Live Seminar News & Updates

New Lesson Updates Live Seminars
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Hi PianoGroovers :wave:

Myself and our teaching team have now delivered around 40 live seminars and I thought it would be a good opportunity to share our plans for what’s coming next, and also to invite any feedback, ideas, and suggestions from our students.

Here’s a quick update on current progress and our plans for the coming months:

1) Seminar Chapters

I know how useful the chapters are when re-watching a 1 hour archived seminar, and so during every live seminar I am now creating the chapter timestamps and chapter labels whilst the seminar is taking place so that the chaptering can be added immediately after the seminar has ended.

Every archived seminar is now fully up-to-date with chapters and downloads and I will ensure this is the case moving forwards.

2) More Styles & Genres

We hosted our first gospel/blues seminar last week and we will now have one gospel or blues-themed seminar per month in addition to the current seminars on jazz piano, vocal piano, and Brazilian piano styles.

I particularly want to ramp up the production of blues-themed live seminars as this genre is currently under-represented in the seminar archives. For this we will be reaching out to our current teachers and also new “guest teachers”…

3) Monthly “Guest Teacher Slot”

Starting next month in April we are introducing a “Guest Seminar Slot” hosted by a piano teacher/accomplished musician who doesn’t currently teach on PianoGroove. I will email everyone a poll this week to understand exactly what styles are most sought after by our students and then I will find suitable musicians to host seminars on these style.

If particular guest seminars are well-received by our students, we can then roll out full courses taught by the guest teacher on the style in question.

4) Light-Up Keyboard On All Seminars Moving Forward

I would like to standardise this for all seminars, as currently it’s just my own seminars that have the light-up keyboard with note names above. It is quite fiddly to livestream the light-up keyboard as it requires an extra monitor, cables, and software, and so I was hesitant to use this system for all teachers. We opted for the overhead camera which is easier to configure and less prone to errors.

Anyhow, after chatting with a student yesterday, we have found a way to generate the light-up keyboard after the seminar has taken place, and then I can swap the keyboards in video editing software. I will be trialling this new approach for the next live seminars and hopefully rolling it out on all seminars moving forward.

That’s about all for now.

If anyone has any feedback on the live seminars (good, bad, neutral) I’d love to hear it.

Likewise if anyone has any ideas or suggestions to make the LIVE section of the website better, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Cheers,
Hayden

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The light-up keyboard has been added to Jovino’s seminar that took place yesterday:

This was relatively quick and easy to add so we can do it to all seminars moving forward.

To confim, the light up keyboard will just be added to the archived version, so if tuning into the live session you will see the normal keyboard, but then to rewatch and study the demonstrations after the live seminar, we will have the light-up keyboard with note names for extra clarity.

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Will these be integrated to past sessions that didn’t include the light up keyboard as well or only the newer ones?

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We can just add this for future live seminars unfortunately.

To generate the light-up keyboard we need to capture a MIDI recording of the full seminar, which we didn’t do in the past, but I will ensure a MIDI channel is recorded for all seminars moving forward.

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It would be helpful if, when a teacher in a live seminar says, “This would be a good exercise,” as Jovino did/does, there were a pdf download setting it out rather than just referring to already existing resources.

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Great idea Wendy.

We can add that task to the workflow when a teacher is giving a live seminar.

We will make note of any recommended exercises or drills that are suggested or demonstrated during the live class, and then notate and upload to the PDF downloads section after the seminar has ended.

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Wow! Sounds exciting! Hayden :purple_heart: That’s so much fun! Thanks so much :blush:

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I’ll second that, Wendy. It would make things much clearer if we could follow along–or at least revisit some of the new ideas/techniques at a later practice session.

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That would be terrific. Thank you. The website that keeps on giving…

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