Even before the pandemic teaching guitar online was a great way to expand your business. But now everyone is used to learning online, it is even easier to create an online guitar teaching business.
However, teaching online, especially an instrument can be tricky. I’ve put together this guide to help your perfect your online teaching .
Teaching Guitar Online
If you are new to guitar teaching I recommend starting with my Ultimate Guide To Teaching Guitar first. You should have a good understanding of the main principles of teaching guitar before you read this. Once you understand the fundamentals this article will show you how to adapt them for online teaching.
Which Video Messenger should you use?
In my teaching business I use a lot of different video messengers, Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Video messenger. I do this because I want to be able to offer my services on whichever platform my students feel most comfortable.
Not everyone is that technical. If you use a platform they are not comfortable using this can put them off online lessons.
It’s not too difficult to set up them up and it could help you get more students.
Equipment
You should definitely use a laptop when teaching online. Mainly because you can quickly and easily adjust the camera angle by moving the lid of the laptop. You want your student to be able to clearly see your face for the majority of the lesson but this sometimes means they can’t see all of your guitar. When I need to demonstrate something on the neck of the guitar I can bring the lid down so they can see exactly what I am doing.
I would also recommend getting an external webcam. You don’t need to spend a lot and it really helps. The picture and sound on my webcam is much better than the inbuilt camera on my laptop.
Set Up For Online Teaching
First of all you need to make sure you are in a quiet room with the door shut. A lot of video messengers have compressors which makes background noise louder. When I’m teaching I can sometimes hear conversations happening in other rooms in my student’s house. Wherever you set up, make sure it is quiet.
You need to think about what your student can see behind you. Ideally you want to be sat in front of a clear white wall. You want the focus to be on you, any pictures, posters or mess behind you can be distracting.
When you are teaching guitar online you should always make sure that the room behind you is neat and tidy. You want to look as professional as possible when you are teaching. This will make a big difference to how you come across when you are doing your lessons.
Teaching Online
Ok, so now you are all set up let’s get down to the actual teaching. There are limitations to teaching online and you’ll need to adapt to them.
Your student will not be able to see and hear you as well as if you were doing the lesson in person. As I mentioned before you need to take advantage of the camera angle to help with this. When you are talking to your student you need to have the camera focused on your face. Your student will take in a lot more if they can see your facial expressions.
We’ve all seen the Youtube video tutorial where the camera is just pointing at someone guitar and their face is out of shot. We know that it is their voice on the video but it appears weird and impersonal.
However at some point in the lesson your student will also need to be able to see what you are playing on the guitar. You should start by doing a explanation of what you are about to teach them with the focus being on your face. Then move the camera to focus on your guitar so you can demonstrate it. The combination of the two will really benefit your teaching.
Check Learning
When you are teaching anything you need to be aware of your student’s understanding. Very often if someone doesn’t understand you they won’t tell you because they don’t want to look stupid. When you are in person you can often pick this up from facial expressions and body language. This is much harder when you are teaching guitar online.
To check that your student understands you can ask questions or get them to play a short section of a song. For example, if you would like to teach the song below.
Wild Thing
A A DD E E DD
You could explain how to play the whole song and then ask your student to try. But if they didn’t understand something at the start of the explanation you’ve just wasted a lot of time and made them feel dumb. It’s better to break this into stages and check their learning as you go.
For example, you could start by checking if they can remember the A, D and E chord shape and ask them to play them. Then you could explain the difference in rhythm for the A’s and D’s and again ask them to play that. This way your are building up to the full song and you always know if your student is following you.
Playing Together
I’ve always found that one of the best experiences you can give your students is to get them playing with you and really feel what it is like to play with another musician. This is almost impossible when teaching guitar online, there is always a slight delay.
There are ways around this. You can play for your student and your student will be able to play along. This will sound fine to your student but terrible on your end. There is a slight delay for your video to get to your student and then another delay for your student’s video coming back to you.
Even if your student is playing perfectly in time it will sound out of time when their video gets back to you. This makes it very hard to really assess your student’s playing.
One way around this is to use backing tracks. These can be tracks that you have prepared and recorded and sent to your student. Or they can be backing tracks taken from Youtube. The best way to do this is to ask your student to play to the backing track on their phone and then play along to it. When they play them on the same device they are using for the lesson it can cause problems with the sound.
This is the best way to give them the experience of playing with someone else and give you the opportunity to check their playing.
Guitar Teaching Resources
Using resources during online lessons can be a real pain. If you are really organised you can get everything together and send it over to your student before the lesson. However, a lot of the time your student still won’t have printed them off or have them ready for the lesson.
Here are a couple of ways around this.
Share Screen
The most obvious thing you can do is have your teaching materials ready on your computer and then share the screen with your student. Depending on the video call software you are using you can annotate the document to highlight the areas you want your student to play.
The big limitation with this though is that your student can see your resource but they won’t be able to see you very well. This makes it difficult to demonstrate how to play the music or any techniques you should use.
This can still work but you have to be much more descriptive when you are telling your student what to play. Go into as much detail as you need and remember you will still be able to see your student so you can correct their technique as they go.
Use The Chat Function
The technique I use the most is the chat function. This is especially useful on Skype and Microsoft Teams because it saves the chat from all of your calls. Your student can go back and look at the notes and you can check what you have covered in previous lessons.
If you are teaching someone a chord progression it’s really straight forward, you can just write out the chords.
G D Am C : D
You can use the spacing of the letters to represent how long each chord lasts. In this example the G, D and Am are all four beats and the last C and D are two beats. I use the colon in between the C and D to highlight they are only two beats.
You can show the rhythm and strumming pattern in the chat like this.
1 2 3 + 4
D D D U D
By placing two chat messages on top of each other you can show the rhythm and strumming pattern at the same time.
Lead guitar is a bit more difficult. I write it out like this, the capital letter tells you the string and the number tells which fret to play.
G0 0 B3 3 e0 0 B3
This is quite straightforward and all my student including kids are able to follow along.
Quick tip – I use a capital E to represent the low E string and lower case e to represent the high E string.
In reality you will use a combination of all of these in your teaching but it is useful to be able to do all of them comfortably.
Conclusion
Teaching guitar online is definitely possible as long as you consider how you are going to do it beforehand and adapt your lessons to fit. Most of these techniques are quite straightforward you just need to make sure you are doing your preparation.