Online Guitar Lessons

Online Guitar Lessons

I have now been doing online guitar lessons for over a year. When the pandemic lockdown began I had to think quickly to keep things moving. The music business ground to a halt in terms of live performances. I did not want to do substandard lessons. So I had to do some research as this was completely new to me, and to most of my students. I looked at as many online teaching / meeting platforms as possible. I found Zoom to be the best of the bunch as this enables screen sharing a feature many of the others did not have. Also the sound quality was slightly superior to other platforms.

First Steps Into The Online World

The first few online lessons was mainly theory rather than practical. This was due to not having the online recourses for more practical lessons available at the time. Before lockdown in a normal face to face lesson, my students would be given a blank music book. I would then write music or tablature into the book for the student to practise. For those taking grades they would of course have their own graded book. Over the past year the ability and procedure to take music exams also changed. I wanted to keep ahead of the pack with online guitar lessons. In order to do this I had to learn and adapt very quickly.

The Ability To E-Mail Music

I had to find a way of typing music into my computer and sending the files to my students. I have many students all at different stages. Once I had discovered a good program to write music onto the computer and ability so send it to my students it was a massive break through. I was even able to send an MP3 file so the student could play along.

Still I just wanted to go that extra mile to make things even better. I wanted to get transcribed music somehow linked with videos. I thought this would really improve my lessons. This was going to be no easy task. The only time I had seen this before was when people had put tablature into videos on YouTube.

Eventually I managed to find the in my opinion the ultimate learning tool for my students online. A video of myself playing with the music transcribed and also tabbed out. Not only that the ability to loop out any section to practise over again and also the option to slow everything down keeping the original pitch. Then came hours and hours of recording videos and writing out music and tying them together. I am constantly doing more of this. From early stage guitar, strum along songs, graded pieces both acoustic and electric and anything else in-between. The repertoire of music and songs that I am doing for this is constantly growing. At the end of the lesson I will send a link to what we are working on.

Conclusion

Online lessons are now far better than I first expected them to be. There has been hours of research and work to make these guitar lessons the best possible experience. This has been a massive learning curve for everyone but one worth doing. Some students are happy to stop online when we can return to some form of normality. I will still be using this material for the foreseeable future even when students return to face to face lessons.