Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Guest review by James Bloomer: How To Make A Living Teaching Guitar

Posted by Jon in • Guitar Books, Reviews,

How To Make a Living Teaching Guitar
How to Make a Living Teaching Guitar is an ebook (PDF) by Nick Minnion, whose website is http://www.teachguitar.com. It’s a book that aims to provide a complete guide on how to start teaching guitar, what to teach and how to run the business.

The first chapter after the introduction is a pep talk, trying to persuade you - the guitarist - that you do indeed have the skills and the ability to teach guitar. Or at least asking the questions to help you decide. I like the positive aspect to this chapter, sometimes you need someone to tell you its possible before you think: yeah.

The next three chapters cover the logistics of teaching, how to get clients and how you should behave. There’s some interesting ideas in these chapters, I particularily liked the chapter about advertising. Once you read it, it seems common sense, but I wouldn’t have thought of his approach.

The next four chapters cover what and how to teach with ideas on lesson structure, syllabus etc. Particularily valuable are the hard earned experience of what to avoid and how to keep the people you are teaching. That’s the sort of knowledge that I expect the average guitarist will find harder to come by than what to teach.

The book is being sold for $19, which at twenty five pages of blandly formatted PDF seems expensive, although that does includes a two month email consultation service with Nick. The price made me wonder whether these sort of tips can be found on blogs of guitar teachers? I don’t know, haven’t checked.

All in all though I thought it was a positive book, which may be useful and inspiring for anyone contemplating teaching guitar, but a bit expensive. For those already teaching it may not provide anything new.

James has been playing guitar for 20 years, in fact coincidentally we started playing guitar on exactly the same day!
Check out James’ SF blog Big Dumb Object.

You should follow me on twitter here.

 

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