Piano Aural Theory ..... and FUN 

If you cannot get to me, I can teach your child/you by Zoom but it saves alot of lesson time if you can set it up before the lesson! 

• Please use a tablet or laptop for your child to see in preference to a phone screen which is a little small but can work if nothing else is available. 
• Please practice placing the device on something secure and check the child can see the screen ok when sitting at the piano.
• Check the view on the screen that I will see in advance of the lesson.  Otherwise we will have to use lesson time to fiddle with it which would be a shame. 
• The priority is for me to see the hands and keyboard rather than the child’s face.  It doesn’t work putting device on the piano music stand or balancing on top of the piano lid/surface.
• An ironing board is useful to rest the device on as it can be adjusted easily up and down.
• Zoom requires a lot of internet bandwidth and uses a lot of power. The ideal situation is to have your device fully charged or plugged into the charger during the lesson. 
• If your internet isn’t up to it, we can have the lesson using audio only but I like to use the screen share function sometimes to illustrate what I am teaching. 

Zoom Settings
 
 Zoom was created for business meetings, it automatically suppresses background noise.  In a music lesson we do not want to suppress background noise or the piano will sound like you are playing the spoons underwater.  🙉. Zoom has now understood this properly and there are specific settings mentioned for music lessons.

• Make sure you have updated and downloaded the latest version of Zoom (it is free)
• Following the settings guidance in the following web post below.  However - uncheck “high fidelity” as this will take up too much internet bandwidth which will result in the picture going fuzzy or cutting out. 
• I will send you my Zoom code and password nearer the time of the lesson. The code and password are always the same. 
• Zoom will let me teach use it for free for 40 minutes.  If you/your child are unable to close it down and reopen it after say 30 mins then I will only teach a 30 min lesson.