Today we’d like to introduce you to Derrick Campbell.
Derrick, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I moved to Boston in 1997 seeking fame and fortune, but instead landed a job at Guitar Center. In the process of selling guitars, customers would often ask if I taught guitar, so I started teaching house call guitar lessons when I wasn’t working at the store. Within a few months it got to the point to where I was teaching and working about 80 hours a week with no days off, so I stopped working at Guitar Center and started teaching full time at Music Maker Studios in Brighton. Since then, I’ve accepted positions at other places including Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, and the Boston Center for Adult Education, where I teach group guitar classes. During the school year, I teach private guitar lessons at Nobles during the day, private lessons and ensemble classes at Music Maker Studios in the afternoon and evening, and group guitar classes once a week at the Boston Center for Adult Education.
In 2000, before I really knew anything about building websites, I bought the domain name “beginnerguitarlessons.com,” with plans to eventually make a website for beginner guitar players. Over the years it gradually grew in size, but was mostly just and advertisement for my services as a guitar teacher until 2009 when the recession started to affect the teaching business. I had some free time on my hands, and the Boston Center for Adult Education offered their teachers a free class once per term, so took a class in HTML, and learned how to make changes to the website on my own. Since then, I’ve started a blog about subjects important to beginner guitar players, published a method book for beginners through Amazon’s CreateSpace website, and also added some free video lessons.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
There’s been some ups and downs, but I’ve never been in danger of going out of business, or had to get a part time job that wasn’t music related. It seems like every time I seriously consider doing something else, like going to school to become an electrician or software engineer, I get a flood of new students, or my band books a bunch of gigs, and then I don’t have time to think about changing course. It does seem like one job always takes up the slack for the other, so when lessons slow down a bit, gigs pick up, and when gigs slow down a bit, lessons pick up.
Probably the scariest thing that happened was when all the free guitar lesson videos started showing up on YouTube, as that did definitely lead to a decrease in beginner students around the time the recession hit. There’s still not nearly as many adult beginners taking lessons as there were during the boom times between 1998 and 2003 when Phoebe on friends was inspiring everyone to pick up a guitar and play “Smelly Cat.” but I have started to see more people coming in and saying they’ve struggled to learn via the YouTube videos.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
One of the most common compliments/comments I’ve gotten from students over the years is that when they’re having a problem playing a chord or riff, I’m always able to look at their playing and identify a problem with the mechanics. Once the student realizes what that problem is, it becomes a lot easier for them overcome the obstacle and move on.
I’ve tried to focus my lessons on helping beginners deal with those kinds of issues, so that includes the following:
Holding the guitar and the pick – most problems beginners have come from holding the guitar incorrectly.
Helping students find songs they like that are easy for them to play – a lot of times I’ll find a song by an artist they like, but is not necessarily the most popular song by that artist, or their favorite song.
I think my biggest contribution to the realm of teaching guitar is figuring out a way for beginners to make the transition from open chords to mastering barre chords. It took a lot of years of watching students before I finally figured out what was making it so hard for everyone to play the F chord and the Bm chord.
What were you like growing up?
When I was in middle school, I was into two things, playing guitar and playing video games. When my family moved from Indiana to Ohio, the first few months we were there a lot of our stuff was still in storage, so I had the guitar but no video games, so I started playing guitar more. Suddenly all of those Van Halen and Led Zeppelin songs I’d been struggling to play got a lot easier, and the guitar became exponentially more fun to play. I joined the high school jazz band, and really started focusing on guitar more and began practicing 3-8 hours a day (it increased each year until my senior year when I practiced 6-8 hours each day during the week and 10-12 on the weekends).
Contact Info:
- Website: https://beginnerguitarlessons.com
- Email: derrick@beginnerguitarlessons.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DerrickCampbellGuitarTeacher/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/GuitarTeacher2
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEYOn6X2ipHl3Cp3hvX6clg
Image Credit:
Ashley Jardim
Jason Rossi
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