Question: I am a self taught guitar player, although I had 7 years of formal music training on the trumpet. I have played guitar over 25 years so I have a somewhat experienced background. My question is I would like to begin teaching guitar out of my home. I am not sure how to go about a method of teaching. I was thinking of placing an ad for beginning rock guitar lessons. Should I use the roundabout way I learned from various books over time or is there a better way to come up with a curriculum for teaching. I would appreciate any idea's you might have on this subject. Thank you.

Tom Hess's Answer: Thanks for your question. I have 2 main pieces of advice for you. First, I strongly recommend that you get some real training on how to teach beginners to play guitar. As a guitar teacher you have the potential to really help people or really hurt them depending on how you approach guitar teaching to beginners. If you follow the teaching method of most beginning guitar books then you will probably get mediocre results since the average guitar book for beginners typically bring mediocre results. I'm sure this is not what you want.. and your students won't want lower quality instruction either.

To solve this problem you need guitar teacher training. Begin by checking out my beginner guitar book method which uses my Geometric Guitar Teaching Method™. (Beginner guitar books by other authors all use the old ‘linear guitar teaching method’.) MY method will not only make your students learn faster, better and more easily, but your job teaching them will be much more rewarding for you.

The second piece of advice is not to limit yourself to only teaching beginning guitar students. You need to teach intermediate level players for many reasons. One of those reasons is the fact that as you teach intermediate level players you will learn more about what challenges and problems they have at that level, this will help you to understand what things you need to with your 'beginning' students so that you can avoid many of the common problems they may face as they become intermediate level guitar players. Fortunately my beginning guitar book method solves these problems for you, but you should still get some direct experience teaching intermediate players as well.

Make tons of money teaching guitar by getting trained by a guitar teacher success trainer.