ABOUT ONLINE LESSONS

At Sarah Gettys Music Studio, we have been offering the option of online lessons long before the Covid-19 pandemic. The convenience and accessibility cannot be beat! With our whole studio shifting to remote lessons in March 2020, we’ve been very pleased to see the effectiveness of our online teaching.

We feel totally confident in our online offerings, not as a “Plan B” to in-person lessons, but as simply a different means of accessing the same high-quality instruction you can expect from our teaching team, regardless of platform!

Technology

Zoom has some great features for education, such as the screen share features for sharing books and materials, and the annotate feature for working on music theory together. Our lessons on zoom are highly interactive. For instrumental lessons, we have two cameras set up; one to see the teacher’s face, and the second, a close-up shot of the teacher’s instrument so that demonstrations are clear and easy to follow. We also use external microphones and headphones so that the audio is high quality for instruction and demonstration.

Advantages in Online Lessons

There are also some distinct advantages to online lessons. For people who are taking lessons for fun or stress relief, it can be way less stressful to go to a quiet room with a high speed internet connection in your own home than to drive to a lesson and have to worry about traffic, etc.

For some of my students who travel a lot, for work or for taking care of elderly family members, online lessons allow them to have consistency in lessons even while they are traveling. For parents enrolling their children in lessons, online lessons mean that you can be at home together while your child takes their lesson—you can cook dinner or just take a moment to relax while your child does their lesson instead of chauffeuring.

Even for students who mostly do in-person lessons, I recommend an online lesson every once in a while so that the teacher can see what their practice space is like, and check on the physical alignment of their space. (For example, is the piano bench too close or too far away? How are they sitting when they are holding their guitar at home? Is their drum kit set up properly spaced apart? Is the chair that they sit in while doing their singing warmups conducive to having a tall, straight spine?) Because the physical space is the same, online lessons make it really easy to connect what happens in the lesson with what happens during practice at home.

a note from sarah: (psst…another fun part of online lessons is that sometimes the pets join in! This is my cat Sally who sometimes helps with music theory, though most of the time she just sleeps in her basket next to the piano while I’m teaching online.)

Required Gear for Online Lessons

• A computer with a webcam

• High-speed internet connection

Optional Gear for Online Lessons