Why learning guitar with a great teacher is fun
Learning guitar on your own is often a long, frustrating and confusing process. This makes learning guitar a struggle when it should be fun. Working with a guitar teacher helps you eliminate the frustrating parts of learning guitar so you can enjoy the learning process more.
According to guitar teacher coach Tom Hess, there are 3 ways working with a teacher makes learning guitar more fun:
- You quickly get answers to why you make mistakes. One of the most frustrating situations for guitarists is not knowing how to fix mistakes in their playing. This keeps you stuck and prevents you from playing how you want to play. Even if you look up answers online, you often come across bad advice that doesn’t help. Working with a guitar teacher gives you instant answers to your problems. This way, you start making progress and having fun as you see yourself improve.
- You always know what to practice, when to practice and how to practice it. Not knowing what to practice leads to confusion and becomes overwhelming when you try to practice too many things at once. A great guitar teacher understands how to help you reach your musical goals and gives you a specific practice strategy to do it.
- You get feedback on your playing. Learning guitar by yourself can be a lonely experience that leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions. When you take lessons with a guitar teacher, you have someone to give you feedback on your playing, help you fix mistakes and guide you along the right path to your goals. This is very motivating. Guitar practice becomes more fun when you know you are doing exactly what you need to do to get better.
Jake Melling of the American Academy of Guitar Mastery suggests that working with a guitar teacher is more fun than learning alone because it helps you track your progress.
We couldn’t agree more with this idea! Here’s why:
The biggest motivator for most guitar students is being able to see themselves improve over time. In many cases, guitar players start becoming excited when they are finally able to play something correctly (such as a single lick, guitar solo or exercise). Working with a great guitar teacher gives you the opportunity to achieve much more progress every step along the way. This means you not only get motivation at the end (when you finally are able to play a certain thing on guitar), but by learning how to master what you are learning in many different ways.
For example, learning to play a guitar lick with perfect two-hand synchronization, being able to play it with excellent vibrato or understanding how to improvise phrases with it. These are all things that self-taught guitarist overlook because they only focus on one goal. It’s much more fun when you see your playing improve in many areas at once, and a great guitar teacher has the vision to help you do it.
Bottom line: you can make small gains learning guitar on your own, but you make much more progress and have much more fun learning with a teacher. If you are currently learning from a guitar teacher but not having fun, find a new teacher who has helped a lot of students reach their musical goals.