Online vs Face to Face

I’m fairly sure that by writing this I may open a can of worms between the lovers and haters of online teaching, however, if nothing else, I hope it may open up an avenue for discussion.

We are now nearly two years post pandemic and I’d love to say that for musicians (and other artists) who struggled so much with the lockdown elements of Covid-19, are beginning to get a semblance of normality back in their lives. BUT, that would be wrong! With cuts to funding, the continuing Brexit saga affecting working in Europe and the perpetual government rhetoric that continually picks away at the worth of music as a subject in school or as a career (Fatima, Mickey Mouse…), I think there is a much bigger wormhole to uncover and short of turning this post into a rant, I’ll save dissecting that for another day!

For many music teachers during Covid and lockdown, lessons moved online with hugely varying degrees of success. There were teachers who lost students, lost work; there were students who couldn’t access a computer or a space in which to have online lessons. On the contrary, there were artists and new music emerging from their bedrooms having recorded work or written songs and shared it via the power of social media, group choirs and bands created music together but individually so it wasn’t all bad!



For me, as a teacher with my own studio, I was lucky, however it was not without it’s issues, latency was a huge problem for a starter. Many of my own students are young and therefore we need to spend a lot of time looking at how rhythms fit into pulse and having a latency issue when I’m trying to explain or clap a rhythm for them was SO tricky. I relied heavily on recordings, supportive parents helping the other end and these youngsters’ comprehension.

Secondly, whilst less of an issue with my piano students, there was an issue of technique, embouchure, diaphragm that is normally easier explained when I can demonstrate next to them.

Finally there was a further issue for me, and that was the platform I used to teach from initially had a weird blip that when a student got to a certain frequency, it’d totally cut out the sound. After about 6 months, this was looked into and there was a ‘musician’ button developed that could be switched so that this didn’t happen, but it required both parties to have the updated version and to switch it on, so wasn’t wholly reliable.

You can imagine, I was mightly relieved when we were finally able to meet face to face again.

Yet, despite my issues with online teaching, there are many teachers who continue to teach this way. They probably have a far wider reaching subset of students rather than those within their location. Some, I know, do videos and put them up online for students to teach themselves, others do actually set aside slots of lesson time for students.

Having been trained classically on a woodwind instrument, technique is SO very important to me to enable a great sound from your instrument and I do struggle to really see how this can be taught as well online. So are we doing a disservice to the emerging young musicians who are being taught solely online? This is a question that plays in my mind quite a bit, however, doing a PhD looking at the barriers to instrumental learning, the opposite side of the coin is that geographical location is a barrier! Travelling to a teacher’s home or vice versa is both time consuming and a huge commitment, not to mention a potential logistical nightmare for parents with more than one child, or a job or…

I do still have two students from the 20 or so I teach each week that learn with me online as they both live a good 45 minutes drive away. Both of these students, if I’m putting on a rational head at the moment, have supportive parents, do LOTS of practice, are motivated and have some previous musical learning, so it does work for them. Both of them are about to take their respective grade 5s and will likely do very well, and both of them I see intermittently on a Saturday for a long lesson to ensure they aren’t creating any incorrect habits with technique. I also use online to teach students occasionally if they have car or really bad weather issues for example, but it would not be my teaching method of choice.

There are emerging pieces of research getting published looking at Covid-19 and the impact of it on music, but I suspect a longevity study looking at the comparisons between being taught online versus face to face may be several years down the line.

Ultimately, I think that the real answer is with the student and what they want to get out of learning an instrument. Learning an instrument is not just about being able to take ABRSM exams or go to music college, there are more reasons than I can list as to why people may learn.

Nonetheless, I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on either being taught online during the pandemic, or your preferences as a student, or if you are a teacher, how do you teach and why? There really can never be one size fits all, that was truly designed by politicians!!

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Language as a barrier to learning