Private Lesson Success: Making the Most of Your Private Lesson

auremar/Shutterstock.com

If you want your guitar lessons to go well, your teacher will need a few things from you. Without good students, there are no good teachers.

Key Traits of Good Students

Attendance

Come to your lesson on time, and do not miss lessons. It sets a bad precedent. If you do this, you are saying to yourself “guitar is low-priority for me” and even worse, you are telling yourself “I cannot honor my commitments.”

Practice daily

Make a goal, and stick to it. There is no such thing as a person who does not have time to learn the guitar. There are only people who are too preoccupied with other activities in order to make that time. But if you are taking lessons, you are not one of those people.

Take notes

The fastest-learning students are those who organize their practice by setting goals, taking notes, and keeping a record of their practice.

Get in the rhythm

If your teacher assigns you an exercise, make sure that you spend some time on it during the week. Just as you cannot walk north and south at the same time, you cannot make progress with your teacher if both your teacher and you are trying to move in different directions. Sometimes this means you need to make a compromise.

Any progress is better than none, so do yourself and your teacher a favor and spend time on the lesson materials.

Give feedback

Your teacher is there to help you. Even if they are the best guitarist in the world and you want to be just like your teacher. No matter how much you might love (or hate!) your teacher, their job is to help you learn. You can only help your teacher do their job by giving feedback. Your teacher needs to hear it, so don’t hold back.

Watch the clock

If you see your teacher looking at the clock, it’s not because they’re thinking about lunch time. It’s because teachers only have a few minutes with you each week and want to spend the time wisely. You can help by trying to stay focused on guitar during the lesson.

Coda

Good teachers are created by good students. The more committed you are to your learning, the more you will get out of your teachers. After all, you are the one learning to play the guitar. Your teacher is just a helper. A great learner can do wonderfully with an average teacher. But the world’s best teacher cannot make a guitar player out of a student who doesn’t practice.

As the creator of Hub Guitar, Grey has compiled hundreds of guitar lessons, written several books, and filmed hundreds of video lessons. He teaches private lessons in his Boston studio, as well as via video chat through TakeLessons.