Tips for a successful Zoom Music Lesson or a Zoom Music Recital

Here are some important tips for setting up your device for a successful Zoom music lesson or Zoom Music recital. Practice with family and friends before your lesson or recital to test your set up.

1. Internet connection

It is important to have a good, fast internet speed (both upload and download) when using Zoom so as not to cut in and out. You may be required to upgrade your existing plan if you are on a basic plan. Make sure no one else in the home is using the internet at the same time (especially video streaming such as Netflix & YouTube) as this will slow down the internet speed.

Here are some other tips about your internet connection for Zoom.

• Wired connections are better than wireless (Wi-Fi or cellular) connections.
• WiFi connections are better than cellular (3G/4G/LTE) connections.

Consider Disabling HD webcam video.

Sending high definition (HD) webcam video requires more bandwidth than sending non-HD. Disabling HD video will free up more of your Internet connection for other parts of your Zoom meeting.

Close other, unneeded applications on your computer or device.

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If you want to learn piano online, the Academy of Music is now offering online piano lessons using an amazing piano lesson app called Piano Marvel! Whether you’re looking for piano lessons for beginners, or to supplement your advanced piano ability, this intuitive piano learning app is perfect for you! (more…)

At first glance, an organ and a piano may not seem that different. But once an organist or pianist sits down to play, they’ll notice that the type of music these instruments produce is quite unique. What’s the difference between a piano and an organ? Is an organ just a piano with 2 or 3 extra keyboards? Not exactly. These instruments sound different, have varying mechanisms to produce their tones, and require distinct training to play.  (more…)

Deciding to learn to play the piano is an exciting endeavour. We’re glad that you’ve chosen to embark upon this journey, and we’re here to guide you through it. One of the first questions you’ll ask yourself is: which type of piano should I buy? (more…)

When you purchase a piano, there is one type of maintenance that is essential to its quality and longevity: tuning. It takes time, patience, a trained ear, and a lot of practice to master the art of tuning. It involves a lot more mechanical know-how and precision than tuning a guitar. But by learning to tune a piano yourself, you can save money on hiring someone else to do it. Better yet, you’ll be keeping your instrument in top shape so that it holds the tuning for longer. If you’d like to learn about the process of piano tuning, we’ve put together the basic steps.  (more…)

There are many reasons why someone decides to buy a piano. Perhaps you want to start taking lessons and need an instrument of your own to do so. Or, you’ve been playing for years and decide that it’s time for an upgrade. Maybe your child is of age to start piano lessons and you’d like to buy an instrument for them. (more…)

The piano may be your vessel to create beautiful and unique music. If there are problems with your instrument, you won’t be able to produce the elegant sounds that your heart sings with. In this post, we’re going to cover common problems that pianists encounter with their instruments. We will include some basic solutions, but many issues will require that you call in a professional piano repair person. (more…)

Humans crave simplicity. We crave complexity too, but under very different circumstances. The beauty of simplicity is that it’s easy to understand, and understanding things easily is important to our survival. Simplicity is especially useful in language, because tight definitions allow us to convey information in fewer words. I once had a friend ask me what the “shape that was like a square but two sides were longer and the other two were shorter” was; he meant, of course, a rectangle. Reducing complex ideas to a single term helps us better understand each other; not all concepts can be so easily reduced, though.

Consonance and dissonance are not things that can be easily described with one definition; their meanings are relative to each other, and relative to culture, upbringing, sense of aesthetics and more. A discussion of consonance and dissonance must also be a discussion of complexity. Instead of offering you an easy answer for what they mean, we’re going to analyze them through a variety of different lenses, to see if we can create a deeper understanding of the terms.

The first lens we’ll employ is purely mathematical. Two notes might be said to be consonant if the ratio between them is simple; our desire for simplicity, back at it again. A perfect fifth is highly consonant; it has a ratio of 3:2, meaning that the upper note makes three vibrations in the same amount of time it takes for the lower note to make two. The major seventh, conversely, has a ratio of 15:8; quite an odd ratio, and quite dissonant to the ears. Without knowing these ratios, you could probably still tell which interval was consonant, and which was dissonant. Things get really strange with the perfect fourth, though. It has a ratio of 4:3, which is quite simple, and to listen to it without context, it sounds quite consonant. In practice, however, the perfect fourth is often considered dissonant. Why?

Put simply, it’s because more often than not, a perfect fourth feels like it needs resolution. It feels inchoate and unstable; we expect it to resolve to a more stable note. You can try this yourself; play an A, then a D, and you’ll almost certainly feel the desire to resolve the two to a third note, something like a C. This shows that simple mathematical ratios aren’t sufficient to explain consonance and dissonance; what else, then, explains it?

The answer to this isn’t simple, though we might very much like for it to be. We can look at cultural understanding to get some idea. When most of the music you’ve listened to for most of your life has treated certain intervals as “tension” and other intervals as “resolution”, you’re likely to interpret perfect fourths or other dissonant intervals as tense, even if you didn’t even understand the concept before reading this. Things that we might find “dissonant” can be seen as desirable in other cultures. For example, if you play two notes whose wavelengths are ever so slightly different, the ear can’t readily distinguish between the notes, but the respective waveforms will construct and destroy each other when overlapped, creating a “beating” or “tremolo” effect. Western musicians strive to eliminate beating, while in Indonesian gamelan music, the beat effect is sought for its added texture.

Here’s where things get really complex: what is music? When we make music, what are we trying to do? There’s no easy answer to this question, but what we are doing, in most cases, is trying to use sounds to invoke an emotional response. We can analyze consonance and dissonance from a variety of different angles, but in the end, it all comes down to how you feel. You can feel dissonance because you want resolution; you can feel consonance because it feels like home, like you’ve arrived. Without dissonance, the music might not be very good, because there’s no real journey to embark on; you never leave home. Without consonance, the music feels listless, unpredictable, not fully formed, because you have no sense of where you’re trying to get to. This means that consonance and dissonance will change constantly over time, as we gain new conceptions of what home is, and what the journey to home feels like. As you learn more about music, through piano lessons, music theory classes, even just listening to new songs, you’ll begin to appreciate how deep the concepts of consonance and dissonance truly are.

Music algorithms are a funny thing. Ostensibly, they exist to help us discover new music that’s suited to our tastes. The problem with the idea is that the algorithms curate based on tastes that you already have, using songs that already exist within defined parameters as a starting point to steer you towards other music that fits the mould of those parameters. The problem with this is clear: while you can discover a lot of new music in this way, it will probably exist inside your comfort zone. In light of this, a lot of people are looking for anti-algorithmic ways of finding new music.

I read a great article by Pitchfork about one of the ways you can break out of the algorithm trap: listen to online radio. Online radio is usually run by passionate musicians and music fans who plumb the depths of the record store to find rare, almost unheard of gems to play for you. They are often volunteers, so there’s no financial incentive for them to play a particular piece; online radio is a work of love, and it shows. I’ve discovered so much music from online radio, and sometimes, I’ll hear a piece that I recognize from a song that samples it. One of the most exciting elements of music is the recontextualization of old sounds, unravelling the mythos of the tracks you listen to. Hearing a melody that calls back to an old song I know, or a lyric that references another track; it appeals to the collector in me, and your collection can’t be complete if you don’t do a little digging.

This anti-algorithm, always-be-curious attitude will help you play better, too. One of the biggest mistakes new musicians make is trying to make their piece sound exactly like another player; it’s good to remember that everything you play is an interpretation, and it’s the variation between your style and another musician’s that will make your interpretation special, unique. You want to play the “right” notes, of course, at the right time, but the feel of it can be different. You might be using a piano that’s totally different from the piano a piece was recorded with. The weight of your keys, the acoustics of your room, your own personal style; all of these will affect the piece.

Getting out of boxed-in modes of thinking is something we must aspire to as musicians. Not just as musicians, either; as human beings, it is our duty to get out of our comfort zone to try and establish new ways of understanding things – and each other. By listening to new music, exposing yourself to new ideas, and coming up with fresh ways of interpreting a piece, you’re a part of a longstanding tradition of breaking the mould through art. You are the anti-algorithm. Algorithms are computerized, digital, cold; you are flesh and blood, human, and the works you make can be made by no one else. When you want to freshen up on the technical elements of your playing, Winnipeg piano lessons are available; we’ll help you discover what you can bring to the world.