Trying to make a living as a guitarist is hard. There’s a lot of us out there, and an ever-dwindling amount of money in the music industry. Fortunately, you can make money teaching guitar lessons to supplement whatever you make as a performer. Teaching guitar is a good option because you can charge very nice hourly rates, and if you build up a big enough roster of students it can be very steady money. Teaching is also fun!
The hardest part of starting to teach guitar is finding people to teach. You can try to sign up for an established guitar school, but it’s often hard to get those jobs without prior teaching experience. The best bet is to start on your own.
One of the most requiered styles to teach is Blues. So check out this cool:
Another guitar style you should know is Jazz. At least the basic chords, so check out this guitar lesson on:
Where will you find students? Look around you! You almost certainly have a friend (or a friend of a friend) who wants to learn how to play and would be willing to pay you a little bit to teach them. You can use them as a reference to find other people to teach, and slowly your number of students will increase. Craigslist is another good resource for finding students, but it is often less reliable than getting personal referrals. It’s hard to stand out from the pack of other guitarists trying to sell their services online. If you really want to go above and beyond, print out flyers and leave them in places like guitar stores.
As for the actual technique of how to teach guitar, it’s hard to give specific advice. The main thing to keep in mind is that you are providing a service for students, so you should do what they want. Ask them upfront what kind of guitar playing they want to learn, and if you can’t teach that style or think it’s dumb, don’t take them as students! You’re trying to make more guitar players, not discourage people from playing the instrument.
With these tips in mind, you should be prepared to start earning some extra cash from your guitar skills, just like you always wanted. You will ensure that today’s generation of kids will rock out just as much as you did when you were learning!
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