(This is a continuation of last week’s blog on Learning guitar with a family member or friend.)
(Cute little Aiden, at 14 months still a little to young to learn guitar from dad, even though dad is a guitar teacher) 🙂
What is The Cost of Free Lessons From a Family Member or Friend
The “Free” aspect of learning guitar with a parent, sibling or friend, is no longer so appealing when you are aware of the price you end up paying to get those lessons free.
- Slower progress
- Which means: waste of your talent
- Waste of your time (you could be progressing 5 times more quickly and use the extra free time to do other cool things in your life)
- Waste of your musicianship
- Bad Habits
- Inefficient use of practice time, which a parent is not equipped to detect, guide or fix
- Incorrect teaching of material
- No guidance in how to practice
- Less Accountability: you will not push yourself as hard in your practice when your lessons are with a loved one than when you have those lessens with a real teacher.
- Not as much of this cool, uplifting feeling of accomplishment you get when you can play things you could not yet play yesterday.
- Less personal satisfaction and joy. (Learning guitar is all the more fun the better one progresses)
- Less certainty you are actually learning and doing it right
- More insecurity and thus less confidence about your musicianship
- Gaps in your knowledge
- Seeing the critiques and guidance of a loved one as criticism
- Taking things personal much more quickly
- Which often leads to tension, frustration, anger, and other negative emotions felt in the lesson experience with a family member. This takes away the fun from learning an instrument
- Not looking forward to lessons because of miscommunications with the family member.
- Too many distractions in a house, which are not there in a professional teaching studio
- No teaching materials, hand outs, or teaching software and backing tracks available which make the learning experience all the more fun and productive.
- Lesses progress = taking longer before you discover cool, fun new things on guitar = lesser new adventures coming your way = a feeling of being stagnant and stuck = lesser feeling of achievement
- … and so much more.
Conclusion:
A great deal of your musical ability, progress, time, and even musical joy gets wasted in the process.
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