How To Make A Good Living As A Guitar Teacher

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By Tom Hess

Chances are, you are not currently earning as much money as you would like to in your guitar teaching business. Fact is, most guitar teachers do ‘not’ make a good living and will never fully understand what they are doing wrong. Here is the unfortunate reality for the vast majority of guitar teachers:

1. The majority of guitar teachers do not make enough money to make ends meet.

2. Most of these same guitar teachers have never helped any students to become GREAT guitar players.

3. Guitar teachers frequently report working excessive hours while making little pay.

On the other hand, there exists a small percentage of highly successful guitar teachers who:

1. Make a minimum of 6 figures each year in their guitar teaching businesses.

2. Quickly turn their guitar students from mediocre players to highly skilled players.

3. Are able to add extra value for their students because they have extra time, energy and resources to put into their guitar instruction.

4. Generally work no more than part time hours every week.

At first, most people are shocked to hear about the above points. As someone who has trained countless people to develop successful guitar teaching businesses (by joining the elite top 1% club), I know all of these things to be true.

Additionally, the majority of guitar teachers out there do not fail because they are necessarily ‘bad’ at teaching guitar. Instead, they fail because they believe in the ‘common knowledge’ they have heard being perpetuated by other unsuccessful guitar teachers. These approaches seem rational at first glance, but in fact are highly damaging for your guitar teaching business in many ways.

Here are the top 7 conventional guitar teaching approaches that lead to failure:

1. Lowering Your Lesson Rates In Order To Compete With Other Guitar Teachers

While giving lessons in a town or city with heavy competition from other guitar teachers, it is natural to think that lowering your lesson rates will give more potential students a chance to work with you. If you are considering this approach, chances are you think that giving cheaper lessons will make you stand out from the more ‘expensive’ guitar teachers in your area. You may have even heard students complain about not wanting to spend a lot of money on guitar lessons and allowed this to affect your judgment. However, in the end this approach will backfire on you. Here’s why:

  • The fact that you charge very cheap rates for lessons tells potential students that you are either new to teaching guitar or are not very good at it. In fact, most students assume that teachers with higher priced lessons charge more because they can get better results. So by charging a small amount for your lessons, you are really only driving away serious students (who are ready to spend money). The more serious a student is, the less likely they are to even think about taking lessons with you when you are the cheapest guitar teacher in town.
  • When you charge cheap rates for lessons from the beginning, this tells potential students that the only difference from one guitar teacher to the next is the ‘price’ (which is totally untrue, although many students think this). With this in mind, it will be very difficult for you to raise your teaching rates in the future. You will be locked into the false perception you created in the mind of your students and will never be able to make as much money as you want.
  • The guitar students you work with will take lessons much less seriously, practice much less and get few results in their guitar playing. Remember, when someone pays very little for something, they value it much less than if they had to pay a lot for it. Charge more for your lessons rather than less and your students will take everything more seriously and get more out of the time they spend with you.

All of these issues will hold you back from ever reaching significant success as a guitar teacher.

So how can you solve this issue and how much SHOULD you charge for guitar lessons? Always make sure that you charge a ‘minimum’ of the average price in your local area (even if you are just getting started). Next, work to make your guitar lessons as valuable as possible in order to transform your students into great guitar players very quickly. Once you can do this, you gain the leverage to raise your rates and have a justified reason for doing so. Learn how to become the most successful guitar instructor in your city or town with the best guitar teacher training.

2. ‘Only’ Focusing On Attracting New Guitar Students

When you first begin teaching guitar, you obviously need to find new students. With this in mind, it is easy for most guitar teachers to ‘only’ think about attracting new students while ignoring all other aspects of their guitar teaching business. This approach will present you with these problems:

  •  Since you do not have a solid strategy for ‘keeping’ your students, you must invest countless hours into your promotional efforts due to the fact that the new students you gain only replace the ones you lost.
  • You will only make slow progress at best to build your guitar teaching business (even if you get more new students than you lose current ones). However, you can achieve much faster growth by working in several different areas simultaneously, such as: student retention, student referrals and converting potential students into actual students.

Following this approach WILL prevent you from making a lot of money through guitar teaching (especially during difficult economic times)

Fortunately, you can avoid these problems by making an effort to consistently improve in ALL areas of your guitar teaching business. By doing this, your business will improve exponentially and the amount of effort needed for major growth with decrease over time.

3. Always Showing Your Guitar Students Anything They Want To Learn

Many guitar teachers are in the habit of asking their students what they want to learn each time they take lessons. They believe that it is the responsibility of the student to tell the teacher what they need to work on. This is TOTALLY untrue. Consider this: if your guitar students actually knew what they needed to work on, wouldn’t they have already done it themselves and reached their guitar playing goals? The truth is that most guitar students are clueless about what they ‘should’ be working on to get better (this is why they came to you in the first place). It is not the student’s responsibility to figure this out, it is yours. You must always learn the student’s ‘long term goals’ up front and design an effective strategy to help them reach these goals. Additionally, you need to help your guitar students understand specifically WHY the things you teach them are both what they ‘need’ and ‘want’ to learn.

Your guitar students will never become great players if you allow them to tell you what to teach them. At most, they will be able to play a few isolated ideas but will never be able to put it all together to become a great musician. In most cases, if you teach guitar using this approach, you will quickly lose your students when they do not start seeing big results.

To make matters worse, you will be damaging your reputation when you do not get the results that your students want. This will make it very hard to sustain a successful guitar teaching business in your local area.

4. Making Changes To Your Guitar Teaching Business Based Only On What Other Local Teachers Are Doing

As a new guitar teacher, you will naturally be inclined to look at what your competitors are doing and try to use this information to build your guitar teaching business. However, as you read earlier in this article, the overwhelming majority of guitar teachers are unsuccessful. With this in mind, it makes no sense for you to try to copy the same things they are doing.

Rather than doing this, you should find a tight group of successful guitar teachers who are willing to share their insights with you. Of course, you will not be able to find such a group in your local area (obviously your competitors are not going to share their ideas with you). To find a network of successful guitar teachers who are willing to discuss their secrets with you, you will need to contact teachers who are ‘not’ living in the same area as you.

Many guitar teachers take part in my guitar teacher coaching program where they gain the advantage of being in a powerful network full of successful, high-earning music instructors who are ready and willing to share their insights.

5. Not Being Able To Say ‘No’ To Your Students

One of the biggest downfalls for most guitar teachers is that they do not enforce their teaching policies because they are afraid that it will cause them to lose students. In reality, failing to create and enforce a strong policy will eventually cause your guitar teaching business to fail. Here’s why:

A. This attracts guitar students who are not serious about learning. This means you will have to deal with students who are consistently late, do not pay on time and do not practice like they are supposed to.

B. Due to the above point, you will use all of your energy on ‘non-serious’ students and have little left to spare for the SERIOUS students who really do want to learn, pay on time and practice every day.

C. You will spend much less time teaching your students to become great musicians and much more time accommodating them with makeup lessons and chasing down late payments. This will lead your students to make very little progress while you make a smaller income and quickly become tired of working as a guitar teacher.

So what is a solution to this problem? Understand that ‘you’ know much more about what your students need to learn (regarding music/guitar) than they do. Develop your teaching policy based around this. Then make sure that your students understand your expectations and why following your policy is in their best interest. If they try to get you to change your policy, refuse to teach them (in other words… ‘fire’ them as students).

6. Becoming A Guitar Teacher At A Music Store

It is a very common belief among new guitar teachers that working at a music store is the best choice for making a good living because:

A. They do not have to find students by themselves. The music store does all the work.

B. They feel it is more professional to work from a music store instead of working out of their own home.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is why teaching guitar from a music store will cause you to fail:

  • It is simply not true that music stores will do all of the promotional work for you. In reality, they do not have a strong incentive to get students specifically for ‘you’. The truth is, no matter if you are working from a music store or on your own, you must learn how to effectively attract new guitar students on your own.
  • Additionally, you make less money when you work from a music store because you must give a large percentage of your earnings to the owner. This makes it more challenging to earn a good living as a guitar teacher.
  • To make things worse, music stores generally are very strict about the teaching formats they allow. In many cases, you are limited to teaching only private 1 on 1 lessons and not allowed to help your guitar students progress faster using other formats. This makes it harder to get big results for your students.
  • Since you can’t get great results for your students, it will be very difficult to develop the positive reputation needed to grow your guitar teaching business to the next level.

The most successful and highest earning guitar teachers never teach out of music stores. Instead, they run their own business and hire other guitar teachers to work for them. If you want to make a great living teaching guitar, you must treat it like a business and learn all you can in order to improve every aspect of it.

7. Promoting Yourself As A ‘General’ Guitar Teacher

Another misconception that most guitar teachers have is that you should try to reach as many students as possible through a highly generalized marketing approach. These teachers promote themselves by saying they teach in ‘any’ style.

The truth is, promoting yourself in this manner will mostly attract students who aren’t very serious about guitar lessons and/or don’t know what they want to play on guitar. These types of students are likely to not take practice seriously, only take lessons for a short period of time and will not be very cooperative with your lesson policies.

On the other hand, the greatest guitar students (who you want to work with) are always looking for a teacher who specializes in a specific niche because they know what they want to play and invest the time to look for someone who can help them play it.

When you gain a schedule full of students who aren’t very serious about learning guitar, you WILL become frustrated from endless cancelled lessons, late payments and other issues. Although these problems are only partially related to the topic of becoming a ‘general’ guitar teacher, they are fully caused by it and will hold you back from earning a living as a successful guitar teacher.

That being said, don’t make the mistake of choosing such a narrow niche that there are no guitar students who are interested in the style you teach. The main point is you will be much more successful if you market your guitar lessons as ‘rock’ guitar lessons (or blues, jazz, etc.) than if you simply market yourself as a general guitar teacher.

Overall, understand that making a good living as a guitar teacher is not the same as simply having a lot of students. Not only must you fill up your teaching schedule, but you must fill it up with the ‘right’ students. These are the students who will quickly make progress, stay with you for many years and help you develop a positive reputation as the best teacher in your location.

Although I have not discussed ‘all’ of the things that cause guitar teachers to fail, after reading the points above you have gained a better understanding of why most commonly accepted guitar teaching approaches are actually ineffective and problematic.

The most reliable method for avoiding failure in your guitar teaching business is to find the best guitar teacher training that will solve any issues you are currently facing. When you are aware of the problems that keep you from reaching success, you will then be prepared to take all the necessary actions to grow your guitar teaching business and earn more income from it than you ever thought possible!

 

About The Author: Tom Hess is a successful professional guitar teacher, composer and the guitarist of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He also trains guitar teachers how to develop better guitar teaching methods. Go to tomhess.net to read more information on guitar teaching, get free guitar teaching skill assessments and powerful guitar teaching tips.

Taking Lessons For Guitar? Here’s 7 Unfortunate Truths About Your Guitar Teacher

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by Tom Hess

REALITY: Most guitar instructors have never taken the time to develop their teaching skills. Unfortunately, this means you must become their student ‘experiment’ as they learn through trial and error. Before you take another lesson, here are the seven things that your guitar teacher has never told you (that you need to know!):

1. “The truth is, I was never trained in any way to effectively teach guitar.” It is true that many guitar teachers previously learned how to play guitar through lessons (or even by going to school to learn), however 99/100 guitar teachers have no actual training when it comes to ‘teaching’ guitar. Most guitar teachers began teaching by using an improvisational, trial by error approach that they still use to this day. Fortunately for you, these people are not the same people who clean your teeth, fix your car or handle your bank account. It astounds me how so many guitar students never think to ask their teachers whether or not they received any kind of training for what they do. This point alone explains why so many students who take lessons from mediocre guitar teachers never become great guitarists.

2. “I’m teaching you guitar with a generic approach that I use for everyone. It might work… it might not work. I don’t really know for sure.” One of the most common ways that guitar teachers hide their lack of knowledge and experience is to use a generalized approach for everyone they teach. Almost every time I start training a guitar teacher, they ask me: “Tom, do you know any kind of methods I can use in my guitar teaching so I don’t have to worry about what I should teach my students every week?” The truth is, with the exception of total ‘beginners’, your guitar teacher MUST use a specific teaching strategy for each of his students (including you) in order to help them effectively improve and reach their goals.

3. “With me, you are limited to playing at a beginner or intermediate level. By keeping you at this level, I can make more money.” There are few guitar teachers who can teach students beyond an intermediate level. In fact, many of them are afraid that you will get ‘too advanced’ and stop taking lessons because they can no longer offer valuable insight. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of teachers purposely hold back their guitar students, thinking that this is the only way to stay in business.

4. “I don’t know how to teach anything besides 1 on 1 lessons.”Contrary to what many teachers will tell you, learning guitar using a private one on one format is NOT the greatest system to learn with. The teachers who try to get you to believe this myth have no experience training A LOT of people to reach high levels of guitar playing. If they did, they would understand that you can get much better results by using a variety of other highly effective guitar learning formats.

5. “Whenever you come in for your guitar lesson, I simply make it up as I go along. I really have no plan whatsoever.” The vast majority of guitar teachers have zero training on how to teach guitar. On top of that, many of them have not even planned out what they are going to teach you from lesson to lesson. When was the last time you took a guitar lesson and felt like your guitar teacher had already prepared a specific plan to help you reach your musical goals? Chances are, you have never felt this way.

6. “Want to become an advanced guitar player? Well you can forget about it if you learn from me.” Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because a guitar teacher has a lot of students, he has helped them become highly skilled players. In reality, most teachers don’t know how to teach guitar on an advanced level or get big results for their students. Fact is, you will never be able to become an advanced guitarist as long as you are taking lessons from someone who doesn’t know how to turn his students into great guitar players.

7. “You want to become a creative guitar player? Sorry, I cannot teach you that… you’re either naturally creative or you’re not creative at all.” Just about every guitar teacher out there (falsely) assumes that creativity cannot be taught. These teachers believe that being able to play creatively on guitar is a gift that you were born with. If you take lessons from a teacher like this, you will never become a creative guitar player because your guitar teacher simply doesn’t know how to help you develop this skill. These teachers will only show you WHAT to play but never how to use it in actual music. Fact is, creativity is a skill that can be developed just like any other skill on guitar.

Now that you have learned what happens ‘behind the scenes’ with (mediocre) guitar teachers, find out finding the best guitar teacher.

Finally, let me give you three big reasons why you should listen to what I have to say:

1. I teach thousands of correspondence guitar lessons to guitar players around the world every year.

2. I have loads of proof of helping my online guitar students become advanced guitarists.

3. I have created a specialized guitar teaching training program that has helped many guitar teachers become highly successful in their guitar teaching businesses (as seen in this Elite Guitar Teachers Inner Circle review).

About The Author:

 

Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, recording artist and the guitar player for the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He helps guitarists around the world with his personalized guitar lessons. Visit his electric guitar player lessons website and get free guitar advice, guitar practice help, and additional advice on how to become a better musician.

How To Know If You Have Mastered Vibrato On Guitar

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Do you know how much your vibrato has improved over the last  6-12 months of playing guitar? Most musicians have no way to answer this  question because vibrato is believed to be impossible to track progress with.  Because of this, guitar vibrato rarely gets the practice time it deserves,  leading to far too many guitarists playing with very inexpressive and simply  ‘bad’ sounding vibrato.

To start, study the video below where I will show you how  simple it is to assess your level of mastery over vibrato. Watch the video  below before reading further:

 

To see the next part  of this video, study this page about guitar vibrato technique.

After studying the above procedure for testing the current  state of your vibrato, you need to adapt it as part of your regular practicing  to track your progress with vibrato over time. Here is how you need to do this:

1. Don’t spend all of your practice time (for vibrato)  practicing on only 1 pitch. You must also work on this skill in the real-life  application scenarios of guitar licks and solos. Although this seems obvious,  many people get stuck in practicing a certain technique in isolation without  applying it into the real world.

2. Log the metronome tempos at which you are able to play  vibrato technique, just like you track your progress with speed building  exercises (scale sequences, arpeggios etc.). Of course when you do vibrato in  actual music, it doesn’t need to be strictly in time all the time, but you must  have the skill to allow yourself to make it so, if needed. THAT is what will  make it possible to choose the best and most expressive way of using vibrato in  your songs and melodies. Knowing the precise metronome tempo at which you can  do controlled vibrato will give you the perfect indication of how this area of  your technique is progressing.

3. Spend some time recording your vibrato practice sessions  and then listen back to the recordings at “half tempo” (this can be easily  achieved in any computer recording program). Doing this will make it easier for  your ears to perceive the nuances of how your vibrato sounds in real time. Most  guitarists never analyzed their playing in that much detail and doing so leads  to many new discoveries on how to make your guitar playing better.

4. When you do vibrato within guitar licks and solos, vary  the rhythmic values you use to play it (exactly like I demonstrated for you in  the video tutorial above). This is important to do because you don’t want to be  boxed into only doing vibrato in a single way all the time. I also put this as  a separate step from simply “training with a click”, because you will be  thinking differently when playing over a musical track about your phrasing and  vibrato than you will when practicing to a metronome.

Don’t forget the final result you are after: to make your  vibrato sound GREAT. So don’t make the mistake of focusing on the tempo at  which you are doing vibrato and losing sight of the other elements that must be  refined to totally master vibrato.

Implement the above points into your practicing and you will  start to see your vibrato (and your guitar playing) sound much better than ever  before.

About the author: Mike Philippov is an educational guitar author, professional  guitar player and composer. He writes articles and publishes videos about the  best ways to practice guitar that are studied by many musicians worldwide. To  get more help with becoming a better guitar player, visit his guitar practicing website.

5 Creative Tactics That Will Transform Your 7 String Guitar Playing

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By Tom Hess

Do you feel like your 7 string guitar playing is not as creative as you would like it to be? Chances are, you have not fully explored the instrument’s creative possibilities and limited your approach to simply trying make your 6 string ideas work with the low B string.

Unlike most guitarists, truly great guitar players are well aware of the differences between 6 and 7 string guitar. As a result, they are able to play creatively on their instrument.

In an past article I made, I covered several 7 string guitar ideas. This gave you many additional ideas for how to use your instrument as well as how to smoothly transition from 6 string guitar to 7 string guitar. This article will focus on some more specific ideas that will help you use 7 string guitar to improve your overall guitar playing ability.

Implement these five concepts into your regular guitar practice routine in order to become much better and more creative in your 7 string guitar playing:

Use Variety When Playing With Palm Muting In Your Rhythm Guitar Riffs

You might think that palm muting is a very easy and basic guitar technique, however, developing it to a level of true mastery requires great skill and focus (as with most techniques). As discussed in this resource about how to record guitar parts, many guitarists use sloppy palm muting technique during their recordings. As a result, they have to buy more time in the studio just so they can redo their recordings.

With this in mind, you know you have truly mastered palm muting when you have the ability to consciously adjust the precise amount of muting you apply while playing rhythm guitar ideas. A good illustration of this is when you use palm muting technique while playing a power chord and slowly decrease the pressure of your palm on the strings to allow them to ring out openly. This technique can sound really intense when applied on the low B string due to the natural ‘heaviness’ of the lower register. Applying this technique consistently and accurately requires practice, especially if you are going to ‘record’ a double tracked rhythm guitar part that uses it. This palm muting application is not at all the same as playing guitar with inconsistent muting without being aware of what you are doing.

Learn how to play 7 string rhythm guitar using this palm muting style to enhance your guitar riffs.

Use String Skipping To Enhance The Intensity Of Your Guitar Riffs

One of the first things that guitar players are drawn to with 7 string guitar is playing rhythm patterns on the low B string. The expanded pitch range of this string gives you the opportunity to use string skipping as a tool to make really intense and killer rhythm guitar riffs. In many cases, string skipping would normally be used as a lead guitar technique. However, on 7 string guitar the low B string allows you to use string skipping while still remaining in the lower pitch range normally associated with rhythm guitar.

When you begin skipping strings from the low B string, you give yourself more options to be creative as well as improve your ability to pick with a much higher degree of accuracy. Why is this? While playing on 7 string guitar, not only must you adjust for the wider neck, but you must overcome these two obstacles as well:

1. You have to move your picking hand a greater distance between each string.

2. The likeliness that extra noise will occur due to other strings ringing out increases with the additional string. You must use great focus to mute properly while skipping strings.

Expand your understanding of this string skipping idea by using the free examples in this resource about how to play 7 string rhythm guitar.

Utilize The Low 7th String To Enhance Your Picking Hand Accuracy

One unique way to develop your picking hand accuracy is to take advantage of the thickness of the low B string. Here’s how to do this: First, think of several licks, scale patterns or riffs that only use the lowest two strings. Then take your time and develop the ability to play them fast with an emphasis on perfect accuracy for each note (use palm muting as well to improve your muting technique).

Increase the difficulty of this exercise by temporarily turning your gain or distortion settings OFF so that it becomes harder to cleanly articulate each note. By doing this, you will expose any weaknesses in your picking attack and force yourself to make adjustments in order to get better. Once you return to your normal distortion settings you will quickly notice that it feels much easier to articulate and play each note more accurately than you could previously.

Using Irregular Rhythms To Build Musical Intensity

Many people associated the term ‘irregular rhythm’ with ‘irregular meter’. However, these terms are not interchangeable. While irregular meter refers specifically to the meter of the music (such as 7/4 or 5/8), irregular rhythm refers to how the beats are divided within a single measure. Generally speaking, irregular rhythm has to do with using unexpected syncopation, silence or note groupings that surprise the listener.

Of course you can use irregular rhythms while playing 6 string guitar as well, however when you use them on the low 7th string it combines with the natural intensity of playing in the lower register to add MASSIVE tension and power to your music. For instance, I like to occasionally add in silence during the middle of a measure to create an irregular feel to the music. While doing this, I catch the listener off guard by changing their rhythmic expectations and create a lot of extra tension in the music with the intense feel of the low B string.

Want to hear how this sounds? Listen to the mp3 examples in this 7 string guitar playing resource.

Play Using A Higher Register By Stringing Your Guitar With A High “A” String

It is overwhelmingly common for 7 string guitar players to use a low B string. After all, this is how most 7 string guitars are sold at guitar shops. However, this does not mean that you are limited to only playing with this string. It is perfectly acceptable to use a high “A” string (in standard tuning) that expands the higher register rather than a low B string. When you do this, you will open the door to creative lead guitar possibilities that are totally unavailable in both 6 string guitar and typical 7 string guitar set ups.

Warning: Just like with the low B string, it is very easy to over-emphasize the high A string and cause your guitar playing to lose a sense of variety. Keep this in mind and use a balanced approach to keep your guitar playing fresh.

As you have found out in this article, there are far more creative possibilities for 7 string guitar than you might first expect. Certainly 6 string and 7 string guitars are played very similarly, however when you think creatively you can use the 7 string guitar to enhance your guitar playing and musicianship in interesting ways.

Get more information to help you get the maximum value out of this article and learn how to play 7 string rhythm guitar with more creativity.

About The Author:

Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, recording artist and the guitar player for the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He helps guitar players internationally to become better players with his customized guitar lessons. Check out free guitar playing videos and use a guitar practice guide on his website with effective guitar lessons to learn effective methods for improving your guitar playing.

How To Promote Your Music Career And Build Your Music Fan Base

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By Tom Hess

Are you trying to find the best way to promote your music and gain a huge following of fans? This is a major concern for the majority of musicians; both for those who are just starting their music careers and for those who have been in the music business for a long time. There is no doubt that having a major following of fans for your music is crucial to big and long lasting success in the music industry.

However, the truth is that there is no all encompassing answer on the topic of how to promote your music. This is because you or the band you are playing in are likely facing many unique challenges that would need to be overcome before you could gain more fans and effectively promote your music. The good news is, whether you are just starting in the music business or are a seasoned pro, being able to get more music fans and promote your music really comes down to reaching the following three goals:

1. You have to get more people to check out your music.

2. You need the people who check out your music to give you some kind of support (either by buying your music, coming out to your shows, purchasing products your release, etc.)

3. You need to turn your fans into FANATICS to where they will tell others (on their own) about how great you and your music are.

No matter what it is that you are trying to achieve in the music business, the three goals mentioned above will apply to anything you do as long as you are trying to develop a strong relationship with your fans.

These goals may all seem to be separate from one another; however, they are in fact all connected. Once you are able to achieve success with any single one of them, you will greatly improve your chances for success with any of the others. As soon as you truly ‘get’ this basic truth, you will find it much easier to be productive in your efforts.

In order to achieve great success as you promote you music to your fans, you must learn how to think in a strategic manner rather than just taking inconsistent and isolated actions (a mistake that most musicians and bands make). Instead of trying to find a general formula that you can apply to help you get more fans for your music, you need to begin thinking in the same manner as most professional musicians. While training other musicians to succeed in their music careers, I help them understand how to find creative ideas that they can apply in their own music career in order to quickly gain more music fans. Once you gain the ability to think this way in your own music career, it will become much easier for you to overcome any obstacles that stand in the way of your promotional efforts.

To illustrate what I mean and give you various steps (that you can take right now to get more music fans), here are some quick and easy things you can do to accomplish all three of the music promotion goals mentioned above.

However, before I discuss this in more detail, you will be able to get much more benefit from reading this article if you take the time (right now) to assess your current understanding of how to attract music fans. Take this free test on how to promote a music career now before you read the following sections of this article. Open a separate tab in your browser now, finish the assessment and then come back when you are done.

Now that you have measured your current music promotion abilities, I am going to show you a few ways to promote your music. While you are reading, try to think creatively and focus on the ‘style’ of thinking that makes up the foundation for these ideas rather than just the ideas themselves. This will help you to better understand what makes them effective and how you can use them in your own music career.

Promoting Your Music Objective: Get more people to hear your music

Solution #1: Release music with other musicians on a compilation album. While releasing a compilation record with other artists, you not only release your own music, but the songs of others. This is important because once you do this you are able to promote your music to both your fans AND the fans of every other musician on the record. Remember, your main objective here is not necessarily to make a lot of money; but to utilize the album as an inexpensive tool for gaining much more exposure to new fans than what you would gain on your own. Later on, you can get maximum leverage out of this by promoting your own records, products or merchandise to your new extended network of fans. This idea of using one action to produce MANY benefits is one of the many success strategies that I train musicians to use in my Music Careers Mentoring Program.

Solution #2: Work together with other musicians locally. Instead of considering other local musicians to be your competition (for gaining more fans), work together with local musical artists of a similar genre to help you gain access to larger amount of fans who are interested in hearing and seeing you play music. One method for achieving this is to work with another band to perform at the same venue in an effort to bring together the fan base of both bands. By doing this, you will not only improve your relationship with the owner of the venue (because you are bringing in more people), but you will have the opportunity to advertise your music to the other band’s fan base (and them to yours). This idea is very fundamental, but in reality not many bands take initiative to actually go out and do it. On top of that, many bands make the mistake of sharing the venue with other bands who are not in their target market, or with bands who do not make a strong effort to attract their fans to the venue (thus taking away the mutual benefit). One example of pulling this idea off (which is fairly common in the music business) is when a band with a small following becomes and opening act for a much larger band. However, if you cannot find a highly successful band to open for you can still achieve this; you will need to simply find a band that contains musicians who have enough ambition to take ACTION and implement this strategy.

Promoting Your Music Objective: Get your fans to take the next step

Solution #1: Make sure that people have incentive to both be a fan of your music AND purchase your music. Those who have mastered the ability to successfully promote music find ways to get their fan base to buy their music as opposed to downloading it online for free. Additionally, they are able to take an average listener and turn him/her into a loyal fan. A great way to do this is to offer something special to people who actually BUY your music (that cannot be obtained by simply downloading it for free). To effectively do this, it is important that whatever you are offering cannot be easily reproduced through digital media. This could include things such as VIP passes to your concerts, merchandise or other creative and unique items. The main thing to get out this idea is that you can implement a single strategy to achieve good music promotion while also developing a stronger relationship between you and your fans.

Solution #2: Become familiar with your current fan base. It is easy to successfully promote yourself as a musician when you can put yourself out there to those who already give you their support whenever you pursue new projects in your musical career. Most musicians think that their biggest problem is a lack of music fans, when in fact, they simply do not know who their real fans are and how to get in touch with them. Instead of contacting these specific fans, a lot of musicians focus their efforts on the general public. The truth is, this approach can work; however, promoting your music in this manner will cost a great deal of money and time. To dramatically cut down on your costs with regards to money, energy and time; make your musical promotion more effective by finding an easy way to stay in touch with your fan base at all times.

Promoting Your Music Objective: Changing Casual Music Fans Into True Fanatics

Solution #1: Create unique events around your music that encourages your fans to interact with you in ways other than just listening to your songs or coming to your shows. There exist many different ways to do this (limited only by your personal creativity); however, no matter what you do, your main goal should always be to expand upon the relationship you have with your fans in order to close the gap between you are your fans.

Solution #2: Reward your greatest fans with unique items and attention that casual fans do not have access to. This can easily be tied together with the point made in solution #1 above or as an independent idea on its own. If you want the fans of your music to take initiative in a specific way (such as spreading your band’s reputation or music to their friends), think of things that you can offer to them that will really get them enthusiastic about what is going on beyond your music. When you do this, offer something that really helps to spread your band’s image as opposed to merely offering cash or “free t-shirts”. Go the extra mile to really offer your most loyal music fans something special.

As you have read, once you take a more detailed approach to understanding specifically what it is that you want to do when it comes to “gaining more music fans”, it’s a lot easier to understand specifically which action steps you must perform to make this happen. The majority of musicians only think about improving their music while trying to appeal to the general public, but doing this is only one aspect of musical promotion. Of course, your music is important; however there are aspects of your music career that you must work on in order to effectively get more fans for your music. As soon as you begin focusing on these aspects, you will start to gain much greater results in your music promotion efforts.

Start getting more fans of your music career by assessing your current promotional skills in this free assessment on how to promote a music career.

About The Author:
Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher online and a music career mentor. He plays guitar and tours with the band Rhapsody Of Fire. Tom also trains musicians on how to succeed in the music business. On his professional musician website tomhess.net you can read many more articles about making a living with a music career.

Use Your Favorite Singer’s Voice To Write Guitar Solos

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by Tom Hess

Would you like to have the ability to write guitar solos that are highly melodic, expressive, and passionate? If you are like the majority, then you have a hard time making your lead guitar playing sound exactly how you want it to. A great way to solve this problem is to start listening more closely to your favorite singers. Once you can truly incorporate a singer’s vocal style with your current approach to lead guitar playing, you will be able to drastically improve your ability to play great guitar passages. Here is how I totally transformed the way I play:

During the 90′s I was auditioning to play guitar for a band. In the end, I didn’t make it in the band, but I still have a strong memory of that day. As I was packing up my equipment to leave, the last thing I was told was this: “Don’t come back until you can make your guitar sing.” In that moment, I felt bad for not making the band, but to tell the truth, this statement was some of best advice I have ever received in music. Unfortunately, at that time I didn’t truly understand it, and had no clue how to “make my guitar sing.”

As the next few months went by, I became interested in learning all about the singers I listened to. I started to examine the way in which they sang their vocal phrases, the rhythms they used, the techniques they applied, and other subtle distinctions of their styles. Once I began to understand the characteristics specific to a singer’s style, I would learn to play their vocal lines on my guitar. I found that I could identify the specific notes of their phrases without much difficulty, but bringing out the subtle parts of the singer’s style in my guitar playing was a much larger task.

Later on I was exposed to the first albums from the band Rhapsody Of Fire. For me, this was a huge turning point in my guitar phrasing. At the time I was shocked by the awesome vocals of their lead singer, Fabio Lione. From the first moment I heard his voice, I knew I had to study his style as much as possible so that I could use his powerful ability as a tool in my guitar soloing. I spent many hours analyzing the subtle vocal techniques in all of Rhapsody Of Fire’s music.

Here is the most valuable concept I learned:

It didn’t really matter what notes (or words) the singer was singing. What made a certain singer stand out were the subtle nuances of ‘how’ each note was sung.  For instance, why so many fantastic vocalists use different levels of volume in their voice for a certain phrase, why they ornament some notes within a melody in a particular way and why they sing with heavy vibrato at the ends of some phrases. At the moment when I truly began to see these subtleties, I started to make massive progress with my guitar soloing ability.

A lot of you know that I was contacted in 2011 by Rhapsody Of Fire and asked to play guitar in the band. Due to my unique ability to play guitar solos with “singing” guitar phrasing, the band took a great interest in adding my guitar playing style to their music.

What is the main thing you should get from this?

The ability to make your guitar solos have a “singing” style is a highly valuable concept to learn. Understanding how singers think to create their melodies will help you to become much stronger in your own musical expression. Another great part of this is that when you combine the mindset of a guitarist and a singer, you create a totally new method of creating guitar solos. This will set you apart from the other players out there who all use the same ideas.

Try this out. Listen to your most favorite singer and try to really focus on and understand all the subtleties in the way he/she sings. After you’ve done this, write a guitar solo while emphasizing these ideas in your guitar phrasing.

Watch this video to see an example of a solo I quickly wrote using this exact process.

About The Author: Tom Hess is a successful professional guitar player, composer and the guitarist of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He also trains musicians to reach their guitar playing goals in his rock guitar lessons online. Visit his website, tomhess.net to read more articles about guitar playing, get free guitar tips and guitar playing resources.

A Powerful And Unique Approach To Writing Guitar Solo Phrases

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By Tom Hess

Many guitar players think that having great technical playing skills is crucial to writing incredible guitar solos. In reality, there exist tons of great guitarists who play truly inspiring guitar phrases without playing in a very ‘technical’ manner… and you can do this to when you follow the steps in this article.

To create killer guitar solo ideas that simply ‘can’t be ignored’ by your listeners, you will need to do two things: 1. Establish a familiar pattern to create a ‘musical expectation’ AND 2. Go against this expectation to surprise your listener. Fact is, this is ‘not’ hard and there are countless ways to accomplish this in your lead guitar phrasing. For the rest of this article, I will show you an effective step by step approach to creating attention-grabbing guitar solos.

Before I continue, it is ESSENTIAL for you watch the video below to see the demonstration of this guitar soloing method. When I say it is ESSENTIAL, I mean it – If you do not do this first, you will not get the maximum benefit from the information in the rest of this article. Once you have watched the full video, come back and I will take you through the steps to writing your own killer guitar solo phrases.

Okay, assuming you have already watched the video above, you are ready to continue reading this article. Follow these steps to write guitar solos with phrasing that ‘demands’ the attention of your listeners:

Step Number One: Begin by writing a guitar phrase in common time (4/4) that uses one of the following choices: a group of eighth notes or a group of sixteenth notes. The phrase should be a repeating pattern that can be easily played over and over (starting over every 8 or 16 notes), so it’s important to use the same note values here. After making your selection, play the phrase you created over a backing track. After making your selection, play the phrase you created over a backing track. Play your melody over this 4/4 track with drums now.

HINT: By using pedal point phrasing (as demonstrated in the video above) you will make the following steps easier to do. Additionally, you can use a similar idea to the one seen below, where every note is picked two times:

(I encourage you to create your own ideas as well)
 

Step Number Two: Play the short guitar phrase you created over the 4/4 track with drums and repeat it several times in a row. This step is important because:

A. By repeating your guitar phrase over and over, you are solidifying the expectation for your listeners that: the pattern itself and the 4/4 beat will continue (as you saw in the video). B. It helps make the next step even more surprising and powerful.

Step Number Three: It’s time to really surprise the listener by doing something totally unexpected. You are going to create the feel of ‘three against four’ with your guitar phrase (as you heard in the video). A very easy way to accomplish this feel is to shorten the phrase you came up with so that it can fit into a meter that uses three beats per measure while you keep playing over the backing track that uses FOUR beats per measure. Compare the image below to the first one from above to see how you can change your guitar phrase to give it the feel of three against four:

Pay close attention to the fact that the rhythm of the notes remains unchanged (as you noticed in the video). By following this example, the music will play in 4/4 while your shorter guitar phrase will play against it – beginning again on a different pulse than the music itself. This creates a sense of strong musical tension that will be unavoidable to anyone who listens to your guitar solo. This will absolutely DEMAND their attention!

 

Step Number Four. At some point, the new guitar phrase will eventually line up with the beat of the backing track (remember the value of each note remained the same). Once this happens, you will need to decide on what to do next. You can choose between any of the following actions:

A. Keep playing the altered guitar phrase in order to maintain the feel of three against four. B. Revert back to your original phrase and play in perfect time with the backing track. C. Start over by creating a new guitar solo phrase.

Notice: Although playing guitar in this manner will certainly create unexpected results for your listeners (in a good way), if you play the same idea over many times it will create new expectations for them. In other words, you must ‘balance’ the process of introducing new ideas and ‘developing’ them in order to keep your playing interesting for your audience. The longer you repeat an idea, the less ‘novel’ it feels to the listener (even if it is a really cool idea).

Additionally, do not limit yourself to using this three against four approach only in lead guitar playing scenarios. All of the steps in this article can be followed to create cool riffs for rhythm guitar as well. There are countless ways to creatively integrate this idea into your music and many more basic examples than I can get into in a single article.

Now that you have learned the unique guitar phrasing approach discussed in this article, apply it into your guitar solos to unlock endless musical possibilities for your guitar playing!

Get powerful tips for playing guitar solos and become a better lead guitarist.

 

About The Author:

Tom Hess is a successful professional guitar player, composer and the guitarist of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He also trains musicians to reach their guitar playing goals in his metal guitar lessons online. Go to his personal website and read more articles about guitar playing, plus get guitar player tips and free guitarist resources.

Why Your Guitar Students Make Slow Progress

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by Tom Hess

Are you tired of watching your guitar students make progress at a very slow rate? Many guitar teachers struggle at some point to get their students to make fast progress and as a result their guitar teaching business suffers. The good news is, it is not as hard as you might think to get your students to make incredible progress in a short period of time… but first you must make a fundamental change to your overall guitar teaching approach.

Although there are tons of reasons why most guitarists who take lessons never become great musicians, in the end a lot of your success as a guitar teacher will depend on your ability to effectively teach your students ‘how to practice’.

You can be a great teacher at everything else in your guitar lessons, but until your students fully understand how to properly practice guitar they will never really be able to reach high levels in their guitar playing. In fact, they could stay with you for years at a time and never make any real progress. It is for this reason that you MUST show your guitar students how to practice and take this subject very seriously.

Once you can effectively train your students to practice guitar you will enable them to play guitar in the way that they always wanted. On top of that, you will create a name for yourself in your local community and build a great reputation (helping you to quickly build your guitar teaching business).

Now, before I reveal the most effective ways for teaching your students to practice guitar, it is crucial that you assess your own guitar teaching skills. Take this guitar teacher skill assessment first (then continue reading the rest of the article).

The THREE Major Reasons Why So Many Guitar Students Don’t Know How To Practice

Reason 1: The great majority of guitar teachers out there use up nearly every moment of each guitar lesson teaching their students new information such as new scales, licks, techniques and so forth. The reason why this happens so much is because most guitar teachers feel obligated to teach new material so that their students don’t feel like they are being “ripped off”. Because guitar teachers are so afraid of this, they overwhelm students with tons of new ideas but only spend a fraction of the time actually showing them how to practice what they learn on guitar.

Reason 2: Whenever a guitar teacher actually does make the attempt to teach guitar practice concepts to a student, the teacher quickly tells them all of the steps that they need to do and assumes that they will both remember what was said and actually ‘do it’. For instance, while teaching two-handed tapping licks, guitar students frequently make the mistake of not muting the strings that are not being played (resulting in excess noise). Most guitar teachers will simply tell their students, “Remember to mute those strings when you practice on your own”, and will show them maybe once or twice how to mute the strings. That said, next week when the student returns… the strings still are not being muted properly! Why does such a thing happen?:

a) Students often assume they understood how to practice something you showed them but will often do it incorrectly at home.

b) If the student even remembers you telling them about the mistake, it is still unlikely that they will remember ‘how’ you told them to practice in order to fix it.

c) The majority of guitar students will totally forget what you said was the cause of the mistake in their playing and will practice incorrectly on their own until they see you again.

Because of these things, you will need to waste time going over what the student was supposed to have learned the previous week once again. This guitar teaching method totally fails for the following reasons:

1. You never check to assure that your guitar students are practicing properly because you have never actually observed the way that they practice. Watching your students ‘practice’ is different than just listening to them play. When you hear them play, you hear the ‘end result’, but you don’t actually see the process they used in order to produce it.

2. During the lesson, your students might think they know what needs to get done to practice effectively, but when they get home and pick up their guitar; they practice incorrectly or forget.

3. The student doesn’t have enough time to truly absorb the process for practicing guitar effectively.

Reason 3: In most cases, guitar teachers give their students very generalized practice advice as it applies to ‘anything’ on guitar. On the other hand, expert guitar teachers show their students many specific strategies for guitar practice based upon the students’ musical goals AND the specific challenges they are facing in their playing. This helps the student to make improvements and advance his/her guitar playing more easily than the student who only received ‘general’ advice on how to practice guitar.

Here Is What You Should Do

Now you should be totally on board with the idea that teaching guitar students how to practice is a crucial part of teaching guitar. I’ve shown you the way that guitar teachers fail to teach this, now here are the solutions that will help you get your guitar students to practice effectively and make better progress:

Solution Number One. Don’t give in whenever one of your guitar students tries to blow off the guitar practice section of their lesson. In many cases, students will tell you that they “Got it” when in fact, they really might not “Get it”. Remember, it is absolutely crucial for them to learn how to practice guitar correctly in order to get results. In situations when you can sense that your student is trying to rush through practice in order to learn something “new”, remind them that they will get better at a much faster pace once they can practice guitar effectively.

Solution Number Two. Your guitar students will not remember how to practice something when they get home if all you did was merely tell them for a brief moment how to practice it. You’ve got to both show them how to do it yourself AND then also have them show you. This is a subject that makes many guitar teachers feel nervous. Most teachers think that if they do not constantly flood the student with new material then the student will get bored and stop taking lessons. This is not true! The truth is, understanding how to effectively practice guitar is the key that will unlock your student’s potential and get them to advance toward the results that they desire. In essence, knowing how to practice guitar is the main thing they need to learn from you to get the RESULTS they want in their guitar playing. If they do not know how to practice guitar effectively, they will not make progress… THIS is the true reason why a student might stop taking lessons with you. With this in mind, getting your students to practice guitar properly (when they are at home away from you) should be your number one priority!

Solution Number Three. Use no more than 75% of the guitar lesson time for showing your students something new – reserving the rest of the time to teach them how to practice that idea effectively on guitar. Simply showing them how to practice for one or two minutes will not help.

Solution Number Four. Don’t make the same mistake that so many mediocre guitar teachers make by repeatedly asking your students to ‘play’ something several times so that you can observe what they are doing and ‘make corrections’. Truly successful guitar teachers have their students show them how they PRACTICED the material from the previous week so that they can see the root cause of any playing issues. Next, the guitar teacher will show the student in real time (as they are practicing) what needs to be fixed. This way the student gets the experience of correcting the mistake for himself/herself. When your guitar students can correct their own mistakes, they will quickly begin to make progress in their playing.

Solution Number Five. Don’t fall into the trap of making assumptions for your students. You are the expert for guitar, so naturally you will understand exactly why something doesn’t sound right, or what needs to be done in order to fix this or that issue. However, your students are NOT experts. You must show them precisely what to look and listen for when they practice guitar so that they do not forget. Additionally, write all of this information down for them so that when they get home they can easily identify all important steps and instructions.

Here are the steps that you should take right now in order to maximize the benefit you get from reading the information in this article:

1. Test your knowledge of how well you can get results for your students while teaching them to practice with this guitar teacher skill assessment.

2. Take the time to help your guitar students understand why learning how to practice guitar effectively is a major factor for their progress as a guitar player.

3. Don’t ‘wait’ to use what you learned in this article – begin implementing the ideas from above into every guitar lesson that you teach from now on.

Once you utilize the knowledge you have gained from this article you will start to see massive progress in your student’s guitar playing. Additionally, you will begin to develop a positive reputation for yourself as the very best guitar teacher in town!

About The Author: Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher online, recording artist and the guitar player of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He shows guitar teachers from around the world how to develop their guitar teaching businesses in his guitar teacher success program. Visit his website to receive many free guitar teacher training resources, and learn more about how to teach guitar.

Top Seven Guitar Practice Techniques For Becoming A Better Guitarist

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If there is “one” thing about guitar practicing that is “most important”, it’s that there is NO single “right” guitar practice method. In order to overcome a variety of guitar practice problems and reach a wide range of musical goals, you need to use multiple effective approaches to see results in the shortest amount of time.

To help you maximize your guitar practice efficiency and effectiveness, read below to learn 7 of the best guitar practice tips and strategies to use to become a better guitarist right now.

1. Discover The Reasons Behind Your Guitar Playing Challenges The single most important thing you must learn to do if you want to get consistent results from your guitar practice is to learn to identify the sources of all guitar playing problems you face. Most commonly, guitarists aren’t able to specifically pinpoint the exact reasons why they struggle to play something on guitar, and at best they are only vaguely aware that some problem “exists”. In order to get crystal clear about what is causing you to struggle to play something, make the challenging part even MORE difficult by making greater demands on your picking hand or fretting hand (or both). This will bring the problem (or problems) into clearer focus. Check out the video below where I demonstrate an example of one of the ways to do this on guitar:

To learn more about the practicing approach described in the video, visit this page about guitar practice advice.

2. Track How Much Progress Is Being Made In Your Guitar Playing Ultimately, you need to know whether or not your guitar practicing efforts are bringing you the results you want. You will need to measure not only the obvious skills (such as your speed of playing with a metronome) but also the intangible areas of your creativity, improvising and phrasing. One of the ways you can track your progress with the latter areas is by recording yourself and listening to your playing over time.

Knowing how well your guitar playing is improving will let you know if/when anything needs to be adjusted to make your guitar practicing more effective. Unfortunately, few guitar players ever track their progress “over time” (that means CONSISTENTLY) and this is one of the main reasons why most have no idea what they need to do to start seeing greater results in their guitar playing.

3. Know What You Are Going To Achieve Each Time You Pick Up The Guitar To Practice To maximize your guitar practice results, you need to start each session by clearly defining specific results you intend to reach when you are done practicing. This will help your concentration to stay high and will direct all your efforts towards making that goal a reality. Doing this will help you to keep track of your results and know exactly what aspects of your practicing may need to improve or be refined further.

4. Learn How To Create Guitar Exercises Out Of Everything You Practice When you find yourself struggling to play something on guitar, there are often a variety of reasons why that is the case. However, most people simply “assume” (or guess) what the problem is and therefore are not likely to find the correct solutions to their challenges.

To prevent this, make exercises out of the very music you are learning on guitar. Isolate the sections that are challenging to play and treat them as “exercises” for improving your general guitar playing. This is a much more efficient way to allocate your limited practice time.

To be clear, I am not implying that you must abandon all guitar exercises you practice, I’m only saying that most of the time you already have the exact exercises you should be working on within the songs and solos you are practicing.

5. Practice For Greater Efficiency In Your Picking Hand Technique You will always improve in every aspect of your guitar playing by making your picking hand technique better – no matter how advanced your guitar technique is right now. The single fastest way to do this is to learn how to make your picking motions very efficient and economical (without sacrificing tone). To see an effective practicing approach for developing this skill, study this guitar picking techniques video.

6. Have A Clear Vision For “How” EVERY Practice Item Is Helping Your Guitar Playing Most guitar players have no shortage of “exercises to practice”, but few guitarists ever give much thought to the role each of those items plays on their musical development. To test if you are one of such guitarists, go through your list of practice items and ask: “What is this doing for my guitar playing?” for every exercise. Like most players you will likely find that you are not able to clearly articulate the reasons why you are spending time on certain guitar practice materials. This leads to several problems:

  • Lack of clarity over your rate of musical improvement. When you are not sure what results you should be expecting, it becomes impossible to measure them.
  • Slow overall progress. Since you never took the time to select specific exercises for your “specific” guitar challenges, any results that come from your practicing happen largely on a “hit-or-miss” basis.

To solve this problem once and for all, ask yourself the basic test question for every exercise you plan to include into your practicing to determine how much it is helping you to progress towards your ultimate goals.

7. Group All Guitar Exercises By The Goal They Help You Work Towards To maximize your rate of progress on guitar, you must break down your guitar playing goals into a series of steps to go through in order to achieve your objectives. To increase your efficiency in going through this process, you must sort all guitar practice items you are working on into groups based on what result they help you to achieve. This is important for a number of reasons:

A. You will be growing in several simultaneous areas of guitar playing in an intelligent and predictable (rather than “random”) way. By knowing exactly what skills a certain guitar practice item is helping you improve, you will be less likely to end up out of balance in your playing. B. Having the clarity described above will help you to avoid making your practicing a monotonous process. If you have multiple exercises in each group, you can rotate between them at any time, keeping your practicing focused on the same general objectives without spending too long on any single item.

Armed with what you have learned from this article, begin using these strategies in your guitar practice sessions, starting TODAY! If you are consistent in applying this guitar practice advice into your playing, you will soon see your results on guitar and your confidence in your ability to reach your goals improve like never before.

About the author: Mike Philippov is a recording artist, guitar teacher and author. His articles on practicing guitar are read worldwide. Visit http://PracticeGuitarNow.com to find more free articles on practicing guitar and lessons on improving your guitar playing.

How To Gain A Lot Of Motivation For Guitar Practice

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Have you been experiencing a lack of motivation in your guitar practice? Are you unsure about what and how to practice? Do you wish you could practice guitar effectively and get better results? If so, you are not alone. It take most guitar players many years before they learn how to practice guitar in a way that is both productive and enjoyable.

As a guitar teacher, I come across all kinds of guitar playing issues through my guitar students. Over the years, I have noticed that most of my guitar students have very specific reasons for why they lose motivation for guitar practice. In order to help you increase your motivation, I have created a list of the 5 most common reasons why guitar players are unable to get great results when they practice guitar:

Reason Number 1: Not having fun with guitar practice

Many guitar players have conditioned themselves to believe that guitar practice is nothing more than a boring set of repetitive tasks. If you have this mindset, you are truly misunderstanding the basic idea behind guitar practice. In order to gain motivation to practice your instrument, you must learn how to create an effective practice schedule that helps you enjoy the learning process as you work toward your guitar playing goals. Once you obtain the right tools to create a such a highly productive and inspirational practice schedule, you will find it much easier to have fun with the time you spend practicing guitar. When you learn how to practice guitar so effectively that you see yourself getting better on a regular basis, it becomes much easier to look forward to your next guitar practice session.

To gain more insight on how you can have more fun while practicing guitar with greater motivation, check out this guitar practice methods article.

Reason Number 2: Not sure what needs to be practiced on guitar.

The majority of guitar players do not know exactly what they should be practicing and why they should be practicing it. This causes them to attempt learning as many new ideas on guitar as possible. Then, by practicing so many different ideas for guitar at once, the guitarist becomes overwhelmed. This happens because they simply do not give themselves enough time to fully process all the new information they are learning.

The key to practicing guitar effectively is to fully understand ‘what’ you must practice and ‘why’ you must practice it. Understand what you should be practicing on guitar by checking out this unique article about manifesting musical goals.

Reason Number 3: Not focusing enough on long term goals.

It takes many years to become a great guitar player. If you want to become a great guitarist, you must clearly determine the best paths to take in order to achieve your long term goals. Once you have clearly identified your long term music goals, you will need to focus on using your guitar practice time effectively to reach them. To illustrate a point, think of each of your guitar practice sessions as separate pieces of a puzzle that make up the big picture of your guitar playing goals. The more clearly you can see the big picture that you are trying to create, the easier it will be to think of ways to effectively practice guitar.

Reason Number 4: Losing motivation due to lack of quick progress.

Even if you understand the best way to effectively practice guitar, you will not achieve big results overnight. Many guitar players expect instant results when using a new practice method. Unfortunately, when they do not get the quick results they are looking for, they end up abandoning (what might be) a truly effective guitar practice method. This results in inconsistent guitar playing progress since you do not give yourself the time to get the benefits from the guitar practice methods you use. This practicing method is like listening to 15 different songs, but stopping the music after one or two seconds in each song before you can hear what the music is about. When practicing guitar, give your practice methods time to develop so that you can determine whether or not the methods are effective.

Reason Number 5: Unorganized and ineffective practicing habits

Most guitarists practice in a totally unorganized and ineffective manner. Unfortunately, they are usually unaware of this and go for weeks, months, or even years at a time using the same ineffective guitar practice methods! One example of a commonly used, yet ineffective method is the idea of using an equal amount of time on every task in your guitar practice. This is just like trying to prepare a dish by using an equal amount of ingredients without thinking about how each of the ingredients will affect the taste of the food. This guitar practice method will cause you to spend too much time on things that are not important to your overall guitar playing progress.

Another mistake that guitarists make during their guitar practice is that they spend a lot of time focusing on the guitar skills they WANT to practice rather than the guitar skills that they NEED to practice in order to achieve their musical goals. This causes their guitar playing skills to become imbalanced. As a result, their weak areas tend to hold back their ability to apply their well developed skills in musical situations.

In order to make progress in your guitar playing, it is essential to analyze your own practice methods so that you can develop an effective guitar practice schedule. To build a highly effective guitar practice routine, fill out the questions in this effective guitar practice assessment.

What should you do next?

After reading this article, you should have a better understanding of why you have a hard time staying motivated in your guitar practice. Think about how the guitar practice solutions mentioned above can apply to your current practice routine. Even though this article has only touched on a few of the problems that you might face as you develop your guitar skills, your guitar playing will benefit greatly by applying them in your everyday practice.

Learn more about the things you should be practicing during your guitar practice time by studying the information in this unique manifesting musical goals article. If you have yet to take the assessment on effective guitar practice, do this now and get personalized advice to help you improve your guitar practice methods.

About The Author: Tom Hess is a successful professional guitar player, composer and the guitarist of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He trains rock guitarists to reach their goals in music in his electric guitar lessons online. Visit his guitar lessons website to read more articles about becoming a better guitar player.