There are pros and cons to taking what used to be called “internet lessons“. Fortunately, Eddie Lewis’ teaching style is less affected by the negatives of distance learning. Let’s look at the pros and cons of Skype lessons and then we will explore what makes the negatives less of a  problem in Mr. Lewis’ trumpet lessons online.

Pros

Trumpet lessons online are convenient. You don’t need to go anywhere. You don’t need to drive. You even get to choose which room to have your lesson in. As long as you have a good connection, the lessons can be located wherever you are most comfortable.

Taking trumpet lessons online also let’s Mr. Lewis hear you in your most comfortable environment. Many students say that they play better at home. Well, now you have a chance to put your best foot forward in your trumpet lessons.

When you take trumpet lessons online, you are also unlikely to forget your music. Hey, it happens more often than you can imagine!

Now with Covid19, everyone is wanting to take trumpet lessons online because it’s safer.

With online trumpet lessons, you also have the opportunity to take trumpet lessons with anyone you want. You are not limited to only your city’s local trumpet teachers. Several of my current students were stuck taking trumpet lessons at their local music stores with teachers who weren’t even trumpet players themselves. In person lessons are always better than internet lessons, but when you cannot find a good teacher in your local area, internet lessons are a convenient alternative.

Cons

Skype trumpet lessons will never completely replace live, in person lessons. However, like we said earlier on this page, Mr. Lewis’ teaching style minimizes the problems of distance learning.

The first and biggest point on the cons list is tone. The technology is not good enough yet to give teachers an accurate assessment of the student’s tone quality. Fortunately, Mr. Lewis’ approach to teaching you how to get a better tone does NOT require him to hear your true sound in every lesson.

Eddie Lewis’ approach to tone improvement is more environmental. He teaches you how to create a musical environment that automates improvement in tone quality. He doesn’t need to be able to tell you that you sound bad for him to help you with your tone.

Another major issue that makes internet lessons a problem is the play-along stuff. The technology for these Skype calls assumes the backing tracks are “noise” to be canceled out. When a student puts a track on and tries to play along with it, either the track is canceled out or the trumpet sound is canceled. out.

Mr. Lewis has found a work-around on Skype for this problem, but for some reason, it doesn’t seem to work for every student. Students with very similar computers and mic setups will have problems making that solution work.

For that reason, Mr. Lewis suggests that the students record some of their assignments on a D.A.W. (digital audio workstation – aka. recording software). The students can use free D.A.W. software like Audacity to record themselves with the tracks. That way we can listen to the assignments in the lesson and even hit pause sometimes to talk about specific points in the recording.

This is a system that works very well for trumpet lessons online. In some ways, this is even better for the students than in person trumpet lessons because they get to listen to their own performances more critically.

The last point on this cons list is latency. Latency is just a fancy word for lagging. When we speak into a Skype connection, it takes a couple seconds for that video to get to your computer. This means that the teacher cannot play along with the student. It means that we can’t play duets (a very important trumpet tradition). It even means that the teacher can’t clap rhythms while you play.

This is part of the reason why we created our You Play First Chair series on Eddie’s YouTube channel. This is a free trumpet play-along series for which Eddie Lewis is performing all of the other trumpet parts. No, it’s not nearly as good as playing duets with a teacher in a live setting. But it’s better than not playing that stuff at all.

The You Play First Chair videos are the second most popular videos on the YouTube channel. During Covid19 lockdowns, we received a lot of comments expressing gratitude for these trumpet play-along videos while band programs were shut down for the year. The trumpet play-along videos were already popular before Covid19, but when the virus hit, lot’s of students were using them daily.