How Online Music Lessons Work
I get asked all the time… “How do online music lessons work?”
They work great! My students really love the convenience of online lessons. Plus, you can do everything in an online lesson that you could do in-person - but you get to do it from the comfort of your own home! No travel time. No traffic. Just log on and go!
I do all my lessons through Zoom, so the functionality is very familiar to most of us. I use multiple camera angles so that students can see my face when we are talking and see a close-up of my piano when I need to show them how to play something on the keyboard.
I do a lot of screen sharing when teaching theory so that the student can see examples of what we are working on. I also include several PDF downloads as we go along so the student can look at all the documents we use on their end whenever they want to.
The biggest challenge with online lessons is the latency or the delay. This makes it difficult to clap rhythms together or play duets. The reason I use Zoom is because they have done the best job of making it accessible for music lessons. There are setting we can use to make sure you are getting the best sound possible on your end and on mine. But they haven't figured out how to fix the latency issue yet. It has never been a problem with any of my students though.
There are great workarounds for these issues: 1) We take turns. For example, I can clap a rhythm and then have the student copy what I did. 2) We can use pre-recorded footage if we want to do duets. For example, I can record my part on a video and send it to the student, then they can play along with the recording on their end. The student would then be able to perform their duet for me at their next lesson.
Another great thing about doing lessons on Zoom is we can record the lesson. I will send you a recording of every lesson so that you can go back and watch it anytime!
The pros far out way the cons and it has been super fun to be able to connect with students all over the world through online lessons!
Using a phone or tablet?
If you are using a phone or tablet for your lessons, click here to watch a great video on how to get your audio set up for Zoom on those devices.
