IN-HOME GUITAR LESSONS IN CALGARY RATES

July 18, 2024

In-home guitar lessons in Calgary rates vary from teacher to teacher. But like most things, you get what you pay for. Naturally, private music lessons provided in a student’s home will cost more due to the time and expense incurred by a teacher of having to travel to a from each lesson. With today’s growing inflation, all these costs absorbed by private teachers are increasing with no end in site.

in-home guitar lessons in Calgary

Like most people, you want to try to keep your music lesson costs as low as possible. Parents often have their children in various other activities, be it ballet, sports or other pastimes, and these costs can add up quickly. So it’s important to know what you’re paying for when it comes to private in-home guitar lessons in Calgary.

Time Is Money

What many folks do not know is that the time you or your child spends in their guitar lesson is not the true cost of their lesson. Music teachers are indeed paid by the hour, but they’re not like the hourly employees you see in a café or grocery store. That is because once barista or cashier clock out from their shifts, they’re done with work for the day.

Once you or your child’s guitar lesson is over, their teacher is not done finishing their job as it relates to the lesson provided earlier. There are additional tasks that a guitar teacher must do to make sure the student’s subsequent lessons are prepared correctly. This is to ensure that he or she continues to progress as quickly and easily as possible.

First and foremost is good lesson record-keeping. That is, making sure the details of what was covered in each in-home guitar lessons session is recorded. With that, the teacher can avoid repeating unnecessary exercises during the next lesson. Instead, the teacher can help the student move things forward and continue along their musical journey. Students will typically not keep track of what was covered from lesson to lesson. So it’s up to the teacher to maintain accurate records.

Private guitar teachers generally work independentally and not as part of a music chool or studio. This means they must manage all aspects of their business. This may entail everything from managing to find students in the first place (i.e. marketing), to scheduling and preparing each lesson. Then, of course comes the commuting to each student’s house and providing the actual lessons. And again, their work doesn’t stop there. After the lesson any responsible in-home guitar teacher will update each student’s progress file

Lesson Record-Keeping & Preparation

Then they will begin planning each student’s next lesson, ideally soon after the previous lesson was provided so that the last lesson is still fresh in their mind. A busy teacher will also take notes during every lesson. This is because at the end of the day of having taught any number of lessons, many details will have been forgotten. Again, this practice can be very time consuming and thus costly. But necessary if helping your students progress swiftly is top of mind.

Another huge time consumer is the time it takes to learn new songs. My personal and successful approach to teaching in-home guitar lessons in Calgary is focused on the material being taught. Simply put, learning to play any musical instrument demands practice and practice requires motivation. While many people claim that they just don’t have enough time during the week to practice, the truth is, practice time is just not a priority. Like any activity in life, be it for work or pleasure, we somehow mange to ’make’ the time for those things we choose to do.

It’s virtually a no-brainer that a guitar student will be more motivated to practice playing their instrument if they truly enjoy the material at hand. In other words, the songs they personally enjoy listening to and wish to play. Though I’ve persoanlly taught over 800 songs ranging in genres from rock, country, blues, jazz, and folk to Christmas songs, national anthems and a whole lot more… I’m often asked to teach a song I’ve never played or even heard of. So much so, it seems I’m learning a new song almost every second day. As difficult and time consuming as it is, I actually enjoy the challenge plus I’ve discovered so many new songs I’ve come to love.

Teaching Students To Teach Themselves

Indeed, an opportunity arises whenever I have a student requesting a song I’ve never played myself. Realizing private guitar lessons tend to be more expensive, I do try to lesson the financial burden on my students by teaching them to teach themslves. There are so many resources available to music students these days, both online and various digital devices to help students teach themselves. This is far from intuitive for most students but can in fact be taught methodically.

Basically I have the student walk through the steps I would take when trying to teach myself a new song. (We’ll get into those steps in a future blog post.)

A Well-Equipped In-Home Guitar Lessons Teacher

Many music schools are actually located within musical instrument stores. Thus students attending lessons in these music schools will have easy and immediate access to any supplies they may need at any given time. A more responsible in-home guitar teacher will make sure to always have extra supplies on hand. This can include different guitar strings (steel, nylon, guages etc.), capos, picks, and tuners to name a few common supplies.

Conclusion

So as you can see, there are a multitude of reasons why in-home guitar lessons in Calgary tend to be more expensive that those charged at music schools, studios and camps etc. In the long run students with private teachers will certainly progress faster that say those in group classes. The cost of in-home guitar lessons in Calgary will probably be higher at the outset. But the real value in how I personally teach my students comes from teaching them ways to teach themsleves how to improve on their own as guitar players.

Doing so, with an engaged student, will naturally reduce the number of guitar lessons they’ll need to reach their musical goals and objectives.