Instruction: Paid Professional Musicians

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Jim Dufresne, I'm here to tell you about how to make a living playing music. Another way to make money is by teaching you how to play the guitar and it's fun, there again it's something you want to do. You can do it for the money, you won't be good at but if you do it cause you want to teach then you will be very happy. I have a lot of happy in my life teaching people how to play the guitar, it's fun to watch people grow. There again you necessarily don't make a lot of money, I charge $45 an hour I always run a one hour lesson and never a half hour lesson because you just can't get into the half hour lesson of what you think a student needs or think what he needs. So it's always important to ask the student expects for and then as you analyze their playing, you can see where they're not at a snuff. Their reading may not be real good that doesn't mean just reading notes, tablature is a very important part of guitar playing more so than the note reading. I'll say that again; tablature is much more important and fortunately much easier to learn than reading regular music notation. Not that reading regular notation is not advantages, it is very important and I do teach it to my students it's up to you if you want to teach it to yours. I find it valuable but tablature is more important, then I always teach the basics of harmony how music works, the actual mechanics of how music works. I teach scales, notes, arpeggio, and how chords work together like sentences. If you can learn how music thoroughly works then you can use it as a basis for constructing your own music, songwriting. I started teaching in 1975 I had private students I was very lucky to get on with the local college here. I taught for the local college for 20 years I think I figured out one time I had over 20 years spend, I had over 20 students so if I go into a supermarket and I pushed down a grocery cart and if I don't run across one of my formal students it's much unusual. I've always loved everyone of my students they're all good people everyone of them I've had some extremely talented students and some not so extremely talented students, but that in the end it doesn't make any difference because you want to have that human interaction."