, but progress was painfully slow and, oh, so boring. I wanted to learn chords. She insisted that was coming later. I wanted to play popular, current music. She insisted, once I learned, I could play whatever I like. While her method would probably have gotten me there, if I didn’t die from boredom, it was far, far too slow and not forthcoming with what I wanted out of it. I gave up in a matter of months.”

Man, that is an all too common tale. I talk about this all the time, but there are students all over the world that end up hooking up with a teacher that has a mindset like this. It’s like: “Yeah, let’s just go through the Mel Bay Method book. Page one. This is what you’re going to learn today. This is a half note. This is quarter note. These are the lines and spaces on the staff.” And you know, here’s this kid, sitting there with a guitar in his hands and he’s like: “When do I get to play? How about what I want to learn?” I mean I’m not saying that reading music is not important. It is. It’s a very important skill, but not first. People aren’t paying you to come and take lessons with you on how to read music. They’re coming to learn how to play the guitar. So, if you’re a smart teacher, you’re going to get them playing the guitar as quickly as you can. And once they’re hooked on it, they love the guitar. They’re passionate about it. Then you can start working in sight-reading. Then you can start working in music theory. If you try to do that stuff first, you’re just going to drive people right out of your studio. Death by guitar method book, right? Like the blog post. I wrote about that a long time ago.

So, there are a lot of teachers that do that, man. It’s sad and it’s aggravating, and it’s tragic for the students because a lot of people, once they quit like that, they never pick it back up again. They just think it’s too hard and life gets busy, and they never find someone that can actually help them. Okay, so don’t make that mistake.

Simon Cowell’s Bad Guitar Lesson Experience

And then, another interesting story that I found online was Simon Cowell from American Idol fame. Simon Cowell said, “I was bought an electric guitar when I was 12, but my guitar teacher beat me up. I didn’t like guitar lessons and I got quite bored. My teacher was obviously bored giving me lessons and one day, I offered him a licorice toffee, but he didn’t answer me. So, I threw it at him and it hit him in the face, and he sort of beat me up. And that was the last guitar lesson I had. That was the turning point when I decided I need to be behind the scenes and not a musician.”

I can just picture that. Man, to be a fly on the wall in that situation right there. 12-year-old Simon Cowell hitting his music teacher in the face with a piece of licorice. I bet that was crazy. But you know, he was bored and he said the teacher was bored too. So, you know, he was just trying to lighten things up, but the teacher didn’t answer him. You know, turned into an ugly situation. But you know, if you’re bored with teaching your students, then you might be in the wrong line of work. I’m just saying. It’s better to try to find ways to keep teaching free and to communicate things that you’re passionate about so that you can actually be a good teacher and a good communicator. If you are bored, then your students are going to be twice as bored, right? So, I thought that was an interesting story.

Stupid Things Guitar Teachers Do To Waste Your Time

And then I found this article. I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes for this episode so you can check it out and read more about it, but it’s called Stupid Things Guitar Teachers Do to Waste Your Time. The author mentioned four different things that guitar teachers should not be doing, and I agree with every single one of them.

So, the first one is: “They spend inordinate amounts of time showing off, playing guitar for you and putting on a show while you watch, wondering when the lesson will start. My very first teacher was guilty of this offense,” the author says. “The really frightening thing is he wore spandex, and played along to Dio records while doing so.” Ronnie James Dio record while wearing spandex when he was supposed to be teaching. “I have to admit, at the time I thought he was pretty cool. Only now, looking back, do I wish I could revise my memory and run from the room with dignity intact. It’s a fact; some teachers are downright embarrassing. It’s a wonder to me that I’m still playing guitar after the 1980s.”

So, that’s another kind of teacher. I mean I could almost do caricatures of each of these kinds of guitar teachers. This one is the guy that just wants attention and kudos and props, and respect and stuff from a student, so he just sits there and just noodles around on the guitar and shows off his chops the whole time, when he’s supposed to be teaching the student how to play. Instead, he’s showing how well he can play. Okay, that’s stupid. Don’t do that. That is so ridiculous. I mean you might impress some kid with how good of a guitar player you are and stuff, but if you want to have a thriving and successful teaching studio, you’ve got to take your ego and you’ve got to leave it outside, man. You can get paid and be successful as a guitar teacher, or you can get your ego stroked, but you can’t have both at the same time. You can’t have both at all.

If you’re ego-driven, you’re going to have terrible student retention, because people can see through bull crap and they could smell it a mile away. And if all you care about is getting your ego stroked, you might find a few students that’ll do that for you, but anybody with any common sense is going to stay far away from you and your teaching studio. I’m just saying. This is kind of tough love today, but hey, that’s just the way it is. It’s true.

The next example this author gives is: “They’ll say, “Okay, well, here’s a scale. Go ahead and practice this for a few minutes and I’ll be right back.” And then they disappear for 15 or 20 minutes while you sit there, practicing your scale, wondering when they’ll come back. Practicing is something you need to be doing at home. An instructor should never leave the room unless they have a good reason.”

So, okay, I’m going to put myself in this student’s shoes. If it was me and the instructor told me: “Hey man, I’ve really got to go to the bathroom. Can I show you this particular exercise and then you practice it for five minutes, and then I’ll come right back,” I wouldn’t have a problem with that. And I’ve even heard some people that give advice to guitar teachers say that it’s okay to do this and, you know, in a 30-minute lesson, for example, you get one student started on something and then leave the room, and then go teach somebody else and get them started on something. And then leave the room and go teach somebody else and get them started on something, and you’ve got four or five individual lessons going on at one time and you’re just going back and forth between them all.

You know what. That might work for some people, but to me that’s not really a good thing to do in my opinion. It doesn’t communicate value to your students, for one thing, because what they’re paying you for, in a private lesson setting, is they’re paying you for your undivided attention. They’re paying to be interested in what they’re doing and to watch them and to give them feedback, and have a conversation with them, and teach them what it means to be a guitar player. If all they need to do is just learn a few licks or whatever, then they can just do that by watching YouTube. That’s not what a genuine guitar lesson experience should be all about, in my opinion.

So, if you want your students to keep coming back and you want them to value your time and your services, then pull stuff like that. Don’t disappear for half the lesson and go do something else, and then come back. It should just be common sense for a lot of people, but you’d be surprised how often it happens.

And then the next example this person gives is: “Too often guitar teachers simply don’t have a lesson plan. You are paying 15, 20 or 25 dollars an hour, or more.” That’s actually very low. This article might be old. “And you sit down with them and they may not even have an efficient methodology that they can walk you through, or anything they’ve developed that’s effective for teaching you while not wasting your time and money. They are often times teaching whatever comes off the tops of their heads.” And we call this winging it in your guitar lessons. This is what lazy guitar teachers do. They either just pull out a book and teach it from beginning to end because they don’t have to prepare anything, or they don’t prepare anything at all and they just teach whatever comes to the top of their head anytime they sit down with somebody.

Both of those methods honestly just suck. Don’t do that. Prepare ahead of time. Spend at least a little bit of time keeping track of what the person worked on with you the previous week. Keep some lesson notes, and then make sure that you’re always a few weeks ahead and that you know what you’re going to do next so that it seems like you actually – I don’t know – know what you’re doing. I’m just saying, man. I don’t know what some guitar teachers think. They just think that they’re God’s incarnate and they just sit down and people come in and just want to sit at their feet and just listen to whatever words of wisdom drift from their mouths like pearls or something like that. That’s not how it is, man. If you think that, I feel sorry for you. You’re not going to be a successful guitar teacher if you have this kind of attitude. Prepare for your lessons, people. It’s all I’m saying. Okay, I’m ranting a little bit. Sorry.

And then the fourth thing that the author mentions, and kind of last one I’m going to mention today is: “Maybe they chose to teach you from a book.” Here we go again. Death by method book. “Don’t be surprised if you’re a beginning guitarist and you find yourself starting off playing When the Saints Go Marching In from an ancient Mel Bay book.” Everybody is picking on Mel Bay today. “A fine song to be sure, but it can be frustrating if you’re not interested in learning to read standard music notation or you really just want to play the chords and songs that you’re interested in. Quite frankly, I believe you can waste a lot of time with a book like this,” and I agree one hundred percent.

Now, I don’t have any problems at all with the Mel Bay Guitar Method. Actually I think it’s a wise investment if you want to buy that series of books, or the one from Hal Leonard or the one from Alfred Publishing, or one of those formal guitar methods. Not so that you can use it as a step-by-step lesson plan for your students, but so that you have resources that you can draw from anytime you need to teach a particular concept or topic to one of your students. You can grab the book whenever it’s called for, find what you need, and use it in your lessons. But you don’t use it as your lesson plan, because there’s a lot of junk in there that most guitar students don’t want to learn and, honestly, don’t need to learn. It’s way better if you customize your lesson plan to the needs of your students, and then just use method books to supplement that wherever appropriate.

In Conclusion

Okay. So, to wrap up this episode, to sum it all up, you should try to avoid the following negative behaviors if you want to be a successful guitar teacher. And I’m just going to summarize each of these really quick.

Smoking during your guitar lessons – bad. Talking trash about other teachers and other guitar players, especially when they’re better than you – bad. Taking personal calls during your lessons – bad. Disrespectful – bad. Being too much of a dictator with your guitar students – bad. Really bad. Being impatient and rude with your students – obviously bad. Boring your students to death with method books and old, irrelevant music and songs that they could care less about learning – very bad and very dumb if you want to make a lot of money as a guitar teacher. Being bored in the lessons yourself – bad. If you’re bored, go find something else to do, or find a way to make it not boring.

Showing off in your guitar lesson or, even worse, just BS-ing the whole time, talking about stuff that’s not related to learning the guitar – bad. Wasting people’s money – bad. Dumping an assignment on your students and then leaving them alone in the lesson room to work it out on their own – bad. And then not having any kind of organized lesson plan and just winging it – really bad. Unprofessional.

Avoid all of those things and then you’ll be miles ahead of the average guitar teacher that’s working at a music store, in the United States anyway. But like Richard said at the beginning of this episode, if you’re going to tap dance in a minefield, it helps to know where the mines are. So, I’ve just given you several mines that you can watch out for as you tap dance through this minefield of teaching guitar lessons. And hopefully, now you have a good idea of some of the things not to do if you want your teaching studio to be successful.

Thank You For Listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.

To leave a quick review, open up iTunes, search for Start Teaching Guitar and then leave a rating and review as shown below. You can do this from your mobile device as well, even if you’re not subscribed, and even if you listen on another platform – this is where I’d appreciate you leaving your review.

Feel free to use the comments section below to let me know what you think about this episode, to suggest a topic for a future episode or just to join in on the conversation with other guitar teachers.

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 require a lot of thought, when you’re exercising at the gym. You can’t buy more time, but you can make some. So, I want to encourage you to re-prioritize the discretionary time that you have available to you and set aside a couple of hours a day to teach guitar lessons and to work on you teaching studio.

If you really want it bad enough, you will make the time to do it. So, start with looking at your downtime hours; stuff that you could consider to be discretionary. Find out what you can eliminate to make time for teaching, and then start doing it. Don’t let the excuse of busyness keep you from stepping out into your dream of being a guitar teacher.

Excuse #3 – I’m Waiting For The Economy To Get Better

Lame excuse number three: “I’m waiting for the economy to get better before I start teaching.” Man, I wish I had five bucks for every time I heard that as an excuse for why people don’t want to teach guitar. You know what. Really? You’re waiting for the economy to get better before you start teaching. Why? You know, there’s never a bad time to start a great business. And I’m assuming that you want to start a great business, right? That you’re not going to start an average, mediocre, or a poor business that is not going to take good care of people and not going to provide a good service. The focus of Start Teaching Guitar is to help you have a great business, and there’s never a bad time, economically, to start a great business.

So, an average business that depends on outside factors is not really what you want to build anyway. Nobody knows, honestly, what the economy is going to do or how long it’ll take for the economy to completely turn around. And you know what. It always goes in cycles. So, if it’s going really good now, chances are, in a few years, it’s going to go down again, and vice versa. If it’s not good now, it’s going to start getting better again probably pretty soon. So, if you’re waiting for the next economic cycle, you might be waiting a long time. And you don’t have to because there are people in every economy that are going to take guitar lessons if all of the factors in your local area are right.

Now, if you live in a town of, you know, a thousand people and you have a hundred guitar teachers in there, there’s a ratio of ten people for every one guitar teacher. Then you’re probably going to have a hard time. Okay, even in a bad economy. But you know, people in Detroit, Michigan. You know, that’s one of the worst economic places in America right now. And I apologize to you if you’re listening in Detroit right now. I realize that not every area of Detroit is bad, but a large portion of it is pretty bad off economically, and they have guitar teachers and music schools in Detroit that are staying in business and making a living. So, if you could teach guitar lessons successfully in Detroit, then you could teach them pretty much anywhere else.

And you know what. In a bad economy, tons of great businesses were started during an economic recession. Let me name a few. You probably have heard of these. Have you ever heard of a little company called Microsoft? Yeah? Microsoft got started during an economic recession. FedEx, the shipping company, got started during a recession. General Electric got started during a recession. Revlon, the makeup and hair company, start during a recession. Hyatt Regency Hotels got started during an economic recession. It is totally possible to start a successful, thriving, amazing business when the economy is bad.

And this is another thing to think about. If the economy is bad, then that means you have fewer competitors. Did you ever think about that? If people are going out of business because the economy is bad, that means you have fewer people to compete with. It also means that the people that you do compete with, the other guitar teachers are going to be weak. They are not going to be at the top of their game in a down economy, which gives you an advantage. It means you can sweep in and you can fill in gaps in the marketplace and build a business that no one else ever saw coming. If the economy is bad, it also means that more things are going to be cheaper for you, like if you do decide to lease teaching space. You can negotiate better terms on studio space in a down economy because there’s going to be a lot of empty commercial buildings.

Okay, there are a lot of advantages to getting started when the economy is not doing very good. And if you get started when it’s down, and you grow your business right along with it as the economy goes up, you can ride that wave and you can be more financially successful, and it’ll be a better situation for you. So, man, I’m so tired of hearing this one. “I’m waiting for the economy to get better. I’m waiting for the economy to get better.” Stop waiting for the economy to get better and start teaching some guitar lessons. There’s never a bad time to start a great business, so don’t let that be an excuse either, because there’s always going to be something going on in the economy that could be used as an excuse. Don’t let it stop you. Just get started.

Excuse #4 – It’s Too Risky

The next excuse is: “It’s too risky giving up my job. What if I fail?” I hear that one a lot. It’s too risky. You know what. It is risky. You know what. Yes, you could fail. There are no guarantees that you won’t fail. The question is what are you going to do about it. Are you going to pursue your dream of being a guitar teacher or are you going to just sit there and spend your life wondering about what could have happened if you would’ve taken the plunge? There’s this famous quote by a hockey player, Wayne Gretzky. He said, “You’ll miss one hundred percent of the shots that you never take.” If you never assume a little bit of risk and take a step and jump out there, you’re going to miss one hundred percent of the time. You’re never going to experience the things that you want to see because you’re never going to try.

So, what do you do? Well, you learn how to accept reasonable amounts of risk. I’m not saying that you do something crazy. I’m not telling you to do something foolhardy and quit your job today, when you only have one guitar student. The smart thing to do is to limit your risk by planning well and by starting small. Don’t spend a lot of money upfront. Work up a good plan on how you’re going to attract new students, and then start attracting them, and then work your teaching business part-time while you still work your day job until you get to the point where you are making enough money teaching guitar lessons that you feel like you can take the plunge.

Yes, it’s going to be a little bit risky. Anything worth doing is going to be a little bit risky. And if you fail, so what? Learn from your mistakes, get up, and try again. It’s okay to try to teach full-time for a while, you know, once you get to a certain point. And then, if things don’t work out, you can go get another job and you can still keep teaching part-time on the side while you correct the mistakes that you made before, and then you can eventually teach full-time again. It’s totally cool. These things can operate side-by-side. So, don’t let the excuse of risk stop you from taking the plunge as a guitar teacher. Plan well, start small, and then you’ll be amazed at what can happen if you’re willing to just step out and do something.

Excuse #5 – I Don’t Have The Skills Or Experience

Okay, the next excuse I hope I never hear again. “I don’t have the skills or experience to be a good guitar teaching.” Man, I probably hear this more than anything else. You know, I get emails from people that are thinking about getting started as a guitar teacher, and that’s one of the most common things I hear; is: “Oh man, I don’t know if I have what it takes. I’ve only been playing for a year or five years, or you know, I’ve never taught anybody before. I don’t have a music degree.” I hear all of these different things, where people just feel inadequate about their abilities to be a guitar teacher. You know what. Just stop it. Stop that, man. Stop doubting yourself. Stop thinking that you’re less than you really are. You may not have all the skills right now, or you may be using this excuse: “I don’t have the skills or experience I need to be a good teacher.” You know what. You’re probably right about that.

You know what. Nobody knows everything they need to know when they first get started. You don’t even know what you don’t know until you jump in and actually start teaching guitar lessons. You’re probably right. You don’t have the skills or experience to be a good guitar teacher, but you need to add one word at the end of that sentence, and that words is yet. You don’t have the skills or experience yet, but if you step in and you keep learning and growing and getting experience, before too long, you will. So, accept the fact that you’re going to learn along the way. You’re probably going to learn from some mistakes. And you know what. That’s totally okay. Mistakes are not fatal. Mistakes are not final. They are lessons that help you and teach you, and make you a better guitar teacher, a better business owner. You’ll learn as you go. It’s okay.

So, what I want to encourage you to do is take some action and do something to increase your skills and experience. What do you do? Well, you get started. You actually start teaching a few people, but take a course, like Group Guitar Launch Formula, for example. Buy a book or hire a coach. Take some lessons from another guitar teacher, at least, and ask them to teach you about their business. Ask them questions about their business. You know, it’s totally okay to do that. Some of them may get a little nervous about that. They might not want to tell you too much because they might afraid that you’re going to compete with them, so maybe you go and study with someone in the next town or maybe you study with someone online via Skype. But you ask them: “What do you think makes a good guitar teacher? What are some secrets to your success of being a good guitar teacher?” And take notes and try to apply them to your own life and your own business.

Another thing you can do is you can pay other people to do the things that you have a lack of skill or experience with. So, if you want to, if you have some extra cash, you can hire a bookkeeper or someone to do your accounting and your money for you. You can hire someone to build your website for you. There are a lot of things that you don’t have to do yourself. You can get someone else to do it if you have a little bit of extra cash. So, don’t let that excuse stop you from getting started. If you don’t feel like you have the skills, you don’t feel like you have the experience, well, then start learning the skills and start gaining experience. And things that you can’t do yourself: get somebody else to do it. Don’t let that hold you back from getting started as a guitar teacher, because the sooner you jump in, the sooner your skills and experience are going to grow and catch up with you.

All right. Kind of feels like I’m ranting a little bit in this episode. Man, I hope it doesn’t come off, sounding like I’m irritated or something like that. I’m really not. I’m excited about this and I really want to encourage and motivate you guys.

Excuse #6 – People Tell Me _____

All right, number six. The excuse number six that I never want to hear again is: “People tell me [blank].” So, fill in the blank. People tell me it’s too hard to be a guitar teacher. People tell me it won’t work if I start my own business. People tell me I’m too young to have my own business teaching guitar lessons. People tell me I’m too old to have my own business teaching guitar lessons. You know what. Whose business is it? Is it your business or is it their business? If it’s your business, I’m going to tell you it’s none of their business. People that tell you crap like that, a lot of times, are just insecure. They are afraid. They feel threatened by somebody else’s success. They’re the ones that are negative. They are the ones that are defeated, and they’re so afraid that they don’t want to see anybody else take a risk and take a chance on something that can make them happy and successful.

So, whose business is it? That’s my question. If it’s your business, then it’s none of their business. For every single teaching business that succeeds, honestly there are probably ten people who said it would fail. Seriously. And that’s not just with guitar teachers. That’s every business. Every business that succeeds, there are probably ten people who said that it would fail and they were just waiting on the sidelines to say I told you so when it actually did. But you know what. Even the smartest business people in the world don’t know for sure if their business is going to be one hundred percent successful or not. Even the Donald Trumps and people like that of the world that start things on a much bigger level, they don’t know for sure if it’s going to succeed. There’s always a chance that it won’t. There’s always an element of risk.

You know what. If the smartest business people in the world don’t know for sure if they’re going to succeed, don’t waste your time listening to, you know, your aunt who lives in another state that is always giving you a hard time about stuff, or your friends that you work with current that say, “Oh, no, if you do that, you’re going to lose your house, man. You know, it’s not going to work. It’s too hard. You’re too young. You’re too old.” Don’t waste your time listening to them. If even the smartest people about business don’t know for sure, they are certainly not going to know, so don’t listen to them. Listen to your gut. Believe in yourself. Work hard. Start your business and then prove them all wrong. Don’t let other people’s negativity keep you from doing the things that you believe in and that you are passionate about in your life. Seriously.

Excuse #7 – I Don’t Know What To Do

Okay, and the last excuse that I never want to hear again is: “I don’t know what to do.” I don’t know what to do first. I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know what I’m going to do a year from now. I don’t know what to do. Okay, this might be true. Guys, girls, Start Teaching Guitar audience, it might be true. Right now, as you’re listening to this, it might be true that you don’t know exactly what to do, but don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Honestly, you’ve never had so much useful information about how to teach guitar lessons available to you today. You know, you have more available now – information – than there has ever been available in the history of mankind.

My website. My podcast has more information about teaching guitar lessons that you could probably ever consume. There is training available to you at low cast that can teach you what to do. There are also tons of small business experts available to teach you what you need to know. There are people available in your local community. There are people available online. People like me that can serve as a consultant and a business coach that can help you be successful. Help you get started right. Help you know what to do next. So, what you’ve got to do is you have to focus on learning as much as you can about the business side of teaching guitar.

Your passion for what you do is going to make a wave for you, and the knowledge that you need is going to catch up with you after a while. Learn what you can about business, but get started. Man, get your feet in the water. Get your toes in the water. Get your foot in the door. Take a step towards building your teaching business, but towards getting started with teaching guitar lessons, because honestly, once you get started, everything starts to kind of unfold before you as you start moving forward. You want to build momentum. You want to get your business rolling to the point where it’s successful, but it’s never going to happen if you never get started. So, don’t let not know what to do next keep you from getting in the game.

In Conclusion

Okay. So, my challenge for you today is I want you, if this is you. If you’ve already been teaching and you’ve already taken some steps toward building your business and you’re getting started, cool. But if you’re one of those people that are sitting on the sidelines, I want you to stop complaining. I want you to stop procrastinating. I want you to stop making excuses, whether it’s one of these seven or another excuse that I haven’t even mentioned today. I want you to stop making excuses and I want you to start taking action. You don’t have to jump out of the plane and quit your job and dive into this full-time tomorrow, but what I want you to do is I want you to make a plan and I want you to do something. It’s never going to be perfect. It’s never going to be exactly like you think it should be before it’s time to start. You’re never going to have as much money as you think you need to have to get started. You’re never going to have as much time. You’re never going to have as much confidence. Those nervous jitters and the feelings of fear are never going to completely go away and so that you would know that it’s time to start.

It’s never going to be perfect. But if you don’t get started, then you’re guaranteed to fail. So, realize it. It’s never going to be perfect. Just make a plan to start teaching guitar lessons and do it.

Thank You For Listening!

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