How To Choose a Guitar Teacher For Your Child
Having a guitar teacher will help your child progress on the guitar. Having a GREAT guitar teacher will do so much more than just helping them progress.
Let’s look at some of the key elements of a guitar teacher to ensure you pick the best guitar teacher for your child so that they maintain their love of guitar and grow their passion into something they keep for a lifetime.
What are you really looking for in guitar lessons for your child?
What are the most important things about guitar lessons for your child? Is it for them to enjoy playing the guitar? To progress quickly? To improve their confidence? To get them away from video games?
These are the common things we’ve heard from parents. It’s important that you find a guitar teacher who understands how great guitar lessons can be for a child, and teach them the relevant skills to go forward in an engaging fashion. Rather than “just” providing standard guitar lessons. We know they can be so much more than that.
How much are the lessons from this guitar teacher?
This is a question that does get asked. Like everything else, you do get what you pay for, and it’s the same in guitar lessons. Often guitar lessons that are cheaper do not provide the same amount of results as more expensive lessons. Where they have more experience teaching. More experience in helping students get to an advanced stage.
If one teacher takes 5 years to get your child to a level, and another takes 1 year, you would actually be saving money with a more expensive teacher who only takes 1 year. We know because we’ve seen students come to us having spent years learning with other teachers only to have the same result as students who have been with us for a short while.
Or even worse, you get a cheap guitar teacher who gets your child to end up hating their instrument. And yes, we’ve seen that too. So it’s vital that you get the right guitar teacher.
Where are the guitar lessons?
A few parents have different thoughts on this. I’ve had parents who do not want someone in their home teaching their child, and those that are really keen to get a teacher to go to their place.
For us, we know that we have the best facilities and studio that can provide everything needed to ensure a child has a great place to focus, and learn and also to have fun.
When guitar teachers go to the child’s home, the parents are wondering if the teacher wants a cup of tea. The child is distracted thinking about homework or the iPad or computer game in the other room.
Having the separation of your child from your home means they know this is the time to pay attention and learn guitar. Where they can focus and enjoy themselves as well.
We’ve found that students get much more value for money when they are in a separate location instead of their own homes.
Is the guitar teacher teaching them important principles?
Different guitar teachers have fundamentally different principles on teaching, on how to play guitar and about learning.
It’s important that you find a guitar teacher that has a great philosophy about teaching. A guitar teacher understands the importance of effort in producing results. They can help a child have a long term vision and produce more results in a child than just guitar progress. Because music is about so much more than that.
Can this guitar teacher help your child progress all the way to an advanced level?
One of the ways to see if a guitar teacher is right for your child is to see if they can show results of other students that they have helped reach a substantial level and also the experience they have had with the guitar teacher.
Whether it’s testimonials online or perhaps in person, meeting some of the other students and their parents to find out what their experiences have been like. It’s all useful information to gather. Remember, glossy images of children playing the guitar does not mean the teachers can teach. You want genuine results to see.
What is their experience as a guitar teacher and teaching children?
Teaching children is different to teaching adults. On top of that, being a good guitar player doesn’t always translate into them being a good guitar teacher.
So you want someone who is not teaching your child as a guinea pig but has the knowledge and skill to teach children. And also the ability to help them as they get older and improve their guitar playing.
Having a trained teacher will help your child to have a lot more fun, rather than having experimental guitar lessons and progress a lot more as well.
We hope you find the right guitar teacher for your child and if you were having doubts with your child’s current guitar teacher. We hope this guide has helped you regarding a few of the things to look for.
If you and your child are based in East London and your child has shown enthusiasm for learning guitar then we would love to hear from you. Contact us at the button below to find out more.