Do you even need a music teacher?
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk from Pexels
Do you even need a music teacher?
So you love music, and you want to learn to sing or play an instrument. You should! You could sign up for lessons. But why would you pay someone to teach you, when you could just use online resources (or even, if you’re doing a retro low-tech vibe, books) and teach yourself?
(Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the idea that there’s more to music lessons than learning music - I’ll come back to that at the end. For now, we’re strictly talking about learning information and acquiring skills.)
Teaching yourself is definitely an option. Maybe you could pull it off. Lots of musicians are self-taught. You can just mess around until you figure stuff out, or you could seek out books, videos, or apps to help you learn. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. are home to a host of musicians and teachers sharing free or mostly-free resources. As long as you have a device and a good internet connection, you have an immense wealth of resources available to you.
That’s not all you need, though. You’ll need time—lots of time—to find and sift through these resources, and time to practice what you’re learning. You also need some personal qualities that will allow you to take advantage of all these resources:
Patience
Concentration and attention span
Ability to interpret verbal or written explanations
Strong motivation
Strong planning and scheduling skills
Discernment
Discernment—being able to tell whether a resource is good quality, or whether you’re learning correctly—is a really important one, and, sorry, it’s unlikely you’ll have enough of it. How do you know what you don’t know? If you’re misunderstanding something or doing something wrong, how will you ever realize that?
And how do you know whether an online expert you’re learning from is qualified and whether their information and methods are good? If you’re there to learn, then by definition you lack the expertise to determine the quality of the materials.
I’m gonna get on my soapbox for just a second here: If something’s free, there’s usually a reason it’s free. Maybe it’s good quality and is being offered for free by someone who’s financially secure enough to share their knowledge purely out of goodwill. Or it comes from someone who has a big-picture business plan that involves giving out some expertise for free, or someone who doesn’t realize their work and expertise should have monetary value. Maybe it’s paid for by advertisements, or by a charitable organization of some kind. ...Or maybe it’s free because it’s not worth money. I’ve said before in Shopping Around for a Music Teacher, people usually don’t charge much when they haven’t invested much. (Not that you can assume something is high quality by how much it costs, either.)
By all means, seek out free resources, because many of them are very useful and high-quality, but maintain a bit of skepticism. Ask yourself, who is giving me this free thing? Who benefits from this situation, and how?
Cynicism aside, you may have found good resources and you may indeed have all of those qualities for self-directed learning that I listed.
You COULD teach yourself.
But will you?
Will you really?
I wouldn’t. I take lessons to learn a variety of things, including musical skills. I recently started taking composition lessons with my accomplished and delightful friend/colleague Amy Gordon. Of course, like everyone, I learn small things from the internet all the time, notably crochet skills, which I talked about in The Valley of Despair. But for more complex skills and knowledge, I prefer having a teacher. Even though there’s no reason I couldn’t teach myself about composing and work on it on my own—I’m already an expert in the field of classical music—I knew I would be happier and more successful learning from a teacher.
Being a teacher myself, I understand how much a teacher can do for you that a website or book or video or your own self won’t.
A teacher can give you the external accountability that will keep you on task. I’m not great at keeping promises to myself, and I know I’m not unique in that respect! I’m a grown-up (kind of), and I have responsibilities that I have to prioritize, so when it comes to working on things just for my own personal development, I tend to think, “I’ll get to this later,” and perpetually push my passion projects further into the future. It makes a huge difference to know there’s someone waiting to ask me if I did what I planned to do every week. Maybe you’re not like me in this respect, but it does take some mental effort to manage your own learning schedule. Even highly accomplished self-schedulers can benefit from not having to be the only one responsible for tracking goals and progress.
Teachers are much more efficient information gatekeepers than students, and a teacher can create a big-picture plan for your education. When you learn on your own, you’re confronted with seemingly infinite information, and finding the most practical thing to start with or progress to can be like looking for a needle in a stack of other needles - difficult, confusing, and also probably a bit painful. Not only will a teacher give you practical methods to apply to your learning and guide you toward the most useful information in an effective progression, a teacher will keep you from going down the wrong path and wasting your time and effort on something that’s not useful or that you’re not ready for.
A teacher can answer your questions. This saves you SO MUCH TIME compared to trying to figure things out on your own. If you want to answer your own question, you might Google it until you’re blue in the face and never come up with a satisfactory answer. If you ask your teacher, they’ll know just where to look to find the correct answer, or they might just know the answer off the top of their head.
A teacher not only helps you learn information and skills, she helps you synthesize what you’ve learned. Individual bits of knowledge aren’t as useful as seeing patterns of information. Grasping how everything fits together into a system of information makes each small part easier to understand and remember. Once you see a bigger picture, you can even start to extrapolate and figure out answers to your questions, instead of asking or seeking a resource for every issue.
A teacher can give you feedback, an essential element of effective learning. In my composition lessons, it’s the feedback that I find especially valuable, because I can only imagine how my work sounds to a first-time listener. I can never hear my work for the first time like a listener would. An outside perspective is something you can never give yourself.
A teacher’s perspective can jump-start your inspiration. My teacher’s insights act as a catalyst for my own ideas; she asks me questions I haven’t thought to ask myself. Our discussions bring me to realizations I never would have come up with on my own, which sends me down an entirely different path than I might have tried to travel otherwise. I learn things in lessons that I wouldn’t have known to try to learn on my own.
Most importantly, I think, a teacher gives you motivation and encouragement. When I try to work on my own, I constantly question whether there’s any point to what I’m doing. I’m always asking myself whether I’m doing a good job, whether anyone but me would find value in what I’ve created. And eventually I lose steam and stop trying. In an immediate sense, getting an assignment from a teacher gives you a tangible goal to work towards, and that goal gives you a reason to keep putting in effort every day. In a larger sense, getting compliments and encouragement from your teacher gives you a feeling of accomplishment that you might struggle to find without some kind of external response, and that sense of accomplishment gives you a reason to keep working over the long term.
All these benefits of having a teacher apply to learning almost anything, not just music. But for music and other performing arts, there’s one more facet: The arts are fundamentally about communication, so you need someone to communicate with. Music making is inherently about expression and connection with others, and it’s weird to try to do that entirely in isolation. Yes, you can express yourself to yourself. You can communicate with yourself. But when someone is there to hear you and see you and share your journey, it makes what you’re creating feel more real than if you kept it to yourself.
Like I said at the beginning, there’s more to music lessons than just learning music. You don’t just learn skills and songs, you become a musician. Music gets built into who you are. Part of how that happens is through relationships, and a relationship with a teacher can be foundational to your identity as a musician.
Teaching yourself is a great way to get started and find out if you want to pursue learning music. One of the best things about being self-taught is the price tag - as little as $0. If you have the money to invest in taking lessons, though, it will be well spent on a good teacher to help you and guide you as you become a musician.
If you’re in the market for a music teacher, read about how to pick the right one for you in this article: Shopping around for a music teacher Self-taught singer or pianist who’s looking for a teacher to help them level up? Visit my teaching page or send me a message.
