today at jwpepper i'm going to show you some ideas for setting up a music workstation
for virtual lessons home recording or really any type of technology based teaching or learning
we'll go over options for different budgets
and take a deep dive on how to get this stuff set up let's get started
teachers everywhere of every type are needing more than ever to provide a great experience
for students in a virtual setting and this is most likely a trend that's not going to go away
anytime soon and really we should embrace a lot of the aspects of this because in the end it will
make us better teachers or presenters and a lot of this stuff falls into the category of music
studios or home recording which i know many people would like to do more of but maybe don't know how
so upping your game with your music workstation can also help with your home studio as well and
since basic home studio slash virtual workstation 101 was not part of the curriculum and education
courses in college jw pepper is here to help you figure out which wire goes to which thing first
let's define a virtual workstation or a music workstation ideally you want a dedicated space
that you can use to give lessons or teach and possibly move around if needed take it on the go
if you have to and in the case of music teachers incorporate things like instruments or microphones
having a dedicated space already set up with a lot of great features takes the hassle out
of setting up each time and makes the experience you're about to share a better one basically the
more comfortable you feel the better your virtual presence will be and a lot of that starts with
being heard and being seen we want to give tips for all teachers in this video so we're going to
start with things that every teacher at this point should have a laptop and a workspace area and then
we're going to build out from there and show you all the things you can do and how to do them and
why you might want to even consider making some of these upgrades along the way we're going to have
products being shown that we're using all the links will be in the description and the pepper
numbers will be on the screen as well so you can pause and write them down while you're going okay
so we've opened up our laptop and if we've done nothing at all to try to correct our situation
this is most likely what our viewers are seeing and hearing when you're trying to engage them with
virtual lessons or with classrooms or anything like that on a daily basis and so right away we
can see that there's some issues here both with the framing with the lighting but also with my
audio and i think that even with just a couple of tips we can show you using just the things you may
have already around your house or some products from pepper um that you'll be able to improve
your situation right away so let's get into that right now first if you can let's get the laptop on
a table that gives you some room and again if you can let's try to position it in front of a window
and definitely not with the window to your back by using some books or a laptop riser you can better
position the angle of the laptop so you can fit yourself into the frame a little better next for
audio which is the most important part this can be improved even using the onboard mic of the laptop
maybe you have some manhasset music stands already or you have some boom stands like the samson mk5
boom you can position these next to your laptop area and hang some blankets from them to muffle
some of the surrounding audio of the room and now we went from something that looks like this
to looking and sounding like this we've added blankets to our manhasset music stand and samsung
boom stands to make this little sound shield and that's improved our audio a little bit we can
present a little bit better now that the laptop is positioned a little higher giving us a better
angle of view and we look a little better because the window is in front of us now instead of behind
us if we wanted to improve things further from here we can by adding some additional items
so that brings us to our first upgrade using something like these the irig mycast hd or the
irig video creator bundle starting with the audio the irig micast hd can plug directly into a laptop
or smartphone and it can mount right to them with the provided magnet clip after plugging in the usb
mic you will have to make some changes to your video call app in preferences so if you're using
zoom or teams go into preferences and change the audio device option from your internal microphone
to the irig mic cast hd so now our audio sounds like this and if you only wanted to improve your
audio quality using the irig mic cast is a very simple solution for that and it's very convenient
because it also comes with multiple usb cables that can plug into many different smartphones
stepping up the video side of things the irig video creator bundle includes a small tripod and
smartphone mount a long cable lavalier microphone and a ring light that mounts to the tripod
by using the setup shown here with the video creator kit you have a couple of different options
you could choose to use the smartphone as the main device to make the call and now you have
your laptop as the second device to provide notes and anything you normally use your laptop for
this would provide better video quality since the phone has a better camera than most laptops
and again it frees up the laptop to be used as you normally would you can also use it in the
opposite way still making the calls and presenting on the laptop but now using the hd mic cast as our
microphone and the tripod to hold your phone as a second device to help with notes or anything else
using the provided ring light would really help if you can't get near a window or don't have
access to sunlight another great benefit of the video creator kit or the hdmi cast
is that they're very small and easy to take on the go the tripod folds up and everything is small
and can go right into a bag to go wherever you need to teach adding better audio alone
will really help keep viewers engaged with whatever it is you're presenting
adding better video really makes that experience for them even more engaging and if you feel better
about how you look and sound you're going to be able to present better as well this final setup
is designed to showcase all the things that you could add to your workstation and i'll go over how
to set up all this stuff and more importantly why i chose some of the things i did it might look and
feel like overkill but trust me there's a reason for everything here and i think you'll find some
of these options really helpful first let's get an overview of everything we have going on here this
setup includes at the heart of it all the zoom r24 recorder interface control surface and sampler
which is acting as our interface to provide multi-track input of both my main voiceover mic
for presenting a microphone to mic any possible instruments or singing and is providing my input
to my multi-track recording program in this case logic pro 10. i'm also inputting into logic using
the samsung graphite 49 midi controller and my microphone for presenting is the shure sm7b which
is connected to the zoom r24 with a cloud lifter preamp we have a video on that preamp linked right
up here and in the description in case you want to find out more about that in this example we also
have a flight soprano travel ukulele which i'm using to show a live instrument example i've seen
a lot of teachers using ukuleles in virtual calls this year and i think they're a great tool to help
teaching my laptop is my main presenting device and where i will share my screen if needed however
we've hooked up a camera to the computer so we're not limited to the computer's camera for quality
and audio and we can also position the laptop anywhere now and still have a great view of
ourselves also i hooked up a second monitor to the laptop so i can share my screen and it doesn't
get too cluttered if i'm using multiple apps and i can still see the students and all that good stuff
finally we're running all the audio through these yamaha studio monitors which are active
and allow for monitoring while recording we'll use headphones while we're on our calls but
while we're recording we'll be able to use these monitors to get a great sound since they provide
a nice flat sound while we're recording one last thing to note we're using a studio light to light
ourselves here and lighting is a whole new ball game and could really get its own video so if you
would like to see more lighting tips using either your own lights or studio lights hit us up in the
comments below and let us know and we'll make one for you this setup here is pretty killer but how
did we get here let's start back at a blank desk and i'm going to walk through each setup part of
this process first thing i like to do is lay out my hardware pieces on the desk without any cables
this gives me a good idea of where things will need to be and how much space i need i might
need to move stuff depending on cables but once i have a good idea this is where i start after the
parts i know i will need are laid out laptop monitor midi controller microphone interface
audio monitors camera and instruments i can start hooking all of this up before we get started note
that this setup has items that jw pepper already owns and that we use for our own production needs
however we have many different variations of these products in many different price points in
the descriptions below so don't feel like you need these exact items however you can't go wrong with
any of these items in this video starting with the r24 as our interface we will first hook up the
yamaha studio monitors running the quarter inch cables from the main output of the r24 into the
yamaha studio monitor's inputs this will allow us to monitor our audio output later on next i want
to run the usb cable from the r24 into the usb port onto the laptop at this point you'll need to
go in and configure the r24 to act as an interface by going to its settings and making that selection
now we can hook up our main microphone and our instrument microphone or any other instrument say
you have an electric guitar or something like that you can plug that right into the r24 since we have
eight channels and one of them also has a high z input for electric guitars for the shure sm7b
you will need a preamp or an audio boost on your main recorder so we use the cloud lifter which
converts 48 volt phantom power to clean gain you attach the xlrs from the mic to the cloud lifter
and from the cloud lifter to the r24 next we need to hook up the graphite 49 midi controller
which again uses a usb connection i'm going to plug that into the computer one thing i love about
this midi controller is that it is truly plug and play i have never programmed a midi controller
before in my life and i'm not really sure how to but i've used this midi controller many times in
the past and i've never been let down i plug it in and immediately logic pro or even garageband can
recognize it and make the necessary adjustments for it and now i have midi input for all the
software instruments in logic or in garageband after you hook up the usb cable to your audio
interface and turn it on some audio interfaces might require additional software to run
in the case of the r24 you do need an additional driver to run it on mac or windows so you go
to the zoomcorp.com website and under r24 if you search that you'll see the software and documents
for this you can get the user manual as well as any firmware updates for the device itself or the
driver installs for mac or windows in this case i'm using a mac so i'll install the mac drivers
after those drivers are installed you'll go to your system preferences or settings in windows
and go to your sound settings and in there you'll be able to select your output and your input to
be the r24 driver as you can see here we have the r24 driver for the output and for the inputs that
means anything that's coming into the computer or going out from the computer is going to be sent
through our audio interface which is exactly what we want after we install the drivers you
will need to make one more configuration to the software that you're using to input your music
in this case i'm using logic pro 10 so as soon as i open up the software it asks me immediately
what type of track i want to create in this case i'm creating an audio track and i'm going to use
input number three from the r24 interface as you can see here it says device r16r24 driver so it's
using that and it's going to come out from input three and output out of one and two of the driver
just like we hooked up to our studio monitors we'll hit create and if i just do a couple snaps
you can see that my audio is coming through on my additional microphone so we're all set to record
some of the last steps that we'll do are hook up our additional monitor which might vary depending
on your monitor connection but most are hdmi and last we'll hook up our camera to the computer
you can use any camera that has an hdmi output which includes gopros dslrs mirrorless cameras
camcorders or even smartphones with an adapter certain camera makers like sony nikon and canon
offer free software that will allow the connection of your camera to the computer
or you can opt for a small device like this hdmi capture card which is used in a lot of online
gaming to connect any pc to any camera once you have the camera card simply connect the hdmi from
your camera to the hdmi input of the card then the usb to the computer you'll then need to go
into either zoom or teams or whatever your video caller is go to preferences and under video select
the usb camera card and now you'll be broadcasting from your camera instead of from the built-in cam
on the computer so why even bother doing this for me first and foremost the biggest benefit is a
larger frame most pcs and webcams are a fixed focal length which is usually tight and can only
be really fitting for your head by adding a camera with a wide angle lens or even a gopro you've just
increased your field of view tremendously allowing you to show more things and be a little bit more
animated second you can have control of the image too you can now use the camera controls to make
the camera brighter or darker if you need to and the image quality is so much better if
you're giving ukulele lessons and trying to show your fingerings it's going to be much cleaner and
easier for the viewer to see so what did this result get us well if i'm teaching a class i
can present having my notes on one screen and i can see my class on another i still have room for
windows if i have more questions that get asked i can bring up more information i can present my
ukulele to the class with high quality audio and video i can sing along with it and record it all
to a multi-track recording session that i can save and work on later and assign his homework if i get
other instruments in like a guitar i can add them easily with my interface and same goes with guests
i can give audio examples with my midi controller on screen using screen sharing and logic and i can
be very animated since i have all this frame to work with best of all if you built this station in
your classroom when your students return this is a fully functioning audio notation and recording
workstation all the same tools and equipment can now be used to do recording sessions with students
or notation exercises for theory mostly all of the zoom and task cam recorders that we carry
double as both audio recorders and audio interfaces so they're not relegated to a desk
they're excellent field recorders as well when live ensembles return okay so we just went over
a lot of information and a lot of great product options and this stuff is not easy to handle but
neither are middle school students and that's why they hire teachers even though this stuff is new
and maybe very foreign to a lot of us having these options at our disposal will make for a
better teaching and learning environment online and it can actually be a little bit of fun once
you know which wire goes to which thing if you did find this video helpful please give us a thumbs up
let us know in the comments below if you would like to see more videos like this one and don't
forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of the content that we have coming out at jw pepper