How To Train Your Guitar Students To Become Excellent Guitarists
By Tom Hess
The best guitar teachers do much more than simply teach guitar. To become a great guitar teacher, you also need to:
*Help your students make progress and gain motivation to practice by training them on how to practice effectively.
*Coach your students in a way that helps them believe in their musical potential and want to do the things you teach them.
The video below helps you understand how to train and coach your students to get them to make faster progress:
Teaching guitar is all about successfully communicating musical concepts and knowledge to your students. Training and coaching mean helping your students learn, apply and integrate everything they learn from you.
You learn how to coach and train your students by following the tips in this article:
Guitar Teaching Tip #1: Help Your Students Become Gain Confidence With Frequent Victories
Your students have the potential to master any skill they learn from you and anything that is giving them problems during practice. You must help them understand this. When they do, they become more confidence, begin trusting your expertise and gain motivation to push through and reach their guitar playing goals.
Your students increase their confidence when you break down their biggest problems and make them a lot easier to figure out.
Example: Here is a lick one of your students might struggle with:
INSERT IMAGE 1
Your student might be able to play each individual part of this lick cleanly, but struggle to play them together.
It’s your job to help your student understand that he can play it. You don’t even need to slow it down or make anything harder to play.
Here is what you do: have the student hold the note at the end of the first measure to give your student more time to think and get ready to switch hands for the second measure.
By holding this note longer, it creates an easier-to-play variation of the lick. This makes it to where your student is able to practice both ideas without slowing down.
Once you raise your student’s confidence in this manner, make the transitional note shorter until he is able to play the whole lick smoothly without making mistakes.
Guitar teacher coaching helps you understand the causes of your guitar students’ problems and fix them with little effort.
Guitar Teaching Tip #2: Expose The Main Issue That Is Holding Your Students Back
When your students gain confidence, you need to start challenging them.
Think of variations for the exercises your students are practicing. These variations must pinpoint the problems they are having in their playing and get them to fix them.
These are two ways that creating variations can achieve this goal:
*Make the problem more difficult. For instance: make your student play an idea that requires major stretches lower down on the fretboard.
*Make the problem occur more frequently. For instance: make your student repeat the same difficult picking motion several times within a lick. This helps them work on improving it more often.
This area of the coaching process determines how quickly your students improve and reach their guitar playing goals. Being an effective guitar instructor is key for helping you keep your guitar students taking lessons with you for years.
Guitar Teaching Tip #3: Make New Exercises For Your Guitar Students To Practice
You need to ensure that your students’ practice is very fun while getting them results. This encourages them to keep practicing until they achieve their goals.
Think of exercises that make your students focus on improving their problems in many different musical situations. For example:
*Have your students transpose licks into different scales or keys.
*Make new guitar licks for them that present the same guitar technique challenges.
*Make a musical etude from the original musical idea for them to integrate into real-life playing situations.
Guitar Teaching Tip #4: Make Your Guitar Students Proud About Their Improvement
Take notice every time your students make progress and give them praise for their effort. This makes them proud of their progress and grateful to have you as their teacher, trainer and coach.
Guitar teacher coaching helps you develop these strategies and become the #1 guitar teacher in your local community.
About The Author:
Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, recording artist and the guitar player. He helps people from all over the world learn how to teach guitar. Visit his website tomhess.net to get free guitar teacher resources and to read more guitar teaching articles.