A Maryland guitar teacher with 200,000 students? Meet Guitargate’s Michael Palmisano.

For someone who says the advent of the internet destroyed his musical dreams, Michael Palmisano of Guitargate.com seems to have gotten the last word.

Palmisano is a guitar teacher originally from Monkton, Maryland who has taught more than 200,000 students how to play guitar using the same internet that in the early 2000s sent him packing from California with a musical career gone up in smoke.

Now people recognize him on the street as the creator of an online guitar course and website called Guitargate.com, and a YouTube channel bearing his name with more than half a million subscribers.

Holding up a photo of himself at 5 years old with a guitar, he says he keeps the picture on his desk to remind himself that he’s doing the right thing for himself and with his life.

“The funny part about that story [of the photo] is that no one knows where that guitar came from,” Palmisano said. “No one knows where it began, but I’ve been playing my whole life. I don’t remember NOT playing but no one else plays.”

Reflecting upon life as a musician, he said it’s never what you think it’s going to be starting out.

“When you move to make a career at it, a lot of times you have to make a lot of hard choices because … it’s just really hard to make a living being a musician,” Palmisano said. “And so I always was in pay-to-play bands and corporate bands and taught and I’ve never done the thing that I’ve always wanted to do, which is actually write my own music and make the things that only I can make. And so, I’m trying to change that.”

He was in college studying business, and dropped out to see how good he was as a musician. He moved to California and attended Musicians Institute (MI) in Los Angeles, which he likened to the West Coast’s version of Berklee School of Music but having more of a tech school’s model than a conservatory’s.

Palmisano emphasized it was a successful school, with close to 30% of graduates from the programs getting jobs in the music industry. This was in the early 2000s, and while he was attending MI, iTunes and YouTube both launched, laying waste to much of the job market for working musicians.

“In real time while I was there, music went from being a physical product with stores you could walk into and buy to that not being a thing anymore,” Palmisano said. “And so, the record industry and all of those jobs which I had been aiming to work in virtually evaporated. Maybe the top one or two people that I graduated with got work, and it evaporated that fast in real time. Yeah, punchline of that story is internet screwed up all my plans.”

Palmisano came back to Maryland, married his wife, and began to teach and play gigs. He taught both private lessons and coached kids’ rock bands, worked in pay-to-play corporate bands, and played wedding gigs. He estimates at his busiest he was teaching 50-60 students per week and playing 120 corporate gigs per year. This lasted for around seven to eight years.

As the internet matured, however, Palmisano began to see possibilities for making an income teaching online. It was 2013 and he had young children of his own, so he decided to make online education his focus.

“Influencer wasn’t a word. Online education was a dream. It was not a reality by any stretch. But I became a true believer,” Palmisano said. “I felt that I was perhaps a better teacher than player, even though I’m a very good guitar player. And I just made a decision. I said, ‘I’m going to go all in on education. I’m going to go all in on the internet, and I’m going to try to build a life around my family instead of what most musicians have to do, which is build a family around their life.’”

He and his wife took their life savings, which they’d planned to use to buy a house, and instead used it to build a custom website and the first curriculums. After a few years of a very rough start and losing money, Palmisano kept working on improving his website and curriculum because he believed in what he called “the online education dream.”

Eventually he was able to stop teaching lessons in person, and then stop playing in a band. By placing ads for his curriculum and online music lessons, it became easier for him to get students.

By around 2016 or 2017 he became a full-time online guitar teacher. Now, 11 years after he began, he has more than 200,000 students in more than 185 countries who have learned how to play guitar using his courses.

“I support a family of six on a farm out here in Baldwin above my garage, making guitar courses for mass distribution,” Palmisano said. “So, the punchline is the internet ruined all my plans. I came home, fell in love with education. The internet started to mature, social media started to mature, I became a firm believer that this was going to grow into a real industry, that you could be an online educator. And now the internet has given me a life that I never could have imagined when I initially left to move to California. What’s so interesting is I left here because I didn’t think I could become who I wanted to be, and ended up coming back to exactly where I came from, achieving more than I ever thought possible.”

In addition to the static videos that are online for students to purchase and watch anytime, Palmisano does weekly masterclasses, which are live group lessons. Students can join on-screen if they want to and ask questions. He has also hired four other instructors to conduct masterclasses so someone is live five days a week.

As for making his own music, Palmisano hopes he’ll get to it eventually.

“I feel that one of the main reasons that I chose to do this and continue to do this and try to grow a community instead of just selling courses is because the more people that I get behind me, the more I start to believe what I’m preaching,” Palmisano said. “I start to believe that I can still do this for a living and that I can make something of value. So, a lot of it is me trying to create this self-fulfilling prophecy that eventually I’ll develop the courage to start making my own things instead of always feeling like I just have to keep working.”

One thing about which Palmisano feels adamantly is that schools focusing on the creative arts are not doing nearly enough to prepare their students for the reality of what awaits them professionally when they graduate. He wants to change that.

“I want to find a way to either open or work with schools to teach that, because so many of these schools, all of these schools, whether it’s Berklee, whether it’s MI, Peabody here in Baltimore, they make zero effort to paint the reality to young people that there’s no work on the other side anymore,” Palmisano said. “They really need to spend this time while they’re here in school, four years or whatever it may be if they don’t go to college, figuring out how to be self-employed in the digital age with their current skill set. And that is such a passion of mine to try to spread, so that’s one of my other dreams: to try to figure out how to empower the next generation.”

Palmisano is thrilled with the ride he’s been on so far, though.

“I still get to go to work every day and keep the thing in my hands. I make a living with the guitar in my hands. And, you know, you get the two big aspects of your life, which is your family and the fulfillment of potential. And I greatly feel like I’m maximizing both…. [T]here is no life without compromise and hard choices, but I’m very happy with my choice,” Palmisano said.

Palmisano’s evergreen advice to musicians, artists, and anyone trying to learn something new and get better at it is “Keep it in your hands.” Keep picking it up. Keep coming back to it.

“Because you’re going to keep getting better if you do that. It’s not always about the education. The motivation and inspiration are larger than that,” Palmisano said.