When To Start Looking For a Guitar Teacher

It’s no secret that having a great guitar teacher helps propel your skills to a whole new level. Despite this, many guitarists go for years trying to learn on their own. This results in years’ worth of poor playing habits, frustration and slower progress towards realizing their ultimate musical goals. Don’t let yourself fall into this same trap. Here are some of the key things that should be telling you it’s time to find a guitar teacher:

Your guitar practice isn’t yielding big results

It is very common that self-taught guitar players don’t practice effectively. In many cases, guitarists take many years to learn things that they could’ve learned much faster had they done so through organized, effective and efficient practice. Instead, they usually learn new things slowly over time in a somewhat random manner.

When you work together with an experienced guitar teacher, he/she evaluates your goals and determines a specific practice strategy to help you reach them fast. With this in place (along with the teacher’s instructions for how to effectively practice), you make extremely fast progress as long as you follow what they say. Without this, you’re stuck learning through trial-and-error, and have to deal with constant struggle and frustration.

You feel frustrated about not knowing what to practice

It’s difficult to know what you should be practicing without the experience of a guitar teacher. One of the most common problems self-taught players face is having too many practice materials. This comes from not knowing what to prioritize or what will help them reach their personal goals faster. This leads to feelings of being overwhelmed which causes most players to become frustrated and unmotivated to practice.

Having a guitar teacher helps you cut out all the unnecessary materials from your practice time and only work on what really matters for reaching your goals. A great teacher understands exactly how to get you from where you are now to the goals you want to reach as fast as possible.

Additionally, working with a guitar teacher helps eliminate the frustration that comes from making mistakes. You always have access to expert feedback when you work with a good guitar teacher. This makes it much easier to persevere in your guitar playing whenever you come across challenges. 

You have big goals you want to reach

The best way to quickly reach any guitar playing goal is working with a guitar teacher who has helped many others reach the same ones you have. Great guitar teachers have several things in common: they have guitar teacher training certifications, they have proof that they’ve helped students reach their goals and they have a passion for what they do. Whenever you look for a new guitar teacher to work with, make sure they have these traits and that they teach in the same musical style you play in. Then, contact them and tell them about your specific musical goals in great detail. This helps them understand exactly where you want to go on guitar so they can create a lesson strategy for you.

After you’ve found a teacher like this, it is important that you follow through with the things they teach you. Simply having the understanding of what you need to do to get better is not enough if you don’t take consistent action.