Music Monday - COVID 19

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I’ve been joining many online meetings and discussion groups for the past week in the quest of finding the most effective ways to structure teaching and learning in music during these pandemic days.

What follows is this week’s discoveries. Use them, add to them, discard them. Whatever works for you:

  1. Zoom seems to be the universally favoured platform for music classes, especially for sound quality. (Of course not all institutions or systems use zoom so we are all bound by our individual situations.) By checking out the various functions on zoom (especially the ‘disable background noise’) you can greatly enhance its capability.

  2. Microphones which plug straight into your laptop greatly enhance your sound quality. One example is the Yeti Blue (about $AUD180). (It doesn’t need an audio interface.)

  3. Many studio music teachers are speaking very highly of the My Music Staff app. 

  4. Group classes which involve any unison singing are best done with the participants’ microphones on mute. Not ideal I know but they can model from your singing.

  5. Call and response has become my new best friend. In normal face to face teaching I use it with younger students and in group classes. Now I find that I am using it in almost every situation, particularly when teaching new song repertoire. I play a phrase. I then sing the phrase. The student sings back and I can check musical accuracy and tone placement and technique. I imagine this would work with most instrumental teaching too. In group classes, although I would have the students sing ‘back’ with mics on mute, they could then email individual performances of the material (audio or video) for checking by the teacher.

And to finish this week’s post, something to make you smile – with thanks to drama teacher John Foreman.