About five years ago I had my first singing lessons over the internet. I had moved to the United Kingdom, far away from my singing teachers who were all based in the western United States. One of them came to the U.K. to teach only a couple of times a year and I wanted more lessons than that. All of my teachers are masters of teaching and had been teaching regularly over the internet using either Skype or I Chat for years. So I knew that they knew what they were doing, but I was still a little skeptical.

Would they be able to hear the nuances of singing that they needed to hear over Skype? How would they deal with the sound delay that sometimes occurs with internet lessons?  Would I miss some of the nuances of their teaching without being face to face with them?  What if the internet crashed?

Since that time I have had many internet voice lessons. And I have taught many internet lessons. At least half of my students take their lessons over Skype. The questions I asked are all legitimate questions and require solutions unique to internet teaching. But they do not get in the way of getting  great singing lessons over the internet.

Voice over internet protocols these days are of  high quality. The sound truly is excellent and much better that what we get over land line phones and mobiles. There have been  one or two lessons where my student’s internet connection was weak, which affected the sound and speed of the connection. But they were able to remedy that problem by either modifying their connection or taking their lesson at a different location where the connection was stronger.  I actually had one student who took her lessons in her car with her lap top outside of a Starbucks for a while! It worked great.

Occasionally a Skype video call will drop. I simply call the student right back and resume the lesson. Occasionally the video part of the call will freeze for a few seconds and then return to normal. But this does not affect what I am able to ascertain about the student’s voice. Advanced singing teachers rely heavily upon their ears to understand what is going on in a singer’s voice. In face to face lessons we will often close our eyes for a brief moment so that our ears can take over and we can truly hear what the voice is doing and not be distracted by our eyes. I have also taught lessons using simply Skype audio without video if the student only had access to their mobile phone and had a Skype phone application. The sound was great and the lesson was good.

It did take some experience for me as a teacher to get used to playing arpeggios and hearing the students voice be a fraction of a second later that what I was hearing out of my keyboard in my studio. But it did not take long for me to be able to only really hear the student’s singing and not my playing. Development of that skill is akin to being in a room full of people who are talking and picking out one conversation several feet away. An experienced teacher will have no problem with that.

Internet lessons are a huge boon to singing students. They allow students to study with the teacher they want to study with, anywhere in the world. Internet lessons allow the student to take lessons when they are touring or on vacation or are snowed in. And internet lessons level the playing field amongst students. By that I mean that it no longer matters if you choose to spend most of your time in a small town in the middle of nowhere but want to seriously study singing. It no longer matters if there is not a good singing teacher in your town. You have the choice of studying with the best teachers in the world no matter where you are. Give it a try!