what a real guitar teacher can do for you

Attending weekly 1-1 guitar lessons with a real guitar teacher is still the best way to learn guitar. You’ll progress faster for a number of reasons but most importantly a good tutor will be able to focus exclusively upon your particular problems and tell you how to fix them. Learning acoustic guitar is a personal experience and slightly different for every person.

The problem is that there are a quite a lot of 'false guitar teachers' out there!

By that I mean that being able to teach guitar is a talent and like any talent not everyone has it. What tends to happen is someone who can play guitar well will decide to teach in order to make some extra money. They are certainly good guitar players but couldn’t actually ‘teach’ to save their lives. Often they are more interested in impressing you with their playing than actually teaching you anything.

Assuming however that you can find a genuinely good guitar teacher to go to then you’ll receive a lot of benefits. We’ve already talked about how they can identify and fix your problems. This is especially important in the beginning stages - if your incorrect techniques are allowed to continue unchecked they will become playing habits. Once it’s a habit you’ll find it twice as hard to correct, you’ll have to first unlearn one thing and learn another to replace it. It’s double the work.

Lastly we need to talk about motivation. Being around someone who can play acoustic guitar well will do your motivation no end of good. It’s inspiring to hear how all that natural, earthy wood in the hands of someone who knows how to play can produce such great sounds. A dose of that each week will help to keep your batteries charged and inspire you to keep practicing.

Continue onto How Can You Tell If Your Guitar Teacher Is Good Or Not?