How much do guitar lessons cost at Guitar Center? | Guitar Chalk (2024)

How much do guitar lessons cost at Guitar Center? It initially took awhile for me to find the answer to this question because it wasn't listed online. However, Guitar Center now makes it much easier to find pricing from their lessons home page.

After verifying the price tag, it seems like Guitar Center lessons cost about the same as what you would typically pay for an in-person guitar teacher. However, they do require you to pay up front at the beginning of each month for four lessons at a time.

Here I'll go over Guitar Center lessons cost, additional details, some alternatives I'd recommend, and how you can lookup lesson pricing at the Guitar Center locations near you.

There are two different types of lessons you can do at Guitar Center, both of which are fairly expensive:

1. Express Lessons: Four x30-minute sessions for $109
2. Standard Lessons: Four x60-minute sessions for $219
3. One-time registration fee of $30 (used to be $20)

This means that to take four 30-minute guitar lessons at Guitar Center you'll pay about $139. Since these were figures I got from the Richmond store, I contacted a second location to see if there was any variance for a different locality:

• Richmond Store:$109-$219 per four lesson
• Durham, NC Store: $119-$238 per four lessons

These costs are paid up front in monthly installments.

From what I can tell, it looks like the stores get their pricing from a centralized location and that it only fluctuates slightly based on the locality of the store. Because of the price and because I don't have any experience taking lessons at Guitar Center, I probably wouldn't recommend you go this route.

It kind of feels like taking your computer to the "Geek Squad" at Best Buy.

There are better options.

And again, this is not to comment on the qualityof the lessons themselves. It's impossible to verify quality in this case because every Guitar Center has different instructors and even what they call a "lessons manager" that runs the lessons and workshops for each store. My assumption is that the quality of instruction would vary pretty widely.

They all provide full courses via streaming video. They're like Netflix for guitar lessons. I most often recommend Guitar Tricks, particularly for beginners, and they'll even let you try their program free for 14 days.

Buying a membership, it only costs $19 per monthwhich is vastly cheaper than the Guitar Center lessons cost. Guitar Tricks' yearly membership is $179, still cheaper than a four hour monthat Guitar Center.

Even if you don't go with any of my recommendations, take the time to look for an in-person tutor that isn't affiliated with Guitar Center. If you want to research how much guitar lessons cost at Guitar Center on your own, here's the process I went through to find pricing.

The first place to go is the Guitar Center lessons and workshops page. They've updated the page so they'll ask you to fill out some information about which instrument you want to learn, what schedule works for you, and where you're located.

When you get to the locator, simply type in your zip code (it doesn't seem like you can type in the name of a city/state).

Guitar Center lessons and workshop start page as of June 2022.

The following page will bring up one or several Guitar Center stores near your location depending on where you live. Since Richmond is the closest "city" to where I live, I had to type a Richmond zip code into the store locator to get any results.

Now, instead of a listing of stores and times, they actually return instructors with their rates listed and an option to book them.

Guitar Center now returns a list of instructors with locations and rates listed. From what I could tell, all the instructors list the same rate we mentioned earlier.

From there you can click on the instructor you want to book, with the pricing readily displayed. For what it's worth, every instructor I saw posted the same pricing:

• (4) 30 minute sessions: $109
• (4) 60 minute sessions $218

Again, there seems to be some variation depending on where you're located, but this pricing model is consistent with what we've seen in the past and is far more transparent than what it used to be when you had to email or call to get any pricing information.

How it used to work

In years past, you literally had to hunt down someone from the particular store you were closest too, in order to get an answer about pricing.

Here's the process that I detailed in older versions of this article:

You can either click the "Email Us" link to open an email prompt or right click and copy the email address into a new message. This is how I contacted several stores to get verified pricing. You can also just call, though I personally preferred the email approach. As I mentioned, it looks like the pricing hovers roughly around $100 - $120 for four 30-minute lessons, though you'll have to find your local store to get exact figures.

Have you taken lessons at Guitar Center? How good were they in terms of quality? How much did they charge you?

If you're comfortable sharing that information, I'd love to hear about it in the comments section, especially because it seems like their pricing model changes somewhat based on locality. I'd also be interested to get a feel for how good (or bad) the lessons were, since they have such a wide swath of instructors from store to store.

Leave other questions and thoughts about Guitar Center lesson costs in the comments section as well.