What's the Best Way to Give Guitar Lessons?

Find a handful of popular songs that all use the same 2 or 3 chords. Teach those chords, then tell the student that they can now play a song. List the songs until they find one they know, then guide them a little bit to get them playing the chords in the right order with an easy strumming pattern. I think for a first lesson, that can probablly take up 10 to 30 minutes depending on the student.

Make sure you use some big, bold, clear diagrams, maybe 1 chord box per A5 piece of paper.

Before you get them to play the guitar though, you can just take them through the parts of a guitar for 2 or 3 minutes, breaking it down to the headstock, neck and body. Then break each of those 3 down further; tuning pegs, main part of the neck, fretboard, frets, inlays (and how to use the inlays along the edge of the neck, basically what frets the dots correspond to), then the parts of the body. Maybe explain the differences betwen an electric and acoustic.

When you’ve named parts of the guitar, explain that you can play different open strings (then strum and name the strings in order, E A D G B E = Eddy Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddy). Then explain that rather than just going from string to string, you can go from fret to fret (then play along the E string upto the 12th fret, then back down again). I believe that one thing us guitarists take massively for granted is that most people probablly have no clue how ’strings’ have anything to do with an instrument; it would seem odd to us, but if you’ve never looked at a guitar up front and personal, I imagine it would need a bit of explaining. So basicallly talk them through how you actually get different notes out of a guitar.

Now, before you get them playing a chord, maybe explain what a chord is; 2 or more notes played at the same time to create ‘harmony’. While your at it, explain that a melody is notes played one after another. I don’t know how in depth you’ll want to go on a first lesson, but I personally would explain that a scale is a group of notes that ‘work well together’, and the mother of all scales is the C Major scale. I would then say that the C Major scale has 7 notes, C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Then I would teach them the relationship between the C Major Scale and the C Major Chord (the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the C Major scale. Then I would teach them the C Major scale on their guitar.

Then I would tell them that there are different types of chords; Major (happy), minor (sad). And that there is a rule you can apply to the Major scale;

C D E F G A B
Major, minor, minor, Major, Major, minor, diminished.

Take the notes of the Major scale, make the first note a Major chord, the 2nd note a minor chord, 3rd note a minor and so on, as above.

I would tell them that this rule gives you a group of chords that work well together. I might then teach them the Dm and G, then find a song that contains those chords.

Then go on to teach them a song as I explained at the beginning.

Hope this helps.

I’ve taught a few people to play and I did a teaching and learning module on my English degree. I also teach children to sail. You have to assume you are an absolute master, so the things you might think are truly basic is all new and really hard to your student. The hardest thing about teaching guitar is that you will be going over things that you find really basic, and that can get boring, but if you enjoy sharing your knowledge, that doesn’t matter.

Good luck.

Edit: It’s also important to re-cap things regularly. Maybe test them on parts of a guitar at the end of the lesson (just the easy parts, that’s quite a full on first lesson lol).