Hi i'm Dr. Mario Ajero, Professor of Piano at Stephen F Austin State University in
Nacogdoches, Texas. In this video i want to show you how to
set up the Zoom video conferencing computer application
for piano lessons or music lessons in general
and walk you through some basic functionality in the Zoom app.
So what i'm going to show will be on my MacBook Pro
notebook computer but much of what i'm going to show is applicable on other
computers as well first thing that i want to show
is how you enable the in meeting option of
original sound and this is especially important for music lessons over
Zoom because the default audio settings are
optimized for speaking and not music that means there are filters in place
that suppress the noise from fans or air conditioners which is fine
but then it might misinterpret soft playing or
low frequencies on pianos and other instruments
as background noise so in order to enable that
meeting option for original sound you'll have to go to the zoom.us
menu here and go to preferences and select that
and then it's going to pull up this window over here i'm going to drag it
over here if you don't mind and then what you want to go is into
audio here okay make sure of course that your microphone
i'm using on zoom h4n audio recorder as my
external usb microphone but you could also use your built-in microphone as
well here and what you want to make sure that you
uncheck remember you want to uncheck is this automatically adjust
microphone volume don't have that check but have that unchecked so that it stays
at one consistent volume level throughout your
zoom meetings here okay and the next step is to go to this advanced
button and go ahead and click on that
you'll see these advanced features such as show
in meeting option to enable original sound from microphone
so i want to check that and then underneath that is audio processing
one says suppress persistent background noise
and its default is to auto what you want to do if you're using zoom
for music lessons is to set it for disable alright
the next option is suppress intermittent background noise
and then what you want to do is also disable
that particular option as well then the last one you don't have to do
is echo cancellation there's only two options one is auto and
aggressive i typically haven't seen much of a difference between the two here but
you can set it to aggressive or experiment between the two
here what this is mostly used for is for when there are echoes coming in
over a microphone and speakers here so i usually recommend to students and
teachers to mute their microphones when they're not
playing for one another here that way it just
cancels out the echo automatically here but if you forget to turn off your
microphones then maybe the aggressive feature
might be the best thing to do so that's how to enable the in meeting option for
original sound in your preferences however you do have
to toggle it on in the middle of your
meeting so i'm just going to start a new meeting here
and then don't forget that whenever you're joining a meeting
it's not like facetime or skype where you
just simply call one another normally we set up meetings in advance and i'll talk
about that a little bit later on but normally it will ask it'll prompt
you to join with computer audio you could also check off this
automatically join audio by computer when joining a meeting here but if it
prompts you to do so make sure that you join with the
computer audio what you should see at the top of the
left part of the screen is a turn off or turn
on original sound this is where it gets a little bit confusing here okay
if you click the little arrow next to it here it says select the microphone
to always use original sound so that way you don't have to do this for every
single meeting you can just have this original sound
for every music lesson that you're going to be
giving or taking on zoom and i'm going to use my H4
and then it says turn on original sound so what i want to do is i want to tap or
click that so that it shows turn off original sound
it's a little bit confusing here i wish there was like a little green
slider that says that original sound is on here but
if you see turn off original sound that means if you push the button then it
will turn off the original sound but and that's actually what we want to see
here is to turn off original sound so if you see turn on original sound then that
means the original sound is off and you're
still going to get those filterings of it here but this is the
setting that you want for original sound
now if you're a student you'll likely receive an invitation from a teacher
that looks like this either through email or some
other type of communication you can either click on the link and it
will launch that meeting through your zoom
app automatically oftentimes the teachers will include the
password already in this url or at least sometimes the zoom app
generates that for you here and then also there's another way that you could
do it on the invitation you might see a
meeting ID and password so that when you're in the
zoom app itself go ahead and tap on join and then go
ahead and tap in that meeting ID
you don't even have to do the spaces this is just a dummy
meeting ID i don't even know if it will work here no it doesn't work because i
just made it up here but and if it prompts you to do the password
then of course input the password as it is
indicated on the invitation and that will
let you go in here but usually the direct url address link usually works
in launching the meeting itself now if you're a teacher you would like
to usually schedule the meeting ahead of time there
as i mentioned before it's not like facetime or skype where you can just
simply call somebody here of course you could always just generate
a new meeting right on the fly and then send out the meeting
invitation afterwards here but i usually find it beneficial to schedule a meeting
here for the piano lessons here so you could say
next piano lesson for i don't know joe here and then you could
say set the particular date in advance here
let's say we go with monday at 2:30 p.m. ends at
ends at 3 30 p.m. okay make sure of course that you
have your time zone set here okay this goes for
both teachers and students here if you're not in the
correct time zone then you might get your
timings mixed up here so just make sure i'm in the central time
zone here and most of the times they set it automatically based off of your
location here but you know you're welcome to do otherwise
here generate the meeting ied
automatically it's good to have the password in fact the
university where i teach has a password already
automatically automatically generated and you're required to have so
i like to have the video enabled for both
video and participants so make sure you check off all those here
you know there's actually ways of actually connecting through telephone
and computer audio here and you could leave that all in there
if you want to but you don't have to and then as far as i just set the
computer audio you could even have specific calendars that it exports to
there's also more advanced options some teachers i know like to use a
waiting room and just kind of have one long
zoom meeting and then students kind of come in the waiting room and then they
come in and go out there as well but i just like to
have it for each individual students lesson here enable join before
host that's up to you whether you want to toggle that on or not
there's various advantages disadvantages about that if you want to mute the
participants upon entry especially if you have a group class and you don't
want someone like bursting in and making a lot of noise it might be
beneficial to have that but you might have to remind your students to unmute
their microphones so that they can actually hear you and
we'll talk about that in just a second here
i like to automatically record the meetings here you have the option to
either record locally on your own computer if you don't have enough space
here you can upgrade to the pro versions
and record it to a cloud so that you can actually even share
the recordings with your students afterwards and you can also
add alternative hosts as well here so i'm going to go ahead and click on
schedule and then my meeting is now scheduled here and if i go into my
meetings oh it also exports it to my calendars if
i need to here but i'm not going to bother with that
since this is just for demonstration purposes i'm gonna go
to meetings here and i have my next lesson for
joe over here and here you see where it says
copy invitation you can copy the invitation here
or also show the meeting invitation it has all this other information
such as joined by h.323 i don't even know what a lot of this stuff means to
be honest i think it's through ip addresses and so forth
what you most want to pay attention to is copy all of this particular
information at least the url the meeting id and the password and then
just cut simply copy that and then paste it into
whatever your mail program is so then i'm gonna
start a new mail invitation here and if i go into this and i paste
and then i can just send that out to students and that should
generate this url that they can join very easily as well and finally i want
to show you when you're in the meeting itself here
and just give you a little quick uh orientation of what you need to
know in order to navigate through the space here okay
so remember that if it prompts you to join with computer audio make sure that
you do so over here and oops i'm in the wrong
window here make sure you're on this window
and then if you have don't already automatically have it start your video
go ahead and start your video just like so here
and then i'm actually have my daughter's
ipad over here where she can join in as well so i'm gonna do that here
and i'm gonna join with video and i'm gonna mute her microphone here
as well so let me oh actually let me join in
but i'm gonna mute her microphone here
so i've gone ahead and muted her microphone here so as i mentioned before
there's this turn on original sound that's not what you want from music
lessons here remember i mean you want it on but you have to
have it show turn off original sound in order to get the best
videos that you excuse me audio that you
need in order to make sure it's working properly for
music lessons here okay if you ever need to mute your audio it's
down here on the bottom left you just toggle it both
on i'm muted and then i'm toggle it off and then i'm
unmuted here as well here okay you could see the
participants as well here that are here in fact as the host i have the
opportunity to ask to unmute this tell the student to unmute
if they are muted and so forth and some other options can stop their
video make them a host etc put them in the
waiting room if you want to punish them i don't know
but you have that and then also don't forget there's also the speaker view
particularly if you're the student and maybe you don't necessarily need to see
the side by side but whoever is talking the
most can be displayed on the screen here okay
it's a little bit confusing because i got two different
videos going on but you get the idea but gallery view
i like the gallery view because then you could see kind of like from that
particular perspective on how it all carries through of course
when you want to leave the meeting you just tap on end and it will either
tell you give you the option to leave the meeting
or end the meeting for all here so whichever one
works best for you so i hope that gives you a little bit of an idea
on how to get around with zoom also just as far as framing your shot i like
to place the camera in such a way that i can see
students hands at the piano keyboard here's just a couple of just
still shots of my kids at the piano where i've recorded them and these are
usually the most useful angles in order to
place your camera so that you have the best zoom musical experience
online as you possibly can alright so if you have any other questions you feel
free to email me at ajeromp@sfasu.edu and good luck with your
lessons here all right take care now bye-bye