There are two different points of view that i’ve encoutered. The first one is more academic and it says, that a good teacher is one of the main things to become a great musician. It almost claims, that without a teacher you will not be able to get any significant results. And the second point is completely oposite and it’s that if you have talent and you put in the effort, than you don’t even need a teacher. So, do you think teacher is important, or you can get away with being self taught and still be great? Hope my English is good enough 
I think if we need to ask ourselves if we need a teacher the answer is obvious lol!
There are a very small number of musicians who reach amazing levels without the aid of a teacher. Most of us aren’t so lucky though. Plus, even the ultra gifted don’t know everything and would benefit from someone else’s feedback.
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Age, skill level, goals or level of commitment have a huge impact of course. In the beginning of learning, I would say yes. But I think an interesting extension to your question could be, what types of personalities benefit greatly from teachers/mentors/idols and exactly what role does the teacher play there.
I got my first theory teaching and general musical coaching when about 17-18 years old from a friend who was much further along in music theory. He really wanted to teach us, and being the eldest of our group and a sort of a badass big brother figure with an actual band, he got us very hyped up about getting better. It was actually cool to be learning theory with him. He taught and quizzed us constantly and made sure we knew the basic stuff better than the other kids around us. It gave us a good start and made us a bit proud of ourselves, too.
I later realized that I’m influenced quite a bit by good teachers - not always just because of the material, but because of the way they teach. I often get kinda hyped up and excited to learn when a good teacher, whose pedagogic language I can attune to, has a conversation with me. Good chemistry with a mentor can make learning feel so much more fun and important, which can be just the thing you need to keep going. In that sense, I feel like I “need” teachers from time to time.
However, a very good friend of mine and musical partner of many years has told me that he was almost bothered by having to take bass lessons in conservatory. He was mostly self-taught at that point, and already very good, basically the best technical bassist in the school. He said he couldn’t benefit very much from the bass lessons themselves, apart from having to study more genres.
Maybe he was simply above the level of education, but knowing him quite well, it always felt like this was more due to his strong DIY type of personality. He just figures stuff out himself, he does not need the conversational aspect as much to keep himself learning. He has musical idols and sources of inspiration, but he doesn’t feel the need to draw as much from them. And it’s all fine, just different types of learners.
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Perhaps the most valuable thing a teacher can do is help you fix mistakes before they become habits. Even if you’re a highly motivated person following a curriculum, a good teacher can recognize things you are doing that will hinder your progress, and make corrections or suggest alternative ways to do things that might work better than the way you’re doing it. And on the flipside, they can recognize and encourage things you do well, to help you be confident about things where you’re on the right track.
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I think that having someone experienced there to give feedback and opinions and bounce things off is very valuable when starting out.
Also there’s always something new to learn, like Joe said “no-one knows everything”.
As far as correcting mistakes early on, yes that’s important, but a player also must be allowed to develop their own technique and style.
That’s the thing with today’s learners, you worry that too many players are being taught the same technique through the net (and online forums like this one lol ) and that might result in a lower number of unique and distinctive players.
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I strongly disagree with it. In fact most of electric guitarists(correct me if i’m wrong) are self taugh, at least it was so in the 20th century. I think it has to do with the fact, that there was no “academia” around electric guitar. For example if you learn classical piano, you can later apply the technical skills you have to other genres. But if you learn classical guitar, although there are similarities, it’s still a different instrument.
That’s cool. We all have our own viewpoints and I certainly don’t expect you to agree with mine.
There may be a disconnect in where we are coming from. I thought in your initial post you mentioned something about the guitarists becoming ‘great’. I definitely agree that plenty of guitarists are self taught, especially in the rock genre and especially in the first parts of the 20th century. Whether or not they are ‘great’ is a different matter. And we likely have our own definitions of greatness.
As I was typing my first response and said there were a small number of musicians who reach amazing levels and are self taught, the 2 names that came to my mind were Yngwie and Eddie Van Halen. I could be wrong but I thought both professed to be totally self taught. I still hold to my view that the number of guitarists who reach that level, and also do it totally on their own with no teacher, is pretty small. Steve Vai and Al Di Meola I’d also consider at that same level of elite playing, and they’ve both had some formal training. I guess whether or not their training had any impact on their greatness…you see where this is going…I feel like this is one of those loaded discussions that has no answer and part of it is that there are too many variables and vague terms.
What is the definition of a great player? If a great player has had a teacher, did this help or would the player have gotten just as good on their own? What is the definition of having had a teacher? Does it mean you have to go to Music School at the university level? Does taking lessons at the local music shop count? Do I have to have actually paid $ for the lessons? What if I have an uncle who’s an awesome jazz cat and gives me some pointers every time I see him at family gatherings? Can I count him as my teacher? I’ve read a few columns in Guitar World magazine by John Petrucci that had a lasting impact on my playing. Can I consider him my teacher?
Also, I just had a moment of Deja Vu with this thread, because we’ve been here before on the forum. It didn’t end well lol!
This stuff is fun to discuss for sure, but the conclusions we’ll come to aren’t much different than if I made a thread titled “Who’s better, Eric Johnson or Steve Morse?”
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It has a lot to do with the teacher you get. I’ve gone to teachers that basically reinforced my confirmation bias that I didn’t need one, and walked away feeling it was a waste. But I’ve also had at least one teacher in my life who could always find something new and exciting for me to play or think about. There’s no substitute for that level of instruction.
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Well with so many different mediums available, and great software I dont know, I would say if you are wondering that you should make sure the teacher you go with is as enthusiastic about the same genre of music, and players as you.
As long as you can get a good teacher in the genre youre trying to play or learn, he will absolutely be of value and might have certain exercises that helped him that might help you. But if you feel like you are plateauing seek another teacher of your favorite genre.
I think what you meant is we should all be teaching because those that can do, and those that cant teach. Haha!
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Didn’t Frank Zappa teach Steve Vai or at least give him some guidance? It doesn’t hurt to ask someone for help, advice, insight, critique, not everyone has musical genetics buried in their dna brain ear meats.
Take with a grain of salt, because it’s said on stage, but at the beginning of this clip, Steve Vai tells the audience what “The Vai Advantage” is:
This is exactly the type of conversation i’m tryin to provoke here 
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I think in terms of music theory, it’s quite important to be fed the information in a linear way, as it is not based on pure logic, it’s very convoluted and if you like me try to learn yourself you can jump around endlessly with very little fitting into place. I also have quite bad ADD and get very stressed focusing on and constantly searching for information, and being spoon feed the information is very helpfull.
Besides that, I’d class just another person to play with and talk about music a teaching experience, even if they know less than you, you can still learn loads putting concepts into practice with another person. Knowing something is totally different from actually putting it into practice, and you can’t really do that alone.
This is a good point. We have more resources than ever and our chances of becoming ‘great’ without a teacher (i.e. going to a weekly lesson or music school or whatever) are definitely more promising than ever.
I could actually use myself as an anecdotal example. I’m classically trained but I’ve had almost no ‘formal’ rock guitar training. From my experience, other than some isolated fretting hand scenarios, there isn’t much overlap between classical and rock. Meaning, I’ve applied almost none of my classical training to my rock ‘lead’ playing.
I did take 3 months of lessons with a guy at a local music shop when I was 17. He was a great player. He didn’t really teach me anything I didn’t already know at that point though. He showed me things like how he visualized the fretboard, which wasn’t much different than the way I did it myself. He did give me copies of Paul Gilbert and John Petrucci’s instructional videos though Those had a big impact on my endeavors, for sure.
Is this enough to consider myself self-taught, in the rock realm? Maybe, I don’t know. Am I a great player? Hell no lol! I don’t know if I’d be any better at all even if I would have gone to Berklee or GIT. I’d definitely have a different perspective. Technique wise though…Troy is the only one who’s pinpointed why alternate picking must be done a certain way (or way(s)). I feel like someone else probably would have just told me to play with a metronome and speed it up little by little. I was already doing that…didn’t work.
I’ve made more technical advancement since getting a CtC subscription a couple years ago than I have in the past decade though. And maybe that’s the heart of this thread @I_VI_ii_V ? Do we need a ‘teacher’ in the traditional sense to advance? If that’s the question, then the answer is probably ‘no’. Still, I feel like it’s just that times have changed and the access is just better now. I never, ever, EVER would have come to the conclusion that my picking technique had no escape and that’s what caused me to cap out at 16ths in the 160 - 170 bpm range (for only very short phrases) prior to learning about CtC.
Oh, and I should add, even after going over every single video in the Primer, I was STILL doing it wrong lol! Yes, I am that effing dense It was only when I did I technique critique and Troy and Tommo told me I wasn’t getting it that something really changed. And I wasn’t even slow at that point. I was doing a JP chromatic run in the 16ths @ 180 bpm range. Troy classed it as ‘good’ playing and it was fairly clean Still, it was not quite right. It wasn’t as efficient as it should have been. My grip/wrist angle/slant was fighting with the nature of my motion mechanic. I needed a paid product and a hands on form of feedback from the creator to really get it.
So I couldn’t have done it on my own. That’s me though. There are some super intuitive people who don’t need much help. I still feel like the vast majority of guitarists benefit from some good instruction.
I think this is a good perspective from Quentin Tarantino on film. Same goes for guitar.
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I really think the only teaching we need is how to speak and comprehend music. Everything else is the creativity, and physical barriers associated with technique. So three separate realms of study that you could get teachers for, but the only necessary one is being taught how to speak it.
I think it’s useful to distinguish between creative pursuits with a high level of technical difficulty and creative pursuits with a low level of technical difficulty.
Tarantino loves to rail against film school (which arguably says more about the state of film schools than about whether it’s useful for an aspiring filmmaker to have a “teacher”). I’m reminded of an Orson Welles quote, which speaks to the idea that making a great film has more to do with having something interesting to “say” as an artist rather than having any unusual technical facility with respect to “how to say it” (though that of course was a little disingenuos even in Welles’ heyday, as he is viewed as an innovator not only in the shots he chose, but sometimes in how they were achieved). Anyway, Welles famously said this in an interview: “I’ve known only one great cameraman—Gregg Toland, who photographed Citizen Kane. He said he could teach me everything about the camera in four hours—and he did.” This says a couple of things, if we accept what Welles said as fact: 1) Learning what you need to know about the camera doesn’t take very long. 2) Welles still was taught those things by an expert rather than discovering them for himself.
But back to my point about high versus low technical difficulty in creative pursuits:
Dancing. People go to school for years to learn certain types of dancing. But dancing boils down to “move your body”. We all know how to move our bodies, right? So we can all just teach ourselves to dance. And there are probably creative and intelligent people who do something interesting with dance without formal training. But how many self-taught dancers reach the pinnacle of recognition in an established style? Probably zero. Then what if we raise the bar a litte. Figure skating. If you have access to skates and ice, you can be a self-taught figure skater. Maybe you’ll come up with something cool that nobody has seen before, but probably not. How long will it take you to teach yourself to perform popular elements like camel spins and axel jumps? How much faster would you learn those things if you had access to an expert coach?
In music, there have been performances across a broad spectrum of easy/difficult that have been recognized as artistically significant. Sex Pistols performing God Save the Queen is a different kind of guitar playing than Eruption by Van Halen. Arguably, the bar for “stumbling into” creating something like Eruption is a lot higher than the bar for “stumbling into” creating something like God Save the Queen. Eddie did it, but for every Eddie, there are a million people stuck at AC/DC riffs, and millions more who give up guitar within a year.
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As of now with the internet, passion and drive are king.
In the past you wouldn’t have the information to absorb as much as we do today. So you’d need an older person who has collected that info and then you stand on their shoulders as the saying goes.
I think whatever teaches you the basics fastest before you get to jaded and old, is the way to go, it used to be old wise teachers that could cut through all the bs and give you a foundation fast. Now there is so much out there that you just have to have the passion and drive to get ahead.
Though to counter that, in my own experience, the internet has acually been too much, to much info confusing the hell out of me. Perhaps guide is a better word these days than teacher.
Ultimately I believe what Quentin said is true, you need that fundamental drive to plow through all the bullshit and be competent. Otherwise you will just be following the narrative, that applies to many different aspects of life.
You don’t need no teacher…
