9 Tips for Successful Online Music Lessons

Most of what goes wrong in an online music lesson happens before anyone plays a note. The call app's noise filter treats your instrument as background noise and turns it down. The camera shows your face but not your hands. The Wi-Fi stutters in the middle of a phrase. All of it can be fixed in an afternoon, mostly with settings you already have.

The nine tips below cover the room, camera placement for piano, guitar, violin and voice, the music settings in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, FaceTime and the Tissimo classroom (checked in October 2026 against each company's help pages, and against the classroom itself), headphones, microphones, the internet connection, and the one thing you can't do over a video call: play in time with your teacher. Then come the exercises that work around it, and a plan for the days between lessons. If you're a parent deciding whether online lessons suit your child, start with Online Music Lessons for Kids; this guide is about making the lesson itself work.

The whole setup on one card: six things to arrange once, before your first online lesson.

1. Choose a quiet room and face the light

Pick a room with a door that closes, and ask the household for that hour. Quiet matters more online than in a teacher's studio, for a technical reason: once you switch off your app's noise suppression so your music gets through (tip 3), the dishwasher gets through too. Put phones on silent and close every other app on the device you use for the call.

Then light your face, not your back. The main light belongs in front of you, behind or beside the camera. A bright window behind you turns you into a silhouette, which is why Trinity College London's filming guidance for its video exams tells candidates not to stand in front of a light source. Daylight from the side works well; at night, put a lamp behind the camera. Turn the device sideways for a landscape picture and put it on a stand or a stack of books, never in your hand.

2. Aim the camera at what your teacher needs to see

Your teacher can only correct what the camera shows. Trinity's guidance, in its February 2026 edition, gives a camera position for every instrument so that examiners can judge a performance from video alone, and the same views suit a live lesson.

Piano: from the side, a little above the keys

Set the camera at the side of the keyboard so that your face, both hands and all of the keys are in the frame. Raised a little above the keys and tilted down, it shows your fingers; set far enough back, it keeps the bass end in view. A side view also shows your teacher your wrists, your back and the height of the bench, the things Piano Posture 101 is about.

Piano: the camera at the side of the keyboard, the view Trinity College London's 2026 filming guidance asks for, set back and a little above the keys so face, both hands and every key are in the frame. The lamp stands beside the camera and lights your face.

For close-ups of your hands, add a phone above the keyboard as a second camera. In the Tissimo classroom, join from the phone too and pick Secondary on the screen before you enter: a secondary device sends its picture and sound but doesn't play the lesson back, and the classroom reminds you to mute your main device so the two microphones don't feed back.

Guitar: in front, toward your picking hand

Trinity's guitar view puts the camera slightly to your picking-hand side, with your face, both hands and the whole instrument visible, and your pedals too if you use them. Left-handed players simply mirror the setup.

Guitar: in front of you, shifted toward your picking hand, at about chest height. Trinity asks for face, both hands and the whole instrument in view, and pedals if you use them.

Violin and viola: from the bowing side

Violinists and violists are filmed from the bowing side, Trinity says, to give a clear view of the bowing arm, with face, hands and the whole instrument in shot. Step back far enough that the whole bow stays in the frame, whether you are playing at the frog or at the tip.

Violin and viola: from the bowing side, far enough back that the whole bow stays in the frame. Trinity asks for a clear view of the bowing arm, with face, hands and the whole instrument in shot.

Voice: from the front, at eye level

Singers are filmed from the front with hands, face and most of the body in shot, and the music stand placed so it doesn't block the view. At eye level the camera sees you the way a listener would, and your teacher can watch your posture and breathing.

Voice: straight in front at eye level, with the music stand to one side so it doesn't block the view. Trinity asks for face, hands and most of the body in shot.

The same guidance covers other instruments: a drum kit is filmed from the side, at a right angle and at eye level, looking through the hi-hat stand, and trumpet or trombone, it suggests, from the right-hand side.

3. Switch the call app to its music setting

Video-call apps are tuned for speech, and most switch on filters for it by default. Noise suppression removes whatever isn't a voice; Microsoft says the strongest level in Teams "suppresses all background sound that isn't speech." Automatic gain evens out your volume, which Teams describes as making sure "everyone hears you at a level volume." Echo cancellation removes your teacher's voice if it leaks from your speakers back into your microphone. All three help a meeting and hurt music: the end of a held note, the difference between pp and ff and the quiet sound of the instrument are what they tend to shave off. Zoom describes its music profile as keeping your microphone's sound "without using Zoom's echo cancellation and audio filters," and Google's help page puts it plainly: if you need "other sounds in your meeting, like music, turn off noise cancellation."

The three switches in short: turn the music setting on (in most apps it also stops automatic gain), noise suppression off, and echo cancellation off only with headphones. The list and table below give each app's menus.

Here is where each app keeps them as of October 2026:

• Zoom (desktop app): Settings, Audio, Microphone modes, Original sound for musicians. (Zoom's help page lists Microphone modes for paid accounts and for free Basic accounts with a credit card on file.) With headphones on, also tick High-fidelity music mode: it raises the audio to 48 kHz and 96 kbps (192 kbps in stereo) and turns off echo cancellation and post-processing, and Zoom lists a professional audio interface, microphone and headphones as required for it. In a meeting, the arrow next to the Audio button opens the same Microphone modes.
• Microsoft Teams: in a meeting, the arrow next to Mic, More audio settings, High fidelity music mode, which sends up to 128 kbps. Microsoft retired Skype on May 5, 2025 and pointed its users to Teams Free, which has the same mode under More, Audio settings, with an Echo cancellation option.
• Google Meet: Google's help pages list no music mode. If you see Noise cancellation (on Gemini plans, Studio sound) under More options, Settings, Audio, turn it off; it can be on even for a free account in a meeting hosted by a Workspace user.
• FaceTime: during the call, open Control Center and set Mic Mode to Wide Spectrum, which lets in "all the sounds around you"; on a Mac, Mic Mode is under the Video button in the menu bar.
• The Tissimo classroom: Settings, Audio, Music mode, which turns off noise suppression and automatic gain control. It is off until you switch it on. Turn on Using headphones as well, only while you wear them, and echo cancellation goes off too.

Music settings in five apps as of October 2026, named as each company's help pages (and the Tissimo classroom) name them. Teams Free is where Skype users went after Microsoft retired Skype on May 5, 2025.

4. Wear wired headphones

Headphones remove the reason echo cancellation exists. With speakers, your teacher's voice comes out of them, into your microphone and back to your teacher a moment later, so echo cancellation has to stay on. With headphones nothing loops back, so it has nothing to remove. That is why Zoom lists headphones among the requirements for its High-fidelity music mode, which switches echo cancellation off, and why the Tissimo classroom turns it off only when you switch on Using headphones.

What happens to your sound on its way out. Music settings switch off the filters built for speech; echo cancellation can go too, but only when headphones keep your teacher's voice out of your microphone.

Closed-back headphones keep the most sound in; the Stanford delay experiments in tip 7 used isolating headphones to reduce leakage into the microphones. Choose a cable over Bluetooth: Microsoft doesn't recommend Bluetooth devices for its music mode, and the Jamulus project, which makes free software for playing music online, warns that "Bluetooth headphones and mics usually introduce latencies of about 50 ms or more."

5. Give the microphone a fair chance, then test it

The microphones in phones and tablets are "built for speech," as Trinity's guidance puts it, and some devices compress the volume automatically. An external USB microphone is the usual next step; an audio interface with a microphone is another. Trinity also accepts direct audio capture from digital pianos and keyboards in its grade exams, and a cable from the instrument keeps room noise out. Place a microphone to pick up the sound in the room, as Trinity puts it, rather than right in front of you, and if your loudest passage distorts, turn the input level down or move the microphone back.

Then test what your teacher actually hears. Play a 60-second sound check at the start of your first lesson, with the music setting on: a held note, a run of short notes, and six levels from pp to ff on one note, the way The Dynamic Ladder asks you to calibrate them. If your teacher hears the held note fade, a short note go missing, or two neighboring levels sound the same, check the music setting first.

A 60-second sound check built on G above middle C: a long tied note, eight short notes from G up to D and back, then six dynamic levels from pp to ff on G. Ask your teacher what didn't come through.

Legato or Staccato? makes a good second test, because its check is a listening game: play each snippet and let your teacher guess which you meant. In the sheet's words, "if they can hear it, you played it right."

6. Plug in a cable and know your numbers

A lesson needs steady internet in both directions more than fast internet. Zoom lists 600 kbps up and down for a high-quality one-to-one video call, 1.2 Mbps for 720p and 3.8 Mbps up and 3.0 Mbps down for 1080p; Google lists up to 1.7 Mbps for 720p in Meet. Music modes add a little: Zoom's high-fidelity audio uses 96 kbps, where Zoom budgets 60 to 80 kbps for ordinary call audio. Your upload speed carries your playing, so check it, not only the download.

What breaks a lesson is variation. The Jamulus project finds even fast Wi-Fi "usually too variable" for playing online, and Zoom recommends Ethernet for its lowest-delay mode. Connect the computer to the router with a cable, pause big downloads and cloud backups for the hour, and close other video apps. On an older device or a weak connection, pick Lite on the Tissimo classroom's entry screen, a lighter version of the classroom built for exactly that (it switches off the shared metronome and music sheets).

7. Don't try to play together over a call: take turns

Why a video call can't carry a duet

Sound travels about 344 meters a second at room temperature, so players sitting two or three meters apart hear one another within 6 to 9 milliseconds.

The Barbican Quartet rehearsing on the Isle of Wight in 2023. Sitting this close, each player hears the others within a few milliseconds, which no video call can match. Photo: Billkaboo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

In 2004, researchers at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics put pairs of people in separate rooms, linked only by microphones and headphones, and had them clap an interlocking rhythm while a computer delayed the sound between them by 0 to 77 milliseconds. At a delay of 11.5 ms the tempo neither sped up nor slowed down. At 14 ms and longer, 85% of the performances slowed down, and the longer the delay, the harder they dragged; the authors describe it as "player A, waiting for player B, waiting for player A." Video calls are built for conversation, which forgives far more: the ITU's recommendation on one-way delay, G.114, says that below 150 ms most applications "will experience essentially transparent interactivity."

The delays that matter, on one scale: playing together needs about a hundredth of a second, while a conversation tolerates more than ten times that.

So suppose each direction of your call takes 125 ms, comfortably within that conversational limit, and you play together at 120 beats a minute, where an eighth note lasts 250 ms. You play exactly with what you hear, but your notes reach your teacher 250 ms after the teacher played: an eighth note late.

Why a duet drifts: with 125 ms each way, the student's beat 1 reaches the teacher at 250 ms, exactly where the "&" falls at 120 beats a minute.

Written as music, the student's part comes back syncopated, every note shifted onto an "&". If your teacher waits for you, the beat drags instead, as it did for the Stanford clappers.

The same delay in notation: the teacher's five notes on the beats, and the student's copy as the teacher hears it, one eighth note later, so every note lands on an "&".

Low-delay options exist, but they don't fix an ordinary lesson. Zoom's Live performance audio aims for about 30 to 50 ms, but only if every participant turns it on in the Windows or macOS app, with a 48 kHz audio input, a processor with four or more physical cores and preferably Ethernet; it also switches off Microphone modes, and cloud recordings capture nothing while it runs. Dedicated tools such as Jamulus ask for wired internet, wired headphones and a server less than 50 ms away. Even then, the delay usually sits above the 14 ms at which the Stanford pairs began to slow; Jamulus counts about 30 to 50 ms as playable, and both ends need the setup, which is more than a weekly lesson needs.

What works instead: turns, count-ins and your own metronome

Online, music becomes a conversation, and these habits keep the lesson moving. First, call and response: your teacher plays a phrase and stops, you answer. Improvising with the Pentatonic teaches it as two bars that ask and two that answer, and Melodic Dictation turns it into an echo game with three to five notes.

Call and response from our Improvising with the Pentatonic sheet: the question (bars 1–2) stops on A, the answer (bars 3–4) comes home to C. Online, the teacher plays the question and stops; the student answers.

Second, count in and echo. Ear Training: Rhythm Dictation already works this way: your teacher counts one bar in, claps a rhythm, and you clap it back. Because nobody plays at the same moment, the delay only shifts the whole echo later.

Echo clapping as Rhythm Dictation sets it up: a bar counted in, the rhythm clapped (item 4: dotted quarter, eighth, half), then clapped back.

Third, keep the metronome in your room. The Tissimo classroom's metronome already works this way: when your teacher starts it, it clicks on your own device, so you play to a click in your room. A click sent from your teacher's side reaches you late, but a metronome playing on a speaker beside you reaches your teacher together with your notes, in sync. Tempo & the Metronome gives the routine: start at 60, play one note per click, and raise the tempo 4 to 8 clicks at a time.

One note per click: the 5-finger scale up and down at 60 beats a minute, then 64, 68, 72 and 76, the steps on our How to practice sheet. With the metronome on a speaker in your room, your teacher hears the click and your notes together.

The same logic covers backing tracks: play the track on a speaker in your room, at a level the microphone can hear, so that it and your playing reach your teacher together. In a studio, a teacher could beat time beside you; online, the beat has to start where you are.

Gerard ter Borch, The Music Lesson, about 1670: a man, presumably her teacher, marks the tempo while a woman plays a double-headed lute. Over a video call his beat would reach her late. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

8. Share the music before the lesson and talk in bar numbers

Send the PDF a day ahead, so that you and your teacher have the same edition with the same bar numbers, and number the bars if the edition doesn't. Pointing at a screen doesn't work, so say "from bar 9, beat 3," and pencil your teacher's markings into your copy as they come. To play your teacher a recording, share it with its sound: in Zoom, Share Screen, then Share Sound, with a choice of Mono or Stereo (high fidelity); in Teams, turn on Include sound; in Meet, present a tab and turn on "Also share tab audio."

Ask before you record a lesson, and for your own playing, record on your phone in your room: that copy never goes through the call's filters. Keep the assignment where you practice: our printable Manuscript Paper for anything your teacher dictates, and the Musical terms & signs chart for tempo words and marks.

9. Practice between lessons with a plan and a log

You can't catch your teacher at the door after an online lesson, so a written plan matters more. Our How to practice sheet gives every session five steps: warm up, hands separate, slow with a metronome (the ramp from Tempo & the Metronome), hands together, one play-through. For a hard spot it says to chunk it: the hard bar alone, then the bar after it, then the bar before, then the whole line, with a weekly log to fill in.

A week's practice on paper: the tune and the chunking plan from our How to practice sheet (bar 3 alone, then 3–4, 2–4, the whole line) and the sheet's log, with one day filled in.

Pianists can add Your Daily Technique Routine, fifteen minutes in five stations with its own log, starting from The C 5-Finger Scale. For any instrument, Write the Counts trains counting out loud, which your teacher can hear perfectly well over a call, and Syncopation asks you to clap against a steady beat, with your own metronome as the partner. Sight-Reading: Set 1 takes two minutes a day: count one silent bar, then play straight through. The Ear Training: Melodic Dictation and Rhythm Dictation sheets have audio for every item, so you can practice them alone. Bring the log to your next lesson: it shows your teacher in a minute what took a week.

Your lesson-day routine

1. 30 minutes before: plug in the network cable and the charger, tune, close other apps.
2. 10 minutes before: open your music and your log; set the camera and the light.
3. 5 minutes before: join, switch on the music setting and run the sound check.
4. During the lesson: count in, take turns, use bar numbers, and say at once if you can't hear or see.
5. After: write the assignment in your practice log and play the hard bar the same day.

If you're running late, message your teacher, and know their rescheduling and cancellation policy before you need it.

Lesson day in five steps, from plugging in the cable to logging the assignment.

Free worksheets for this lesson

• How to practice — five steps per session, the chunk-it plan and a weekly log
• Tempo & the Metronome — tempo words and the metronome ramp from 60
• Your Daily Technique Routine — fifteen minutes in five stations, with a log
• The C 5-Finger Scale — the five notes behind the metronome example
• The Dynamic Ladder — six levels from pp to ff, the sound check's ladder
• Legato or Staccato? — read the marks, then let a listener guess
• Ear Training: Rhythm Dictation — count in, clap back, write it down, with audio
• Melodic Dictation — find home, trace the shape, and the echo game
• Ear Training: Melodic Dictation — tunes to write down, every item with audio
• Improvising with the Pentatonic — question and answer on five safe notes
• Write the Counts — write the counts, clap them, then play
• Syncopation — straight, then syncopated, against a steady beat
• Sight-Reading: Set 1 — four tiny pieces to read once, without stopping
• Manuscript Paper — blank staves for what your teacher dictates
• Musical terms & signs — dynamics, tempo words and marks in one chart

Ready for your next lesson

Set up once, check the sound at the start of each lesson, and give the time to music instead of to the connection. A Tissimo teacher can run the sound check with you in the first five minutes and tell you what your setup is losing; you can find a teacher for your instrument whenever you're ready.

Sources

• Setting up professional audio for Zoom Meetings — Zoom Support
• Zoom system requirements: Windows, macOS, Linux — Zoom Support
• Use high-fidelity music mode to play music in Microsoft Teams — Microsoft Support
• Skype is retiring in May 2025: What you need to know — Microsoft Support
• Filter out noise from your meeting on Google Meet — Google Meet Help
• Change FaceTime audio settings on iPhone — Apple Support
• Digital Grades & Diplomas: Filming and recording guidance, Music (February 2026) — Trinity College London
• Effect of Time Delay on Ensemble Accuracy (Chafe, Gurevich, Leslie and Tyan, ISMA 2004) — Stanford CCRMA
• G.114: One-way transmission time (05/2003) — ITU-T
• Changing audio settings during a Zoom meeting — Zoom Support
• Jamulus FAQ — Jamulus
• Speed of Sound — HyperPhysics, Georgia State University