Music is my life affirming joy that I will never be able to divorce myself from. Then, as a teacher for singers, how could I stop teaching when I could no longer see my students in person due to the Chinese Communist Party invading and shutting down our county with their devastating virus. I am ready to get back to teaching people in real life, but understand though the media and draconian measures taken by the government people are going to be scared into their homes for a while longer, so, I’m still going to be teaching; online. With that, let me tell you what teaching and what taking an online voice lesson is like from someone who’s just learned how to do it from scratch.
Zoom, there is a clear difference to me in the sound and keeping up the pace quality of the video compared to Skype. I would only use Skype if a student, for whatever reason, flat out refused to use Zoom. Make sure to click record from the source when you schedule your Zoom lesson appointments so you don’t have to remember to click the record button during your lesson. You do not miss out on keeping these for future reference. (What was my students’ top range today in the warm up? What part of their song did I mean to record for them and send back after the lesson? Etc.) If you’re the student, don’t forget to record so you can listen back and do your warm ups through the week to follow and hear back any corrections you received on your other music. I would go into all the workings of Zoom, different ways you can adjust the settings to hear musical sounds better, but simple searches on YouTube will provide you with a plethora of resources that will better explain things (with visuals) than I could do here. What I do want to explain in depth is the process of teaching a lesson and the back and forth itself.
There is a time delay, I mean once you speak the sound and video has to go from your recording device up to a satellite in space and back down into another person’s device, whether teaching a student across town or across the world, that’s almost equally a long distance to go. This means, you can’t play and have your student sing at the same time at the high end of challenges and at the low you have to take turns talking. Ever seen someone being interviewed on TV from an outside location from the studio? If they do not wait for the interviewer to finish their full statement/question before they start talking then the, “Oops, I’m sorry, you go.” “no, I interrupted, you go.” “no, you go.” “okay, so what I was saying was…” will start. Do not let yourself fall into this trap. It takes some time to get used to it, but just think of it as a super polite way of talking. You’re not allowed to cut the other person off. You need to feel sure what is being said is finished before you start. Think of it as if you’re talking on walkie-talkie’s and almost need “over” after each phrase you say. (But do not say “over,” that’s so weird.) This sounds like a huge inconvenience but I promise once you and each student gets used to it, it will become second nature quickly.
Onto singing! Let’s start with warm ups. No, you cannot sing/play together. Remember the time delay. It gets really messy, real fast. So what’s the solution? There are two great ones. One takes time before the lesson and a little coordination with the student, the next takes just a bit more time during the lesson but is much less painless in the short term. Option one. Record all your warm ups you’d like to do with your student(s) beforehand, each one, each step up and down scale through their range. Make each warm up a track on a set of recordings. How this then works is that you send these recordings to your student ahead of the lesson marked with what they are. (I.E. Track 1- Lip Buzz. Track 2- Aaa, Ahh, Aaa, 1-5-1, slide Track 3- Na, na, na, na, na, nasal going down, Etc.) Then during the lesson, Ideally the student will have burned these onto a CD and use a boombox or have a rather loud secondary digital device to play these warm ups from. You then will demonstrate once the first exercise then have the student play their track one and perform the exercise for you. There are positives and negatives to this approach. The biggest positive is that if it happens to be a very technical exercise with multiple notes, say a whole 8 note scale, the student gets to hear and sing along with each note played as he/she is doing the exercise in real time. Drawback is that it is hard to interrupt and give technical advice to the student until the entire exercise is over. I suggest this method for singers who have more experience and are already making self-corrections to the point where they would stop themselves in the middle of an exercise and say, “was that right?”
Option two for warm ups. Going in full effort at the moment of the lesson. My personal chosen option at this time. This will work on your digital coordination skills a bit, but I find is well worth it for the simpler vocal exercises that require 5 running notes or less. Here is where things get tricky. Again, you can’t play and have your student sing at the same time you can though do a call and response kind of exercise. For beginning beginning students play and sing the exercise for them then play just the chord that goes with what you just preformed. They will hear that chord on their end and should be able to sing along to that with you getting to hear them clearly. From there you can respond (Sing with a little more breath support when going to the high note, relax the jaw next time, etc.) More advanced students can just hear the next chord and perform the exercise for you, less advanced it helps to sing it once for them then have them repeat each time. This is most advantageous if you are teaching a lot of technique during exercises as opposed to waiting for the set to be over and then having to go back and recall where in a student’s range something might have gone a little sour.
When it comes to working on music, I suggest musicnotes.com for all my students to purchase their sheets. They now have digital copies you can get with your prints that they can then send to you, the teacher, after purchase so you can follow along with every note. The student then can download the musicnotes app on their phone or better yet their laptop and play the piano part (and/or vocal part) for themselves to practice along to and sing along to with you. I suggest though that if a song is chosen in an original (or well know covered) key that you head to YouTube and find a piano only cover of it to sing along to in that key. Much nicer to sing to than the computerized musicnotes program. If a student wants, they can always ask you, for a fee or part of a lesson, to record for them their own piano background track to use. Once a student has a background piano track to sing with, they can perform their song for you and you can make corrections as they go. This is one part where each teacher/student relationship will have to be individually sculpted here. I often will do the warm up technique of playing/singing a line and then having the student sing it back to me acapella. Doing this for several lines to make a verse then have them try it with the piano part. I’ll often record just a track playing only their melody line on the piano for them sent ahead of time for them to listen to a practice along with. Go back 10-15 seconds over and over again on parts of the recording to get trouble spots before they enter the lesson with you.
Now onto the after-lesson homework, for both of you. Have your student use a simple voice recording device on their phone (I know Everyone has one!) and record themselves, your choice, once or twice (my choice) a week their song for you and send it to you to listen to. It will give you a much better feel for what they need help with most than listening to them sing with a hint of sound delay and shoddy sound transmission over Zoom. Then you can hit the song part of their lesson head on with what they need the most help with, with a game plan.
Now Go! Go on, try a lesson online. I think you can tell it will not be the same as the in-person experience, it’s a bit more work for the teacher and I would say the student gets about 80% of what they would from an in person lesson, in general, from an online lesson, but hey, insane pandemic times that make people scared to go out into the world might just make you brave enough to start singing with a teacher in the quite safety of your own living room.