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Online music lessons offer obvious advantages to your school. You can reach students who live more than 30 minutes away – even students across the country. Teach during normal “off hours”, when students in your area are tied up at school or at work. And students and parents are increasingly interested in online lessons to avoid the time and hassle of traveling to/from your school.
Several companies have built online marketplaces of music teachers, but these markets haven’t offered a partnering model for existing schools. And even if they had, online music lessons haven’t taken off like other online Internet markets. Why? Because every one of these markets has relied on Skype or similar apps – built for voice chat – to deliver online music lessons. This is a major problem. Voice technology makes music sound awful in online sessions – so bad that teachers can’t assess the student’s tone and sometimes even the pitch of what they are playing. These apps also have very high latency – a technical term that means that the student and teacher cannot play together, another critical requirement for productive lessons. Since Skype wasn’t built for music, it also lacks many other basic features to support effective lessons, like a metronome, mixers, backing tracks, etc.
At JamKazam, we’ve spent years designing, patenting, and building technology specifically to enable musicians to play online live in sync with studio quality audio. We’ve built a wide variety of critical online music performance features into this platform. And now we’ve built a lesson marketplace on top of this foundation to match students to teachers, and we’re investing in marketing to drive students into the market.
The bottom line is that your school can now effectively offer and teach online lessons to students using our incredible technology. If you secure students through your own marketing initiatives, it’s free to use JamKazam. And if we bring new students to your school, we keep a portion of the lesson income for these students, helping you to grow your business, increasing your revenues and profitability.
If this sounds interesting to you, read on to learn more about some of the top features of JamClass by JamKazam.
Teacher and student need to be able to play together to enable effective lessons. As any teacher who has attempted to teach using Skype will tell you, Skype doesn't let you play together. JamKazam's patented technologies deliver on this requirement at an amazing level. Click the video above to watch 6 bands play together from different locations to see our tech in action. And for an even more impressive feat, watch this video with a band playing together from Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, and Brooklyn using JamKazam tech.
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Skype was built for voice - for people talking with each other. It uses something called a "voice codec". This just means it processes all audio as a spoken human voice, and the result is that music, whether instrumental or vocal, sounds very bad in Skype, as it has been processed through tech built for talking. JamKazam delivers very high quality audio. You will be amazed at how good it sounds. It sounds like you're sitting next to each other playing. This is also critical for a good lesson. Poor audio is hard to endure in lessons.
You can use JamKazam's superior applications and services to conduct better online music lessons with your existing students, and to attract new students through your own marketing efforts. In addition, even schools are challenged to invest the resources to attract new students. Our JamClass marketplace adds value to your business in this area as well, as JamKazam invests every month to drive new students into our marketplace, and delivers these qualified students to you, set up and ready to go for online lessons. This is explained in more detail later on this page.
Many times a student thinks they've got it during a lesson, but they get home and realize "I don't got it", and then they've wasted a week. In JamClass the instructor can record all or portions of a lesson that the student can easily refer back to later. You can also have students record their performances, and you can review them together.
Teachers usually apply the techniques taught in lessons to playing songs - ideally songs your student loves. JamKazam makes this better too, as we offer a catalog of 3,700+ songs. Each song is is a complete multi-track recording, with fully isolated tracks for each part of the music - e.g. lead vocal, backing vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, keys, bass, drums, etc. So your student can listen to just the part they're learning in isolation, turn around and mute that one part to play along with the rest of the band, slow down playback for practice, record and share your performances, and more. It's really fun! And a great way to keep your students movitated and engaged.
Recitals are an important tool for teachers, but recitals are lost using Skype. With JamClass, you can live broadcast video and audio of student recitals through YouTube. This enables other students, family members, and friends to "tune in" for recital performances. And when students share the link to their recitals with their friends, it can also serve as great exposure for your lessons, attracting friends of your existing students as new students.
The free JamKazam app lets you easily apply VST & AU plugin effects to your live performance in lessons. For example, guitarists can apply popular amp sims like AmpliTube to get any kind of guitar tone without pedal boards or amps, and vocalists can apply effects like reverb, pitch correction, etc.
The free JamKazam app also lets you use MIDI instruments in online lesson sessions. For example, keys players can use MIDI keyboard controllers with VST & AU plugins to generate traditional piano sounds, Rhodes electric piano, Hammond organ, and other classic keys tones. And drummers who use electronic kits can use their favorite plugins to power their percussive audio.
There are many other features that are specifically useful for online lessons built into JamClass by JamKazam, including a metronome feature, the ability for either teacher or student to open any audio file and use it as a backing track for session acccompaniment, and too many more to list.
In addition to the lesson features, an awesome bonus is that once your students are set up to play with your teachers in online lessons, they can also play completely FREE with anyone else in the JamKazam community any time to use the skills they’re learning in lessons to play with others, which again reinforces and motivates students to stay engaged, as it’s more fun to play with others than alone. If you teach ensembles and rock bands, your students can practice in groups between lessons without having to find rehearsal space, pack gear, and travel. Plus there are thousands of online sessions played every month on the JamKazam service, including open jam sessions set up by our user community, and students can hop into these sessions, create their own improptu sessions, etc. It's a vibrant and welcoming community of fellow musicians.
At a minimum, you need:
To have very high quality audio in your sessions, rather than using the built-in microphone on your computer to capture your instrumental and/or vocal audio, we recommend using an external audio interface. An audio interface is a hardware product that connects to your computer and processes audio better than your computer alone. If you already own/use an audio interface, you can use the one you have. And if you don't, please refer to this set of help articles that recommend the best gear based on your instruments and/or vocals. You can pick up a perfectly good interface very inexpensively, typically for less than $50. And you can use your new interface not just for JamClass, but also to make home recordings of your performances, and also to play in online JamKazam sessions with other musicians. So it's a great thing to have for any musician.
If you feel worried or confused about getting set up because you're not a "tech genius", we are happy to work with you 1:1 to answer your questions, and walk you through picking gear and setting it up. We'll even hop into an online test session with you and your school’s teachers, show you around the key features, and make sure all your teachers are ready to rock and roll online!
You can use JamClass by JamKazam to teach your own existing students if they'd like to take online lessons, and it’s free to use in this way for schools, much like Skype.
If you would like JamKazam to bring new students to your school through the JamClass marketplace, we will be making substantial marketing investments in attracting, equipping, and delivering these students to you. JamKazam will bill and collect payments directly from these referred students. You and your teachers set your prices for lessons just as you do today. We retain a minority percentage of the lesson revenue from these referred students, and we will transfer the majority balance of these lesson revenues to your school. The school is then responsible to distribute lesson payments to its teachers according to the school’s agreements with its teachers, whatever those may be. Also, as the school operator, you may choose to have all lesson booking requests from the JamClass marketplace come directly to you as the school administrator, so that you handle scheduling and booking for all these online lessons, just as you already do for lessons on premise at your school. Once you have set the date/time for these lessons, they will then appear on each teacher’s JamClass dashboard. So when using JamClass you, as the school owner, may continue to manage scheduling and distribution of earnings to your school’s teachers.
Finally, please note that to participate in the JamClass marketplace, each teacher will need to opt in to participate in our TestDrive program. TestDrive is a core component of our JamClass marketing programs, providing students interested in taking online lessons with discounted introductory packages to get started. To participate in the marketplace, each teacher must be willing to teach at least 2 TestDrive lessons per week. Your school is paid $10 for each 30- minute TestDrive lesson, and many TestDrive students will become long-term students who pay your normal rates. Teachers may opt to accept more than 2 TestDrive lessons per week if they would like to grow their student base more rapidly.
If you're ready to sign up your school, or you think this might be good for your school but are not sure yet, scroll back up to the top of this page, and enter your email address and a password to sign up. Once you've done this, we'll reach out to you to answer any and all questions you have. If you find you want to move forward, we’ll work with you directly to help you get your school ready to go.