Seven Unfortunate Truths About Your Guitar Teacher

REALITY: Most guitar instructors have never taken the time to develop their teaching skills. Unfortunately, this means you must become their student ‘experiment' as they learn through trial and error. Before you take another lesson, here are the seven things that your guitar teacher has never told you (that you need to know!):

1. "The truth is, I was never trained in any way to effectively teach guitar." It is true that many guitar teachers previously learned how to play guitar through lessons (or even by going to school to learn), however 99/100 guitar teachers have no actual training when it comes to ‘teaching' guitar. Most guitar teachers began teaching by using an improvisational, trial by error approach that they still use to this day. Fortunately for you, these people are not the same people who clean your teeth, fix your car or handle your bank account. It astounds me how so many guitar students never think to ask their teachers whether or not they received any kind of training for what they do. This point alone explains why so many students who take lessons from mediocre guitar teachers never become great guitarists.

2. "I'm teaching you guitar with a generic approach that I use for everyone. It might work… it might not work. I don't really know for sure." One of the most common ways that guitar teachers hide their lack of knowledge and experience is to use a generalized approach for everyone they teach. Almost every time I start training a guitar teacher, they ask me: "Tom, do you know any kind of methods I can use in my guitar teaching so I don't have to worry about what I should teach my students every week?" The truth is, with the exception of total ‘beginners', your guitar teacher must use a specific teaching strategy for each of his students (including you) in order to help them effectively improve and reach their goals.

3. "With me, you are limited to playing at a beginner or intermediate level. By keeping you at this level, I can make more money." There are few guitar teachers who can teach students beyond an intermediate level. In fact, many of them are afraid that you will get ‘too advanced' and stop taking lessons because they can no longer offer valuable insight. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of teachers purposely hold back their guitar students, thinking that this is the only way to stay in business.

4. "I don't know how to teach anything besides 1 on 1 lessons." Contrary to what many teachers will tell you, learning guitar using a private one on one format is not the greatest system to learn with. The teachers who try to get you to believe this myth have no experience training A lot of people to reach high levels of guitar playing. If they did, they would understand that you can get much better results by using a variety of other highly effective guitar learning formats.

5. "Whenever you come in for your guitar lesson, I simply make it up as I go along. I really have no plan whatsoever." The vast majority of guitar teachers have zero training on how to teach guitar. On top of that, many of them have not even planned out what they are going to teach you from lesson to lesson. When was the last time you took a guitar lesson and felt like your guitar teacher had already prepared a specific plan to help you reach your musical goals? Chances are, you have never felt this way.

6. "Want to become an advanced guitar player? Well you can forget about it if you learn from me." Don't be fooled into thinking that just because a guitar teacher has a lot of students, he has helped them become highly skilled players. In reality, most teachers don't know how to teach guitar on an advanced level or get big results for their students. Fact is, you will never be able to become an advanced guitarist as long as you are taking lessons from someone who doesn't know how to turn his students into great guitar players.

7. "You want to become a creative guitar player? Sorry, I cannot teach you that... you're either naturally creative or you're not creative at all." Just about every guitar teacher out there (falsely) assumes that creativity cannot be taught. These teachers believe that being able to play creatively on guitar is a gift that you were born with. If you take lessons from a teacher like this, you will never become a creative guitar player because your guitar teacher simply doesn't know how to help you develop this skill. These teachers will only show you what to play but never how to use it in actual music. Fact is, creativity is a skill that can be developed just like any other skill on guitar.

Now that you have learned what happens ‘behind the scenes' with (mediocre) guitar teachers, find out finding the best guitar teacher.

1. I teach thousands of correspondence guitar lessons to guitar players around the world every year.

2. I have loads of proof of helping my online guitar students become highly advanced guitarists.

3. I have created a specialized guitar teaching training program that has helped many guitar teachers become highly successful in their guitar teaching businesses (as seen in this Elite Guitar Teachers Inner Circle review).