I’ve recently heard from many of our students that getting real-time feedback is highly valuable when learning jazz — so I’m excited to announce a brand new way to accelerate your learning journey: PianoGroove Live Video Q&A Sessions!
On 21st July @ 12pm EDT , I’ll be answering your jazz questions in-person in a special webinar.
I will be hosting another live session the following week to accommodate for our students on other time zones.
How To Register For The Live Session
All PianoGroove students will have received an email with a link to the registration page.
Upon registering you will receive the live session URL and you can submit a question for me to cover in the Q&A.
There will also be live chat during the session so that participants can ask further questions for direct feedback and guidance.
Future Live Sessions
The vision is to host live Q&A sessions regularly and develop this into a new section on the PianoGroove website.
We are starting with a “Beginner Jazz Theory” session. Afterwards it would be great to hear your feedback and suggestions on the layout and structure of the live Q&A.
We can also create a poll to decide on the next topics and theory areas to cover by myself and our teaching team.
Looking forward to helping you get unstuck, and back on track!
Great idea! Maybe you could record those sessions and make them available later online. It wouldn’t be live, but the later viewing would certainly be of use–maybe create a section for those sessions with some sort of identifier for the topics covered. Just an idea. And I’m never awake at that time.
Yes creating a section of the site for previous Q&As recordings is a brilliant idea. I agree we can create a system to categorise and filter the recordings based on difficulty and themes/topics covered.
I’ve been focusing on the streaming software and stream layout and it’s looking good with a light up keyboard similar to the lessons on the site.
The initial response has been great and I’m excited to get the ball rolling with this.
And yes I will ensure we offer a selection of different time zones moving forward.
Hello Hayden: I was in two minds about signing up and decided against it for two reasons: the focus in this session was going to be on the basics and I did not want to take space from other interested parties. If (and knowing you, you will extend the scope of these sessions in the future) you offer sessions beyond the basic theory (I am far from advanced but intermediate staff is within my ability) I will be eager to join. Provided, of course, that there is room.
Best, Smole
I’ve reviewed the questions that have been submitted and we will be discussing both beginner and intermediate topics in the session. There have been some advanced questions which I will likely keep for an upcoming session.
Moving forward, we plan to create these sessions for all types of topics, levels, and abilities. I thought it made sense to ‘work from the ground up’ and open the discussion for our beginner students to begin with.
There is a lot of cross over between the beginner/intermediate/advanced classification on the site, and sometimes it’s hard to draw a solid line between them.
Based on the questions that have been submitted I will be touching upon a wide range of questions that are not just beginner focused so you’re more than welcome to join us. We have around 30 places left on this one so space is not a problem.
We set the limit to 100 participants to ensure that I can answer questions posted in the live chat during the session. I will review how this figure works as I want to make sure the session is personal enough to deliver realtime insights to those who tune in, whilst also accommodating for as many students as possible.
Thanks for the great Q&A session…lots to be learned from different skill levels. You have taken an already wonderful learning platform to a new level! Wow!
Great session Hayden and you did extremely well to cover so many questions across all levels of theory. Was great to see examples applied to the questions asked of the recipients and very insightful.
Regardless of one’s degree or level of knowledge on jazz theory, it was worthwhile to reinforce my own views on some of these areas like pentatonic chords and improvisation, etc.
Just an idea but be great for some of the other teachers to conduct a similar webinar/exercise to supplement their course theory.
Look forwards to receiving the download link or any reference to materials that you mentioned during the session!
I have created a temporary home for the Jazz For Beginners Q&A Session:
I will be rewatching the session and adding more download links and lesson references so the page is a work in progress.
Next Steps…
These videos are much longer than anything else on the website and so I feel that we need a new interface to chapter and navigate these sessions. We will be building 2 new page templates for live sessions.
Live Stream Archive Page
Live Stream Video Page
Here’s some of my ideas and I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas too:
Live Stream Archive Page
We can filter by teacher, genre, difficulty, perhaps search keywords
The archive shows upcoming events and past events
A countdown to the next live event would be cool
‘Add to Calendar’ functionality for upcoming events
Perhaps a bookmarking feature like the lesson page
Live Stream Video Page
A new chaptering interface to accommodate for longer video length and more chapters. There were about 25 questions yesterday, each one could be a chapter.
Teacher headshot and short bio
Link to teachers website
Live stream description with genre/difficulty bubbles
Related lessons/forum threads
A more customised live chat functionality - perhaps we could pull in the headshot from the teacher/student profile
Regular commenting system for feedback, perhaps a thumbs up badge to gauge the popularity of each session, and then we can show a “most popular sessions” filter option.
Upcoming Topics
If anyone has ideas for topics/themes for upcoming Q&A sessions, you can post them here.
I had an idea for a live version of the jazz standard lessons. Students can submit the tunes they are working on and we can build the arrangements from the ground up with real-time feedback on why particular choices were made for chords/voicings/reharms/fills etc… I think that would work well.
Another idea could be practice-orientated sessions where we pick a particular theory topic and walk through an example practice routine.
Now that we have a ‘working prototype’ I will chat with the other teachers as it would be awesome to have more styles and insights than just my own in these Q&A sessions.
Hayden, this sounds so good! I’ll be sure to send you any suggestions once I’ve had a chance to work through all this. One observation: I think in the initial box above [Live Q&A] you have “achieve” where I think you mean “archive.” Thanks for all of this.
I love your idea for a live version of the jazz standard lessons!
All of your ideas sound great. I like being able to filter by instructor, genre, and theory topic.
If possible, I would like the slow down…speed up on the Q&A video as we have in the regular lessons. It would be helpful to slow down the keyboard at times to fully grasp what you are illustrating.
Thanks so much for what you are doing. PianoGroove is truly a premier jazz piano learning site. These Q&A chats take it over the top!
And thanks for letting me know about the typo. When the page preview is shown, I think the forum caches the text and image. I corrected the typo on the page, but the preview box does not change. Perhaps it will refresh!
Hope everything is good on your side. Just wanted to let you know that I thoroughly enjoyed your “stream” yesterday. It was casual and very informative. You were nice enough to read my question (written rather hastily I’m afraid) regarding the placement of the leading tone (or melody) at the top of the “upper” structure. I so dig the sound of those - most common - upper structures that I believe I overuse them. Your “rich chocolate cake” metaphor really put the UST’s in a proper prospective for me. I appreciate all your effort. I’ll be attending your next “stream” for sure. Continued success and BE SAFE. - ron
Great Q & A session yesterday - I really enjoyed it. Thanks also for dealing with my question (which I wrote rather quickly, I’m afraid) but totally understand your answer. Lots of suggestions from you and others - so I’m sure the online sessions will be a great addition to the site. Great work…!!
This new dimension to PianoGroove is marvelous.
It just keeps getting better. Keep it coming. Thank you so much.
You mentioned a downloadable pdf. Where is that?
Great first live Q & A. Congratulations Hayden! - that really fired me up and motivated me to review some of the Theory lessons I need to still watch and learn. With your questions organised from beginner to advance - followed by your invaluable tips, detailed demonstrations and answers (personally) helped me to have a lot more direction in my practice and understanding of the courses/lessons. That was so FUN to watch! Many thanks again.
Wow you did mention about students - having the opportunity to submit any tunes they/we are working on… maybe possibly — in the future , a chance for Student Review Sessions ?
Yes I created a PDF containing lesson links related to the submitted questions. You can find it in the “Downloads” section of the lesson page above, and I’ve also uploaded it here:
Hi PianoGroovers
- Paul
Thanks for all of this.