Trying to find work as a guitar teacher.
It's a rigged game now.
This is a look back at my career as a guitar teacher. Times have changed considerably since my first days of teaching lessons at the local music store. It's always been tough to make a decent living as a music instructor, but nowadays, it's damned near impossible.
I didn't go to college to learn how to play music.
I also didn't go to college for any sort of business training. In fact, instead of going to college, I went to work and learned a trade as a full time baker. It was very good pay, but very hard work. In my early twenties, going to college was for people who came from wealth. I most certainly did not come from a well-to-do family. I was working as a paperboy before I was a teenager. In the blue-collar town of Racine, Wisconsin, if you wanted to get ahead in life, you simply went to work. Very few people in my circle ever entertained the idea of going to college. There were some local colleges, but they were more community colleges. I knew early on that college just wasn't in my future. If I wanted to get out and make something of myself, I had to go to work right out of high school. So, that's exactly what I did.
Both of my parents were musicians. My old man was a drummer and my mother was a singer. In the early days of my youth, I remember the stereo being on in the living room much more than the television ever was. Music was a huge deal in our house. My parents never pushed me or any of my other siblings into taking up an instrument. I never even knew that I wanted to play the guitar until my best friend brought one home from school one afternoon, and proceeded to tell me that he was going to take lessons with the nuns at his church. Within a week or two, I was taking guitar lessons at the local music store three blocks down from our house.
The guitar took some time for me to understand. This was mostly due to the guitar that I had. It was an old "Kay" acoustic guitar. The neck was warped which made it nearly impossible to push the strings down any higher than the third fret. It was the only guitar available for me to use. I saved my paper route money and a year later, I purchased a brand new copy Telecaster electric guitar for $118.00. My parents were unable to continue paying for my lessons, so I paid for them out of my paper route earnings. The guitar just made sense to me early on. I took lessons, but mostly, I taught myself how to play things my teacher wasn't teaching me. My lessons were only a half-hour once every other week. I was learning much more on my own. It also helped that my best friend and I played together all the time.
By the time I got to high school, I joined the jazz band and began playing the bass guitar. This happened mostly by accident and out of necessity. They needed a bass player in the band, and I wanted to be in the band. The bass guitar came easily to me, like a fish to water. By my junior and senior years, I was known as "Dave the bass player." One stoner classmate even dubbed me as “Guitarski”, as a combination of my last name and the guitar. Clever, indeed. Music became my identity. I worked and practiced endlessly to earn that identity. I knew early on that music would be my life. I just didn't know in what capacity it would evolve.
Over the years, I played in many bands and played many gigs. I loved the idea of being a real working musician. The only thing was, it was not something you could only commit to on the weekends. Musicians think of what they do as a job, just like any other job. The only problem that existed for me was the instability of income. I had heard all my life about the underworld life of the starving artist/musician. These were people who barely existed day to day, living life on their own terms. I was attracted to the romance of it all, but I also wanted to have a stable way to pay my bills. So, I remained the weekend warrior. I worked my jobs and played in bands, never really doing it for the money. I didn't have to. I had a job.
I worked at Orlando International Airport for nearly nine years. I was getting burned out. I wanted something different, something much more rewarding in my life. I was still young and had plenty of time to explore new options for my life. My good friend, guitar teacher and band mate, Mike, told me that I should consider teaching guitar on my days off. Mike had been a guitar teacher since high school. For him to suggest it as an option for me, meant quite a lot. So, I met him at the local music store one afternoon. He showed me around, told me what he actually did for lessons and made it clear that he believed that I could teach beginners how to play the guitar. I had never once thought about teaching music as a job. To help seal the deal, he told me that he would give me a few of his students. Within a week, I started teaching my very first students at the store on my days off from the airport. I had always made good money at the jobs I worked in my youth. Working as a part time guitar teacher was originally only supposed to be an experimental way for me to supplement my income. I had no idea that things would change so dramatically.
I went to work at the airport one afternoon. The supervisor pulled me aside and told me that our contract with the airline had not been renewed and that we were all out of a job by the end of the month. At first, I reacted as anyone would react when they had just found out that they would soon be unemployed. I think that in time it took during that one shift, I began to understand that this was happening for a reason. One door was closing and another better door was opening a little wider.
By the end of 1997, I had roughly 30 weekly students. I soon started teaching lessons in the homes of my students as a way to make better money. I loved being my own boss. The unfortunate reality was very simple. I had to quickly learn how to maintain my business as the boss, the scheduler, the bookkeeper, the bill collector, transportation and teacher all in one. Let's just say, it took a while for me to get the hang of being my own boss.
The income from teaching has never been all that stable or profitable.
In fact, most of my career as a guitar teacher has been some of the hardest days of my life. But, this is the world where I belong. Music has always been my life. I have been a musician for nearly a half a century. I have been teaching lessons on and off for nearly twenty-eight years. I love teaching. People actually pay me good money to show them how to properly practice their instruments.
Around 1999, I got a fresh start on things. I did okay with my lessons for the next several years. I still struggled, but I managed to pay most of my bills on time, and I never went hungry. Then, by 2012, things started to get really bad. I couldn't keep a steady roster of students. I would gain one new student and lose two. This cycle repeated until around 2017, when I had only a couple of students on my roster. I had to walk away from teaching for the first time in 21 years.
I ended up back at the airport for a few years. For health reasons, I left the airline industry again in 2021, and went back to teaching guitar lessons. This was during the peak of the covid plandemic. If you will recall, lots of people stayed home out of fear. This worked well for me because I was getting calls from prospective new students every week. These people were bored and wanted something to do. I had a roster of nearly 20 weekly students by the end of 2021. In 2022, the covid fears began to slowly dissipate and people started going back outside. Normalcy was finally coming back. By the end of 2022, I was back down to twelve weekly students.
Everything would have been okay until I got a notice from my landlord that they were going to increase my rent $250 on the next lease. No reasons were given. They were simply jumping on board with the absurd and arbitrary rent hikes the rest of the country had started to do. I am currently paying more money per month in rent than I have ever paid in my life - for a shoe box apartment in a building that is over 50 years old. Then, my car insurance exploded and nearly doubled. I haven't filed a claim since 1998, but for some reason, I now have to pay over $200/month on a 17 year old car. My electric/utilities bill used to be around $75/month. I now pay over $110/month for the exact same services. I had to replace my Android cell phone with a newer high end model in 2022. My monthly payments have doubled. I remember the days when you could fill your grocery cart at Walmart for $100. That same $100 now buys you one third of that. I drive all day, going from lesson to lesson, all over Orlando. Luckily, I drive a small engine car that gets about 22mpg. $20 worth of gas at the pump, barely moves the needle on the dash. Everyone is feeling the pinch of a failing economy. I see homelessness around Central Florida like I have never seen before. Every busy intersection has at least two people standing around with cardboard signs with illegible writing.
I presently have 13 active weekly students.
This was once, plenty of students for me to make enough money each month to pay my bills. Now, it doesn't even make a dent. I would need to have at least 20-25 weekly students on my roster, with no cancellations, for me to make a decent living. Here is where the existing problem has plagued me for many years. What I do for a living is considered a luxury for most people. Not everyone can afford me. Hell, I can't even afford me.
I read and hear about the poverty level income in Florida being around $1255.00/one person/month, or just over $15k a year - and I truly wonder how people are making it. Well, they aren't. It doesn't matter who you are, what education or degrees you have, everyone is struggling hard. I guess it only stands to reason that less people are interested in paying for guitar lessons, when they should be spending their money on groceries to feed their families.
It's a very difficult pill to swallow, especially when the landlord doesn't care why your rent is late or why you can't pay it on time. If I could put 20 people on my roster, I would do it in a heartbeat. I'm struggling just to hold onto the students I have now. Music stores are going out of business, cutbacks on staffing for those music stores too. Some music stores only have lessons scheduled for a few hours on only a few days each week.
I’ll be 61 years old in May. By the time I will be eligible to collect social security, it will be all but depleted. Governmental help for retirees will be mostly gone within the next ten years. Medicaid will be gone before the end of this decade. They have plenty of our tax money to send overseas to fund wars, but man-in-the-sky forbid they take care of their own people sleeping in the streets. It's a rigged game now.
I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to hold onto what I have. The cost of living for me has been far out of reach for well over two years. I have been living on borrowed time ever since. That time is about to run out very soon unless I catch a really good break. Pretty scary world we now live in.