During the Covid-19 pandemic I began teaching virtual lessons using Zoom. Nothing compares to face-to-face lessons but the next best thing is to continue providing encouragement and instruction virtually. I did strive to offer my best to each student despite having to go virtual. More students had become interested in these virtual lessons and after months of experience using Zoom, bugs have been worked out and lessons worked very well.
If you are considering using Zoom to interface with students or your teacher, I strongly recommend using the Samson Go Mic or some other quality condenser mic. This mic is relatively inexpensive but it will make a huge difference in the quality of the audio. With a few adjustments in the audio settings the Samson Go Mic has performed very well for me on all the instruments.
With Zoom, I’ve gotten creative with using duet material, jazz recordings, etc. to keep kids engaged and working in diverse materials. Typically our lessons are broken into three parts – scales and technical exercises, method book material (Rubank) and then either solos, duets, movie theme material or jazz.
Very important to keep in mind when doing Zoom lessons is that the student and teacher both need to have a copy of all of the music in front of them. Longer etudes and songs should also have measures numbered. It makes navigating through the practice of the music so much more efficient.
Zoom also allows you to share your computer screen, so pulling up a piece of music so both teacher and student can see it is easy.
If you are interested to learn more about other nuances of virtual lessons please check out this video.
Now that the Pandemic is nearly completely over, and things have returned to some sense of normalcy all of my lessons have returned to in person which is much preferred. However, if in person is simply not an option for you I am willing to use Zoom for your lessons.
To DOWNLOAD Zoom click the link below
Randy Rovik 