virtual piano lessons
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hello everyone and welcome back to my channel the nine-to-five musician if you are new here my name is maggie and this is a channel dedicated to everything related to living a creative and healthy lifestyle now today we’re talking about online lesson setup this took such a long time for me to kind of perfect but i finally have a really really good working system and believe me it took a while but now i’m happy to share with you all how to recreate it so that your lessons can go smoothly okay so the first thing that i did was find a webcam now i tried out several of them ordered them send them back and the one that i ended up liking the most is just this simple webcam here called the jellycomb 1080p hd webcam now this has a lot of good features so for one the quality of the image is very good it’s a nice wide angle lens so you can see most of the piano i do shift it around sometimes like if you’re going to the extremities of the registers but in general it’s it’s pretty pretty good i also like that this does really well in low light so sometimes i you know take this places and i never have a problem with things looking dark i actually usually have to like dim the lights because it does so well um in getting a clear and crisp image with low light so that’s a that’s a really good feature as well and i also like the mounting of this specifically i’ll show you how i mount it to my overhead stand but you can swivel this camera like any direction you want which is really really helpful because if you’ve tried to set up an overhead view you know the limitations of like which way you can turn your camera so that you don’t have a mirrored image or upside down and this took me a long time to figure out i couldn’t find any video on the internet to explain how to position it correctly so that it looked like you were looking at the piano instead of upside down um so i’m going to go ahead and now walk you through like what my actual zoom meeting looks like from both camera angles okay so as you can see this is just the general like first hello opening um camera angle this is simply just my computer not the best quality but it does fine for lessons um and this is you know how i talk to my students and usually go over instructions things like that so that we have a personal connection but now i’m going to switch over to the overhead camera so this is the view from the webcam and as you can see it’s not mirrored it’s not backwards it looks exactly like you would see um if you were in a lesson so that’s why i love this setup and as you can see it’s incredibly bright and a nice crisp image so that’s my webcam again it’s linked below if you would like to get it for yourself i highly recommend this and it’s only about 35 dollars so it’s a nice deal as well so the next part of my setup that um has really like upped the game is just having external lighting that’s specifically meant um to create a better image so i actually have these two um kind of like soft box lights that you would typically use for photography um thereby roleno um and i use one and my husband uses the other one during his lesson so it’s actually worked out really well and i like this because it’s a very very bright bulb but it has the soft box over it and i found that this just kind of clears up the image for everyone and i think that for the teacher if you can have a great setup then it’s going to make the lesson go so much better so this is definitely another thing that i would encourage it’s not necessary but of course it does kind of up the quality and the enjoyment of the lesson okay so the main event of this at least for me and hopefully it’s helpful is the overhead setup i spent so long trying to find a good option for an overhead setup and this is by far the best and cheapest option that i’ve found if you go on youtube and try to find different things there’s like just crazy setups there there of course they look amazing but they’re not super efficient unless you only teach online lessons for the rest of your life they’re hard to you know put up and take down and so this has been like amazing for me this is simply just the double bare overhead phone stand you can find it on amazon it’s about fifty dollars um but this is like the best fifty dollars that i’ve spent on my online setup because it is perfect it’s so easy to use and i haven’t had any problems with it so as you can see here it’s just like a very small little uh setup here and it’s very heavily weighted at the bottom which is great so it’s not going to tip over and i just connect my webcam to the arm that extends out which is extremely important that’s what i was trying to find something that extends quite far over the side so that you can get that good view of the top of the piano and this is adjustable in many ways the angle of the extending arm the height how wide you want it to go out in front of you so this is like perfect it’s such a random little option but this has been exactly what i was looking for i would highly recommend this if you’ve been trying to find something to get a nice overhead view okay so the next part extremely important which is the audio so we have a good video now lighting and everything but the audio is extremely important and honestly most people can forgive bad visuals if you have really clean and crisp audio so um the setup that i’m using now is a little bit fancier and you don’t of course need this setup just for you know a few lessons here and there we have a blue snowball microphone just like a plug and play usb microphone which works great for lessons and my husband uses that one but we have one so what i’ve done is actually started to use my xlr mic through zoom lessons just to get some really clean and crisp audio so i just hooked this up through the interface that we have from borrowed from a friend which is linked below it’s by focusrite and again this is kind of like a fancier setup so it is a little bit more expensive but for me i’m constantly teaching online lessons so it’s just made my life so much easier and lessons more enjoyable so the microphone that i do use is the audio technica at2020 as you can see here it’s really good and it’s multi-purpose i don’t just use it for zoom lessons i use it for recording for streaming for lessons for a multitude of things um and it was about a hundred dollars so for me i’ve already like made that back exponentially so for me it was a really good investment and if you constantly teach online online lessons uh i think it’s worth investing in something like this just to up the communication level and make it a more enjoyable experience all right so the next one seems kind of like silly but it’s really important and it’s by far cause like the most issues and frustrations and lessons and that’s just how to set up the camera now most people are not actually using a camera they’re using a computer which is what i use a tablet or dare i say a phone some families like to use the iphone it’s really hard for the teachers to see because it’s very small but the quality of video can be okay sometimes but it’s not the best option so now for tablets and computers what constantly happens in lessons which is funny once or twice but then becomes frustrating for everyone is falling off the camera tumbling down or not being able to see the kid either their hands or their face or anything so it becomes very um you know not personal disconnected so the best thing that i found which is a very easy solution is to just use a music stand i use my husband’s traveling music stand here it’s by the company peak music stands and he just takes this to gigs but it’s actually very sturdy and it holds my computer very well and the thing i like about this is using a music stand allows you to adjust the height the distance and the angle like all in one go very easily you’re not stacking books you’re not moving tables or furniture around to get some amazing setup which usually doesn’t work anyway so i’ve recommended this to many of my students and they’ve switched over and we’ve seen a huge improvement in the lessons in general so if you are constantly searching for how to set up your camera computer or something just get a little music stand because it’s going to solve everyone’s issues and make the lessons run much more smoothly in general so that really covers the main like big items that i use constantly um but if you wanted to get like the most efficient setup they’re also a few like tiny little detail things that can help for instance having a usb hub so if you have a mac or something you know like the limited ports on the side especially the newer models so i have this usb hub from hub drive and i like it because it just like magnetically snaps on the computer so it’s very efficient and like it’s very small it doesn’t take up a lot of space and it’s not wires running everywhere so that just kind of helps streamline things another thing if you want to use the interface and this xlr setup like you’ll just need a few cables like a 12 volt cable for power you also need an xlr cable and maybe a mic stand so just like a few extra things that um at the beginning i didn’t really know how to put together and i found frustrating so um i just wanted to quickly mention those little details because they can make everything much more easy and stress-free so again everything that i’ve mentioned today is linked below if there’s any part of this setup that you would like a more in-depth video on like please leave me a comment and i’d be happy to do that and yeah i hope you guys enjoyed this and found it helpful to create a really nice and efficient online studio setup let me know if you try any things out and if they work for you and as always if you enjoy this content go ahead and subscribe and if you found this video helpful give it a thumbs up and we will see you in the next one okay bye guys [Music] you …