How to become a guitar teacher
To find out if you should consider becoming a guitar teacher you will need to provide honest answers to the following three questions.......
Q 1: Are you a good enough guitar player to teach it?
Q 2: Do you have the communication skills required?
Q 3: Do you have good teaching resources and a plan?
In order to become a guitar teacher you actually need three things. The first is an ability to play the guitar to an appropriate (for the kind of teaching you set out to do) level.
The second is that you need is to be able to communicate with your customers and the third thing that you need is a set of guitar teaching resources that will allow you to do the job with the minimum of stress and effort.
We can't help you too much with the first two attributes outlined above but as far as the resources go then you have come to the right place. We have resources that are suitable for teaching kids to play guitar as well as a whole lot of backing tracks designed to get your customers through the beginning and intermediate stages of guitar playing
You may be interested in becoming a guitar teacher but how much thought have you given to what kind of guitar teacher you want to be? There are a whole range of situations that a teacher may find him or herself in. In order to explore this in further detail you could take a look at our material on the Three Types of Guitar Teaching Jobs that are commonly available to teachers. The material looks at the pros and cons of teaching from home, in a school and in a music store
You may also be wondering just how good do you need to be in order to teach guitar and we have a whole load of material up here that deals with this important area
Guitar Playing Skills
It seems obvious but you need to be a "better" player than the people that you teach If we look a little deeper into that situation it becomes a little more complex and illuminating
There are many different types of guitar teacher
All guitar teachers are different and will operate differently depending on the variables that exist within their local area and the circumstances in which they set out to teach
Most educators are engaged in catering to the needs of beginner/intermediate guitar students but it is by no means rare to find teachers specialising in genres to which they are attracted and in which they exel such as rock, jazz, country, folk or blues
It hardly needs saying that if you advertise your services as a jazz guitar teacher then you'd better know your stuff inside out and back again The customers that roll up to your door will most likely not be beginners and will probably have a reasonable level of technical skill and most probably even a (sometimes shaky) grasp of music theory They are quite likely to be experienced pop rock or blues musicians setting out to "improve" their playing by studying a genre that is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be more involved and theoretical than most other styles
One of the most important elements of guitar teaching is to know the market within which you set out to operate
The reality is that if you are teaching beginners and children to play guitar there are more important skills and attributes required than being able to fly around the fretboard at warp factor ten, "whammy bar a wiggling" and having noises fall out of an amplifier that sound like somebody is torturing a horse
When teaching beginners and/or younger guitar players"soft skills" are every bit as important as technical ability and in some areas they may even be the most important factor in the success (or otherwise) of a teaching programme or business
"Soft Skills" for the guitar teacher
The ability to communicate easily with your students
It may be an over used word but the reality is that empathy is the key
Education of any kind is not something that should be "done to someone" by a teacher, rather it is a collaborative process that both the teacher and the student set out upon and when it goes really well both parties learn something worthwhile (that's how teachers get better with experience)
No matter what level of technical skill you have on the guitar you will be unable to function to any kind of effective level as an educator unless you have the social skills to put people at their ease so that you can both get on with the business of teaching and learning
The "soft skills" that you will need to be able to display as a guitar teacher are vital An ability to get along with a wide range of people irrespective of age, gender,social class, musical taste, political outlook and education levels is something the importance of which can not be overstated
This does not mean that you have to get along with everybody or that you need to agree with every (sometimes) foolish opinion or statement that someone comes out with just because they are paying you Its ok to occasionally feel that you do not really enjoy teaching a particular individual and to take steps to engineer them out of your life and into the practice of another guitar teacher who may be able to get along with them
One of the luxuries of working from home as a self employed guitar teacher was for me to (very) occasionally "sack" a student who was annoying me I did not do it very often but there were occasions when a couple of them proved themselves over time to be fairly unpleasant individuals whose company I did not enjoy and I took the option to ensure that they gave up on having me teach them I do not regret it and I felt better when they had stopped coming
This is a luxury you tend not to have if you are teaching guitar in a school or in a music store With those kind of jobs someone else drums up your customers and you will more than likely have to put up with the odd "annoying" one
Why I came up with the teachwombat guitar teaching resources
The backstory behind the handouts, backing tracks, chord charts and guitar lesson plans for guitar teachers
I started this website as a direct consequence of being a guitar teacher frustrated with the lack of "joined up" teaching resources available at the time
Sure there were a bunch of (often ancient!) established method books which while perfectly worthy were marooned in the times during which they were written and too heavily reliant upon standard notation and old (copyright free) folk tunes
The other thing I remember going on at the time were the release of a seemingly endless stream of video and later DVD packages of wildly variable quality These products featured a range of stern bearded jazz "cats" or poodle haired rock ninnies doing the "tricks" that made them famous and sometimes being hilariously "bad" at talking to a camera explaining what they thought it was that they were doing
To be fair to them some of the rock lads (and it was just about always lads at the time) seemed to be very upbeat and enthusiastic despite the fact that the amount of sniffing they were doing gave away the fact that they were obviously suffering from a heavy cold on the day of filming so fair play to them
So...... as far as I coild see it was outdated method books (to illegally photocopy pages from) or come up with my own resources
I needed chord charts, scale sheets, tablature and (later) backing tracks that would allow me to get on with my job of making people into better guitar players than they were when they walked through my door
I compiled my materials onto a disc and sold some on ebay to guitar teachers before taking the plunge and dipping my toe into the whacky world of websites Here I am almost twenty years later drinking tea and typing this in a (you'll have to take my wife's word for this) spectacularly lurid pair of (what the brochure called) "lounge trousers" (I'm color blind)
I love doing this and I get a real buzz out of updating both my website and my guitar teacher's resources
Which brings us to.......
What's in the guitar teacher's download?
You can download over 450 PDF's and more than 35 backing tracks to make your guitar teaching easier, more organised and stress free
Follow the link below to see a full list of whats in the download
HOW TO DOWNLOAD
Everything you see and hear on this website in a single "Deluxe Download"
Buy your teachwombat.com download in complete safety via any major credit card (through paypal) or directly through your paypal account if you have one. If you choose to use a credit card, rest assured that we never see your credit card details as paypal do all of that for us.
When Paypal receive your payment you will be immediately invited to click a
"RETURN TO MERCHANT"button.
You will be taken to a page from where you can download the products that you have paid for NOW!
In the (rare) event that something should go wrong with the order/download process just email me at robh@teachwombat.com
I will check the order and send you the links that will get you to your stuff.
Cheers! Rob!
The Deluxe Package:
Download every resource that you can see on this site for just
$25.00
