Had an interesting experience yesterday… I gave my first online remote guitar lesson via Skype. I was working with a professional songwriter (as in, he’s got a publishing deal in big Nashville) I had met at the Mark Robinson gig at the Pine Room awhile back. The gentleman later contacted me, interested in having me deconstruct some tunes for him so he could learn the chord progressions for possible use in his own work.
Remote lessons (ie, real-time video conferencing) is an idea I’ve been toying with for many years, ever since bandwidth and computer specs advanced to the point where the concept was feasible. While “distance learning” is unquestionably a successful method for communicating lecture-style materials, I’ve had certain practical reasons for avoiding it, since there’s this hands-on aspect to teaching someone how to play guitar that cannot exist in a virtual studio. In recent years, though, it has seemed to me that the advantages of not being constrained by geographic proximity might outweigh the disadvantages of not being able to take the soft end of a pencil to gently nudge my students fingers around, tapping on target notes, or not being able to reposition hands into a more beneficial stance to the instrument. There is also the problem of duet playing over the internet, where latency would prove problematic.
While I remain convinced that there is no substitute (and cannot be one) for the one-on-one teacher/student experience, I have to admit that this inaugural outing went rather well. First off, the 1-hour lesson was paid for in advance using PayPal. With the transaction out of the way, the Skype connection was easy to establish, minor lighting problems were quickly resolved, and we were soon deep into a focused ear-session of listening to a few songs and figuring out what the artists were doing on the guitar. My student had emailed some MP3s to me in advance, though we did have a last-minute addition that came up in session, and had to wait a minute or two for it to make its way through the pipeline from his desktop to mine. Aside from that, there were no significant delays in the proceedings at all.
We ended the session discussing the experience and planning for future sessions. All in all, I’d have to say it was a very productive and worthwhile experiment, and certainly quelled many of my reservations about the remote learning concept as applied to guitar lessons. I still miss the hands-on aspect, and visually things were more difficult than had we been sitting side by side and able to get a clearer view of what our fingers were doing. And while we didn’t attempt any duet playing, I’m fairly certain the latency issue would have made that impossible. In spite of the drawbacks, though, I finally saw first-hand that doing the lesson thing online can still be useful and fun. This experience does make me think I should adjust my thinking, get organized and enter into online lessons as a worthwhile adjunct to my in-studio teaching biz. Perhaps old dogs CAN learn new tricks, after all.
