Remote Music Teaching with OBS and Zoom

[Music] don't tell me you've come here because you want to learn a bit more about teaching music online and I've been struggling to to find a really good way of teaching music remotely from home like you I'm sure I've had to battle with zoom and trying to get over the poor audio quality the latency sometimes when you hit the key on the keyboard and it sounds half a second later it's really not conducive to teaching an instrument at all if nothing else in my setup helps you it might be useful for you to know that you can log in to zoom with the second device so for example if you have a spare tablet or a spare phone or a spare laptop you can log in with any of those devices to create a second image for example an overhead shot of the keyboard as I've got here along with another camera looking at your face you can log in to your own meeting that was news to me and it may even be all you need but I wanted to do a bit more than that I wanted to be able to show them sheet music and possibly even me playing the piano while this sheet music on the screen or maybe incorporate a logic session how can you do all those things simultaneously without having to go back into the share screen page and zoom to keep changing the screen backwards forwards between the keyboard and the score what I've come up with I'm really excited about because I think it's actually going to enhance my teaching beyond what I can do in the classroom I've only actually paid for one new piece of software which is only twenty nine dollars and it's actually specific to teaching keyboards anyway so you may not need that you know one or two new bits of hardware as well which you might find useful so let's have a look at that setup first and then we'll dive into the software and I'll show you what's going on there now please don't be find off by what I'm about to show you I'm just really lucky to have a nice studio at home and lots of equipment to hand but I'd like to think you can adapt this setup to whatever you have available depending on your requirements and what instrument you're teaching I'm using two computer monitors which is really useful so I can have lots of applications open and viewable at the same time and as mentioned earlier I'm also using my iPad to host the meetings that way I'm always available on the screen to talk to my students you can obviously use a webcam or phone for this purpose I'm using my controller keyboard for teaching which is connected via USB to my Mac so I can use high quality sounds from within Logic Pro X other brands of music software and MIDI keyboards are available whatever equipment you're using you will need to do some testing with regard to the audio and eliminating feedback since there may be multiple mics that are live and speakers trying to retransmit those sounds an awful lot of these audio issues can simply be resolved by wearing a decent pair of headphones you need to be comfortable if you're going to be teaching for any length of time and now you can switch all your speaker's off and eliminate any nasty feedback if you're on a tight budget I'll be all these in-ear headphones were a huge surprise to me I've got these on Amazon and they cost a tiny fraction of what I paid for some well-known mid-range in-ear monitors but they by far outperform them again to maximize audio quality I'm using a studio condenser mic plugged into my digital mixer but you could use any microphone plugged directly into a computer find an audio interface or a mixer or USB but your audience is really going to appreciate if you try to avoid using the built-in mic on your phone or laptop for hands-free convenience my microphone is on an adjustable arm which you can buy fairly cheaply but you may just have a spare microphone stand laying around I'm also employing my phone to give her an overhead view of my hands on the keyboard if you happen to have a small action cam or something that might be preferable and that would mean you could still use your phone during your teaching hours but for me this just solves a problem for now the rig that's holding my phone in place is a slightly complex little setup and depending on your space and where your instrument is located you may find a simpler solution but I know you curious so mine starts with a small clamp on the desk above my keyboard onto which I've attached what is called a friction arm or a magic arm this is just a flexible arm which rotates into any position and the whole arm locks into position with a single knob on the side these usually have a camera or lighting mount on the top and I've added a tripod extension tube to mine to give it a just a ball height at the top I've got a smartphone holder which is then attached to a mini tripod ball head so I can rotate it into any position I want as I say it's a little bit complex but it works and I can easily remove the whole assembly in one piece between lessons if you're teaching for any length of time it's going to be important that you can keep your phone plugged in for charging so do buy some long USB cables and have some sockets nearby since you're essentially going to be broadcasting from home now make sure your students can see you if you don't have a lot of natural light in the room it's worth investing in a small LED light the LED video lights these days have become so cheap now and will make all the difference to your visitors experience now some of these little bits of equipment I've had lying around the studio for a while but I found a few similar bits on Amazon which I'll link to in the description below nothing in this video has been sponsored or endorsed so have a hunt around yourself and let me know what you've found in the comments below so let's now turn to the software side of things and show you how we're going to broadcast your lesson [Music] okay so the first thing we need to do is come to OBS project comm and download the OBS studio software this is open broadcaster software which basically allows you to broadcast from home whether it be live streams or just screen recordings you can download for Windows and Mac OS and even Linux and the other piece of software that I decided to invest in which you can get a free demo for you can try it for free it's this called synth easier and it's a lighting up piano basically so you can see what notes you're playing and you can broadcast that then to your students I'll show you how that looks in a minute you can also load MIDI files into things easier and you can display sheet music and all sorts of cool things so if you are a keyboard teacher that's a really useful one to have so when you first load the OBS software you should be faced with a window that looks a little bit like this what's going to happen is that you're going to create scenes in the left window here under preview this will be the display that you want to broadcast to your students and when that displays are ready to go you can hit transition and it will pop up over here now this is the screen your students are actually going to see in the end so this is your broadcast screen if you like just check that studio mode is switched on here otherwise you just see one screen we want to see the two so we can see what we're going to show our students before we show it to them also check in settings and go to video and make sure that you're broadcasting at HD resolution so this is the base canvas resolution and the output resolution just make sure they're the same and they should probably be HD in your setup also come to the audio tab here and select your microphone input in my case the StudioLive 24-hour commend you do lots of testing in order to get the best audio quality possible for your lessons in my case I found it best to monitor directly from the mixing desk so I don't actually need this input and OBS and can mute it but it is really useful to have it here available for testing purposes so let's start creating our first preview scene there's one already here called scene which has got nothing in it I'm just going to right click and rename that scene keys teaching now we need to add some sources to the scene that could be video that's coming in through various cameras or it could be windows on your computer that you want to share and broadcast to your students so we do that under the sources menu here and we click Add now I want to add my overhead camera first of all so this is my iPhone which I've rigged up over the keyboard and I'm going to select a new capture device this could equally be a webcam or something let's just call it overhead cam and we're going to click OK and then we get a window pop up here where we can select our device and because the phone is connected it's connected by USB and it pops up here you could do the same with an iPad but what I did find was that trying to connect an iPhone and an iPad made this software crash for some reason I couldn't use both at the same time that may just be a bug in the apple system where you can't connect the two at the same time or there may be some workaround which you can let me know about in the comments but here's my iPhone you can see it's upside-down actually I could flip the phone but I'd have to reset it all up so what I'm going to do instead is accept that as an input and it pops up here we can move it resize it whatever we need to do if we right click on it we can transform edit transform and rotate this by 180 degrees you can see it's moved out of that window here but we can drag it back in and there's our keyboard right-clicking again let's do another edit transform and you can see we've got some crop tools here let's crop the top which will now be the bottom of course so I'm gonna say 200 in there that's a bit too much 150 and the bottom 300 that looks pretty good let's close that up and there we have a keyboard we can resize it so that it takes up more of the screen and there we have our keyboard and if we were to now transition we can make that our broadcast output one more thing to note on this subject is that if you're using your phone as a virtual camera the video app that you're using is likely to have an overlay which will appear on the output when you plug it into your computer what we need is a clean video signal without that overlay I discovered how to get around this problem by downloading an app called true visage on the iPhone and as you can see after just a few seconds the overlays disappear and you're good to go but there's plenty of room here to do other things so what we're going to do is add another source this time I want to share a window so I'm going to call it window capture and we'll call it Synthesia and here we can select the window that we want to broadcast so these are all the windows I've got open on my computer at the moment and there we can see it's Synthesia FreePlay let's open that up and I'll see we have two sources labeled here which we can also hide by clicking on the eye or we can lock them as well you can see that's displaying my MIDI note output as I play the keys which is just fantastic now obviously we can resize this as well resize this window we could crop the window as well I'm going to do this this time I'm just going to try and make that line up roughly with my keyboard and which I think I've done there fairly successfully I'm just gonna stretch it sideways and there we are ruff I mean you can you could also obviously move the keyboard I've got mines just on a desk here so we could move the keyboard to line it up and get somewhere close but for the purposes of demonstration I'd say that was pretty good so we've just learnt how to open an application window within OBS and broadcast that to our student for the lesson so why stop there we could open any application and do the same thing I'm going to switch now to my other display and show you what's open there his Synthesia that's the window that we grabbed to display that I've got some music open here which is just open in preview on the Mac which is off see free comes with Mac OS so you can display anything in that window that could be a text document or any sort of PDF document or image and I've also got logic open here as well which is providing my keyboard sounds I can switch from lecture piano to grand piano [Music] and I could also include backing tracks here there's a drummer track I've got already prepared so let's try now sharing these two windows in OBS now we're going to try and add that score window so again hit the plus for a new source window capture we're going to call this score here we go we find the window now this is under the program preview and there it is there's our chart here it's looked okay now we could transition here and broadcast that as a screen it's a bit messy though isn't it so let's tidy it up let's resize it manually and then we'll drag it up here and then if I were to scroll in the preview window you can see how that moves with it and we can display our score perfect let's try a new scene now I'm going to create a new scene and call it logic logic session ok again new source so now we haven't hold new scene we can hit the plus button for a new source have a window capture let's just call it logic select the window from the menu and here we are this is our logic session and we can immediately transition to that for broadcast and it will switch to the next scene in the list obviously we've only got two in the list so it's going to switch back to the keys one ready to transition back --lens of forwards between those two scenes so if I go into logic now and hit play you can see how we are broadcasting that screen perfect but how do we get all this into zoom into your zoom meeting well first of all we need to set up a new meeting in zoom Yui press new meeting start a meeting or so you can schedule your meeting as well and here we are hello nice to see here we are in zoom I'm going to go to the menu at the top right here and you see this button called an able original sound let's hit that button we're also going to go into meeting settings and allow screen sharing that's really important there's other settings there as well that you might want to look at for your particular meeting but that's the important ones I've muted the audio here in the iPad session and then I'm going to go to participants and invite a new participant and there we are so zoom has opened up on my computer what I would do now is go to the top right here and go exit full-screen and I'm just going to pop that screen next to my screen in OBS to keep it out of the way and I'm going to click the share screen button here on the computer and we have various options we can we could just share this Synthesia screen if we wanted to from here we can share the whole of either desktop we could go to the whiteboard as you can normally in zoom you can also share via your iPhone directly but I found the most efficient way is to go to the advanced tab here and select a portion of the screen to broadcast and this is a portion that I've selected you can resize this obviously so here we are we can now go back into here and broadcast my keys screen there's a score window transition and that would show up on the display there isn't that cool so again we conflict here between reading and logic we could if you want choose to show the overhead instead of the Synthesia keyboard all sorts of options here now there are some really important settings to look at and zoom that are really going to transform the audio so open up settings on the desktop version of zoom and you will find a whole list of options here but we're going to concentrate on the audio you can see that I've got signal coming in from my microphone input the StudioLive 24 and the output here is muted because I'm monitoring the signal that's going into the computer I don't want to hear it twice so come down to advanced settings and make sure the show and meeting option to enable original sound from microphone is enabled so that your students can enable that feature and that will turn off the suppression of background noise the zoom might consider any sort of musical sounds background noise especially as sounds sustained and died away it will try and chop those sounds up so this option to enable original sound will preserve all the sound that's coming into the microphone and not disrupt it at all likewise here in the desktop version you need to turn the suppress persistent background noise option off and likewise suppress intermittent background noise we want to disable that too that will really clean up the audio makes so much difference there are all sorts of cool things that you can do within zoom itself once you're showing your screen I could for example ask the students to spell out keys on the keyboard using the screen annotation feature so again we could say C minor 7 they spell it out and it's fed back to me on my screen as well of course that's a really cool feature and of course you could share any application from your computer so that I'm sure there are all sorts of methods you could use for teaching depending on what instrument you teach as well let's just take a quick break from OVS and have a deeper look into Synthesia if you do happen to teach any keyboards you're gonna find this really useful and if you've looked at any online tutorials of piano lessons you've probably come across this interface before essentially it's a piano which lights up as you play it and it also makes an effort to show you what chords are being played as well which is really useful when I'm broadcasting I'm actually using sounds direct from logic which better-quality but these built-in sounds are pretty good actually and you can activate them within the settings here the built-in MIDI synthesizers you can turn on or off there's a nice library of sounds strings brass leads if you want that sort of thing but you can also just drag MIDI files into the window here and it will play them back for you here's a quick demo so that's a really useful tool but there's a bunch of songs as well which have been programmed at various levels of difficulty all there's just as free play mode now the keyboard you can see I've got here is fairly blown-up you can change that to show all eighty-eight keys if you want to but if you want to match it up with an overhead view of your keyboard you it might well be won't get eighty-eight keys in and it's also going to be harder to see on a small screen for your students so I've set up this custom one you can go anywhere in between with the zoom settings here and you can slide the keyboard along as well to show which area you want to use and save those settings well we did cram quite a lot in there didn't we but I do hope some of that has been useful to you if it was please like and subscribe to the channel and I'll keep bringing any more content until then thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: 2b Media Services

Views: 8,042

Keywords: YouTube, Teaching, Music, Online, Lockdown, Remote, Lessons, OBS, Zoom, Keyboards, Piano, Colin Willsher, 2b Media, COVID, Setup, Gear

Id: goMfFYOzgkw

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020