What Great Music Teachers Actually Do Differently, From One Who’s Spent a Decade Finding Out

Almost everyone who has taken music lessons can sort their teachers into two categories. There were the ones whose lessons you looked forward to, who left you walking out with your instrument feeling like more was possible than when you walked in. And there were the ones who were perfectly competent, who knew the material cold, and who somehow still left you a little flatter than you arrived. The strange part is how hard it is to say what actually separated the two. Both groups knew their scales. Both could explain a chord. The difference lived somewhere harder to name.

That difference is worth naming, because it is the thing a student is really shopping for when they go looking for a teacher, and it is the thing most descriptions of teaching quietly skip over. Credentials and repertoire are easy to list. The actual texture of a great lesson is not.

Harry B., a guitar teacher at Tunelark, has spent ten years on the teaching side of that divide, and he has thought carefully about what puts a lesson in the first category rather than the second. His answers have very little to do with how much a teacher knows, and almost everything to do with how a teacher pays attention. What follows is his working picture of what the best teachers actually do, drawn from a decade of lessons taught and a lifetime of lessons taken.

Structure that knows how to bend

Ask Harry what set apart the great teachers he studied with, and he does not start with brilliance or charisma. He starts with flexibility.

“The great teachers I’ve had are really flexible with understanding what I need,” he says. “Every student teacher relationship and every lesson needs structure but this structure needs to be able to bend. A rigidly conceived lesson plan can often miss the mark when it comes to what a student needs to hear.”

That sentence holds a distinction most people miss when they picture a good teacher. The instinct is to imagine someone with a flawless curriculum, a fixed sequence of skills marched through in the correct order. Harry is not against structure. He is clear that every lesson needs it. His point is subtler: the structure is a frame, not a track. A frame holds a shape while leaving room for what shows up inside it. A track only goes one place, and a student who needs to be somewhere else is simply out of luck.

The reason that matters is that a real student rarely arrives in the exact condition the lesson plan assumed. They had a hard week, or they got unexpectedly obsessed with a song the plan did not include, or the thing that was supposed to take two sessions clicked in five minutes and left the rest of the hour open. A teacher running a rigid plan will push through the prepared material anyway and miss the live opportunity sitting right in front of them. A teacher whose structure can bend reads the room and follows what the student actually needs that day, which is usually not what the plan predicted.

Teaching students how to learn, not just what to play

The second thing Harry names is, in a sense, the whole job. A great teacher is not a delivery system for information. The information is everywhere already.

“Another sign of a great teacher is when they are able to draw the answers out of their students,” he says, “teaching them how to learn rather than simply instructing them on what to do. There are plenty of online and print resources for instruction but only a human teacher can provide the personalized guidance and encouragement of a great lesson.”

This is the line that separates a teacher from a tutorial. Anyone can be told what to do. A video can demonstrate a chord shape, a book can lay out a scale, and a student can follow either one without a teacher in the room. What those resources cannot do is draw an answer out of the particular person holding the instrument. They cannot notice that this student already half-knows the thing they are stuck on, and ask the one question that lets them find it themselves. The difference between being handed an answer and being guided to your own is the difference between a fact you forget by next week and an understanding you keep.

Drawing the answer out also does something the handed answer never can: it teaches the student how to learn. A player who has been guided to their own discoveries leaves with more than a chord. They leave with a small piece of the method for getting unstuck on their own, which compounds over years into the rare and valuable thing of a self-sufficient musician. That is why the personalized, human side of a lesson is not a luxury layered on top of the content. It is the content. The encouragement and the questions are exactly what the printed and online resources cannot supply, and exactly what a student is really paying a teacher for. It is also a large part of what makes a great music teacher in the first place.

The skill that doesn’t show up on any resume

When Harry names the single most important skill he has built in ten years of teaching, it is not a musical one. It is not a faster way to explain modes or a clever drill for sight-reading. It is the quiet discipline of actually listening.

“I’ve been teaching music for 10 years now and the biggest skill I’ve developed is active listening,” he says. “When I showed up to teach my first lesson I had an itinerary and a neat and tidy plan on how my student would get from point A to point B in the 4 lessons she had booked. It only took me 10 minutes into the first lesson to realize this was an ill-fitted approach! Every student is different with unique learning style, interests, and strengths. As a teacher I find the most effective approach is to show up with an open mind and willingness to follow the questions and energy of my student. I always teach my students about technique, theory, and improvising, but the way we arrive at these things is unique with each person.”

It is a generous thing to admit that the neat plan fell apart inside ten minutes, and it is the origin story of everything else he believes about teaching. The young teacher with the tidy four-lesson roadmap was doing what seemed responsible: preparing thoroughly, mapping the route, knowing exactly how the student would get from point A to point B. The trouble was that the map was drawn before he had met the territory. The student turned out to be a specific person with her own learning style and her own interests, and the route that looked so sensible on paper did not match the human sitting across from him.

What replaced the roadmap is the harder and far more useful skill. Active listening is what lets the structure bend on purpose rather than by accident. It is the teacher tracking, minute to minute, what is landing and what is not, where the curiosity is lighting up and where the eyes are glazing, and steering toward the live energy instead of the planned one. Notice that Harry does not abandon the material. He still teaches technique, theory, and improvising to everyone. What active listening changes is the path. The destinations are shared, but the way each student arrives at them is unique, and only a teacher who is genuinely listening can find that particular way for that particular person.

This is also the clearest answer to why teaching does not get easier to fake with experience. The skill that matters most is invisible. It is not in the lesson plan, not on the resume, not in the catalog of pieces a teacher can play. It is the moment-to-moment attention that decides whether the prepared material actually meets the student or just sails past them.

Love the instrument first, drill the fundamentals second

The last thing Harry points to is a piece of teaching orthodoxy he was handed early and has since turned almost upside down.

“I was always told to start with the fundamentals,” he says. “The fundamentals (playing with good technique, tone, and time) are very, very important but I think we need to start with learning to love our instrument first! I like to get my beginner students playing music as soon as possible and from that place of excitement, students feel more encouraged to put the work into developing their technique. I think that the concept of play and practice should exist at the same time.”

The advice he inherited is not foolish, and he is careful to say so. Technique, tone, and time genuinely matter, and a player who never builds them hits a ceiling fast. The question is one of order, and order turns out to decide who is still playing a year later. The fundamentals-first approach asks a brand new student to spend their earliest, most fragile weeks on the least musical part of the instrument, drilling clean technique before they have ever felt the joy that the technique is supposed to serve. Plenty of would-be musicians quietly conclude during those weeks that this is not for them, and put the instrument down before they ever reach the good part.

Harry flips the sequence. Get a beginner making actual music as soon as possible, and the excitement of playing a real song becomes the engine that powers everything afterward. A student who already loves the sound they are making has a reason to go back and refine their technique, because now the technique is in service of something they can feel. The discipline grows out of the delight rather than being demanded before it. His final phrase is the whole philosophy in miniature: play and practice should exist at the same time. The work and the joy are not separate stages, with the grim part front-loaded and the fun deferred. They run together from the first lesson, and the joy is what keeps the work alive long enough to pay off.

It is a through-line that connects everything else he believes. A teacher whose structure can bend, who draws answers out instead of dictating them, and who listens closely enough to follow each student’s energy is a teacher who can keep that early love intact while the skills get built. The flexibility, the listening, and the love-first sequence are not three separate tricks. They are one stance toward the student, which is to treat the person as the center of the lesson and the method as the thing that adapts.

Frequently Asked Questions

About Harry

Harry’s path to the guitar was set before he ever held one. Ask him what first drew him to the instrument and the answer is pure sense-memory: “The sweet smell of mahogany and formaldehyde emanating from my dad’s guitar cases.” The instrument was in the house, in the air, before it was ever in his hands.

Today Harry is a Nashville-based session guitarist, composer, and educator with over a decade of experience teaching, touring, and recording across North America. He holds a bachelor of music with honours, did graduate study in improvisation, and has shared stages with Grammy-winning artists. Much of his own playing is rooted in jazz and bluegrass, but his teaching deliberately centers on the things that serve any player at any level: learning music by ear, improvisation, music theory, reducing tension at the instrument, and the kind of student-led approach this whole article describes. He teaches online guitar lessons to everyone from total beginners to advanced players.

What still keeps the work fresh for him fits his philosophy exactly. The moment that makes the job feel worth it, he says, is “when a student challenges me with a question I don’t have an answer to.” It is a telling thing for a teacher to celebrate. The person whose whole method is built on drawing answers out of students is, fittingly, the one who lights up when a student hands him a question he has to go find the answer to himself. The teaching never stops being a two-way street.

And the largest lesson the years have handed him is one any student would be glad to hear from the person guiding their practice: “Given the tools, everyone has the ability to make something original.” It is the love-first philosophy stated as a belief about people. The teacher’s job is to put the tools in reach and protect the spark long enough for the student to use them.

Ready to learn with a teacher who actually listens?

If you have ever had a lesson that left you flatter than you arrived, the missing ingredient was probably not knowledge. It was attention: a teacher willing to bend the plan, draw the answers out of you, and keep the joy of playing alive while the skills come together. Harry is currently accepting new guitar students at Tunelark.

Looking for an online guitar teacher? See our full Online Guitar Lessons page for everything you need to know about getting started.

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About Jennifer Heath

I'm Jennifer Heath, VP at Tunelark and a lifelong singer. I joined the company in 2020 and oversee much of what makes Tunelark work for our students and our teachers. That includes hiring, training, and supporting our instructors, customer and student support, marketing, and the day-to-day operations of the business.

I started voice lessons at age 7, sang with professional choirs that toured internationally through my teens, and performed solo at competitions and community events across Texas before stepping away in my twenties to study other interests, including business management. I haven't performed professionally in years, but I'll happily take the microphone at a karaoke night. Music has been in me every day of my life. Being able to spend the last six years working inside an online music education company, while traveling the world full-time, has been a perfect fit.

I believe deeply that music belongs in every life. For the self-expression, the discipline, the comfort, and the simple joy of it.

The Tunelark blog is where we share what we've learned about online music lessons: how to choose an instrument and a teacher, what to expect from your first lesson, how the major platforms compare, and how to keep music going through the busier seasons of life. Practical, honest writing you can act on.