Session players who teach earn more, and it isn't only about the money
· 4 min read
Sessions arrive in clumps. Lessons arrive weekly. Together they make a living that neither does alone.
Ask a working session player how they make a living and you'll rarely get one answer. It's usually sessions, plus some teaching, plus a bit of live work, plus something else.
That isn't a failure to specialise. It's a rational response to how the work arrives.
Sessions are lumpy in a way that's hard to live on
A good month might be three sessions. The next might be none, then five in a fortnight, two of which clash.
The income is fine on average and unusable in practice, because rent isn't lumpy. Anyone who has tried to live on project work knows the actual problem isn't the total — it's that you can't plan.
Teaching solves precisely that. A student who comes weekly is predictable revenue. Six weekly students is a floor under your month, and a floor changes what you can say yes and no to. It's the difference between taking a badly paid session because you need it and taking it because you want to.
The skills overlap more than people expect
The common objection is that playing and teaching are different jobs. Partly true — but less than it sounds, and the overlap runs in both directions.
Session work makes you a better teacher. You have current, specific answers to why does this matter — because you used it last Tuesday. Students can tell the difference between a teacher who knows the theory and one who has had to use it under time pressure with someone watching.
Teaching makes you a better player. Explaining something forces you to actually understand it. Most players discover holes in their own knowledge the first time a student asks a direct question about something they'd been doing by feel for a decade.
There's also a practical point: teaching keeps you playing during the fallow weeks. The alternative to a quiet month isn't rest, it's rust.
Where teaching goes wrong
Pricing by the hour without pricing the admin. An hour lesson isn't an hour of work. There's scheduling, there's the fifteen minutes before and after, there's the material you prepared. If you price purely on contact time you'll conclude teaching pays badly, and you'll be wrong about why.
Taking anyone. The beginner who wants to learn three chords and the grade-six student preparing for an exam need entirely different things from you. Teaching both badly is worse than teaching one well. Say what you actually teach and at what level.
No cancellation policy. This is the one that kills teaching income. Students cancel, and if your policy is "that's fine", you have no income and a hole in your Tuesday. A visible, ordinary policy — 24 hours' notice, otherwise it's chargeable — is normal, expected, and the only thing that makes weekly teaching viable.
Being invisible. Most teachers get students by word of mouth, which works and is slow. The people looking for a teacher right now are searching, and if you're not findable, they'll find someone else.
Remote changed the shape of it
Remote lessons are worse than in-person for some things — you can't adjust someone's hand, latency ruins playing together — and better for others. No travel is the obvious one, but the real change is that your catchment stops being your city.
A specialist teacher in a small town used to be limited to whoever lived nearby. That's no longer true, and specialism is precisely what remote suits: if you teach something narrow and unusual, your student is out there, they're just not local.
Practical middle ground most working players land on: in-person for beginners, where physical correction matters most, and remote for intermediate and advanced students who mainly need direction.
Setting it up so it actually runs
If you're listing teaching alongside session work:
- Separate the two rates. They're different products. A session rate and a lesson rate are not the same number and shouldn't pretend to be.
- Say remote, on-site, or both, and be specific about what on-site means — your place, theirs, or a room you book.
- Publish your level range. "Beginner to intermediate" saves everyone time.
- Set the cancellation policy up front so you never have that conversation.
On SESH a session player listing carries a separate teaching rate and a remote/on-site option, so the same profile covers both without you maintaining two of everything. Payment is taken when the lesson is booked and released to you 24 hours after it happens, which quietly removes the most tedious part of teaching — asking people for money.
The part nobody puts in the pitch
Teaching connects you to people. Students have bands. Students' parents know other parents. A guitar student who's fifteen now is someone who books you in six years.
That's not a reason to teach. But most players who've done it a while will tell you a meaningful share of their session work traces back, indirectly, to teaching — and none of that appears in the hourly rate.
List what you do — sessions, lessons, or both.