Skype Lessons

[Polara Pat]

Alright, so I've come to the point in my rigorous whistle training where I feel like I could use some professional help. I have checked out OAIM but I do better with personal interaction. Full disclosure, this forum is about the extent of my technological knowledge and skype has always seemed really annoying to me. Unfortunately, there are no options locally for taking whistle lessons at this point, so a skype lesson was suggested. First off, does the delay cause problems with lessons of this kind? I assume that playing together would not work. Secondly, does anyone here do online lessons and have room for a new (old-ish) student?

Thanks in advance

[Bretton]

Hi Pat. I recently did a Skype lesson with Sean Cunningham (http://whistletutor.com/). Skype worked pretty well and didn't have any issues with delay, but that really depends on the quality of both your Internet connection and the instructor's connection. If you were trying to do a Skype lesson from the US to an overseas location (UK or Europe) I would guess the delay might be more noticeable.

There are other Webconference type options (https://zoom.us is one). It's free for 40-minute sessions or less, and probably has better quality control.

If you let us know, in general, where you're located, maybe someone would have other in-person options.

-Brett

Alright, so I've come to the point in my rigorous whistle training where I feel like I could use some professional help. I have checked out OAIM but I do better with personal interaction. Full disclosure, this forum is about the extent of my technological knowledge and skype has always seemed really annoying to me. Unfortunately, there are no options locally for taking whistle lessons at this point, so a skype lesson was suggested. First off, does the delay cause problems with lessons of this kind? I assume that playing together would not work. Secondly, does anyone here do online lessons and have room for a new (old-ish) student?

Thanks in advance

[Polara Pat]

Hi Pat. I recently did a Skype lesson with Sean Cunningham (http://whistletutor.com/). Skype worked pretty well and didn't have any issues with delay, but that really depends on the quality of both your Internet connection and the instructor's connection. If you were trying to do a Skype lesson from the US to an overseas location (UK or Europe) I would guess the delay might be more noticeable.

There are other Webconference type options (https://zoom.us is one). It's free for 40-minute sessions or less, and probably has better quality control.

If you let us know, in general, where you're located, maybe someone would have other in-person options.

-Brett

Alright, so I've come to the point in my rigorous whistle training where I feel like I could use some professional help. I have checked out OAIM but I do better with personal interaction. Full disclosure, this forum is about the extent of my technological knowledge and skype has always seemed really annoying to me. Unfortunately, there are no options locally for taking whistle lessons at this point, so a skype lesson was suggested. First off, does the delay cause problems with lessons of this kind? I assume that playing together would not work. Secondly, does anyone here do online lessons and have room for a new (old-ish) student?

Thanks in advance

Thanks for this. I was in contact with Sean a few months back on another matter but got the impression that he wasn't looking for someone at my level of playing or was simply too busy. I'd love to get instruction from him. I've followed a bunch of his youtube tutorials.

I'm in Canada in B.C. just above Spokane Wa.

[Tor]

I've played together with my wife on Skype many times over the years during times when one of us has been on travel. The long latency (typically round-trip time of 350ms) hasn't created much problems, the real problem is that as soon as we start playing Skype drops to simplex audio. One can hear the other, but not the other way around. So in practice, playing together doesn't work well at all. Which is why I've never considered Skype lessons for anything else than A listens to B, then B listens to A. Never A and B together. (For some reason this doesn't happen when we're just talking. Probably something to do with their audio coding algorithm.)
With that limitation in mind, Skype lessons should be OK.