Season 1, Episode 3: Mike Grande, Creator of Rock Out Loud Live

Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song.

I'm Clara Jung.

And I am Eric Hunter.

The guest of the third episode is Mike Grande, who is a creator of Rock Out Loud Live, which is a software, a virtual music lesson platform, meaning it's like Zoom, but it's way better.

No, it's not like— well, it's not like Zoom. We just spent the past 5 minutes trying to figure out original sound. My mic is gloomy. Eric is telling me I sound worse with the setup on, so it's not like Zoom. So, all right, so sorry, sorry.

A Zoom replacement.

Yeah, a Zoom killer.

Let's call it a musical Zoom.

Yeah, exactly. I'm just trying to communicate through our audience because they have no idea. So trying to use that Zoom as an example, but way better in terms of audio. And it's actually specifically made for music lessons, online music lessons, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Wonderful. So anyway, thank you so much, Mike, for joining us today. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, especially on a Saturday. I know it's been tough to get me Monday through Friday to take this time, especially on a Saturday morning. When people have tons of things to do in their personal world, I really appreciate you guys making time. So thank you.

No, it's great.

Wonderful. Thank you. Yes.

So we've come to know Rock Out Loud Live from other piano teachers such as Andrew Inkubet of the Music Color Method and Carly Walton of Teach Music Online. And then we've read rave reviews of your software in terms of better audio and being able to do duets. At the same time, like simultaneously with your student, and sheet music integration, so forth. So could you tell us all about Rock Out Loud Live?

You betcha. So it's funny because people have said to me it came out because of 2020's pandemic, which really it wasn't. It was out— I started building this 3 years ago. I was on a podcast. Danny Thompson's got Music Lesson Business Academy, a podcast that he hosts in California. I was on in 2018 and I said, guys, 5-year plan is everything's virtual. He's like, ah, no, you know what, it's never going to be virtual. I said, I'm building this application, it's going to be virtual. Uh, Danny has since closed down his school to do only virtual now. So this is 3 years in the making. Uh, literally on Monday, this past Monday, my patent, which was 3 years in just building this patent and working with lawyers in the patent office, was finally completed. I got the allowance on Monday, which is fantastic news. And I've also found out there are a lot of competitors that are using this technology that is now patented. By Rock Out Loud Live, so we'll see how we'll handle that. And then, yeah, so that has been 3 years in the making. July 4th this year, after about 7 or 8 weeks of beta testing, we went live, and I think in the first week we had 400 music schools. Today we're almost— I think we're a little bit over 100 days out live. We have 93 countries using this. I think I just posted it today on my Facebook Live group. 23,000 users are using this now. We're hosting about 15,000 to 20,000 lessons every single week. And yeah, we have a couple of thousand schools all over the world subscribed with including students and teachers. Students aren't even counted. So we're actually only counting the teachers because we have no personal information that we require from the students whatsoever. So if one teacher on average teaches 20 kids, think about that. It's 20 lessons a week per teacher. If we have thousands of them, if you just do the math, that's an amazing number in such a short period of time. Period of time. I think it's the market saying, hey, we needed something like this.

Totally. Wow, congratulations on your success.

Thank you.

Yeah, and then, um, so, um, Rock Out Loud itself is a music school, or music—

yes.

Yeah, okay.

So I opened up— so I've had the Staten Island School of Rock, which is not associated with the School of Rock franchise. I've had that now for 16 or 17 years. And if you ever do the numbers of the School of Rock franchise, the only borough in New York that can't get into is Staten Island, is they just can't 'with me. We have hundreds of students. Everybody recognizes us. We've been there for forever.' And they've wanted to, you know, work with me and kind of combine, you know, schools, which I'm not going to do. But they did say, 'If you go to Jersey,' which is where my second school is opened up, 'and you do anything School of Rock related there, we'll sue your butt off.' So Rock Out Loud was born a few years ago, um, which is about 2 or 3 years ago. The name came up and I found the place. It took me about— it's funny, it took me 3 years to actually open and only 4 or 5 months to build out the space. So then you say, well, what was the 2 and a half extra years? What was that for? That's how long it took my landlord to just give me a vanilla box, which the building was built. There was another tenant, took them 2 and a half years to give me a vanilla box. And when they handed me the keys, I said, do you realize Christopher Columbus founded America sooner than it took for you to give me a vanilla box? And how do you respond to that? Because that's such a great question. And they had no answer for that. 4 months later, we open up in November, November 2nd. It was a great grand opening, and this buildout cost me almost $700,000. The place looks amazing. It's— if you ever want to see the virtual tour, rockoutloud.com will give you a virtual tour. It's about 3,600 square feet. But 4 months later, we closed, and we closed, and we, we just transitioned naturally over Rock Out Loud Live, which was still in beta. All my teachers knew it. It was a great transition.. It was amazing. And then that's how this whole thing really snowballed. So on July 4th, we just released it live.

Wow. Wow.

I have a question if I could just jump in. So I'm really curious, how did you see this whole online transition coming? Like, how did you have the foresight to start planning?

That's an amazing question. I'm a big reader. I'm a big reader. And Think and Grow Rich has always been a book that I've read. I love Napoleon Hill.

Think. Yeah.

Look at that wave. Yes. That's awesome. All right. And they talk about specialized knowledge in one of the chapters, Napoleon Hill. And I thought about it. Just think, if you wanted to learn how to speak Italian, you go out to Italy and you learn Italian. You want to speak Spanish, you go to Spain, you speak Spanish. But what if you wanted to learn flamenco guitar? Why do you have to rely on the local music school that maybe just has a, I don't know, a blues teacher who could just teach blues? And now you have to conform and say, you know, I really wanted to learn flamenco, but you know, I guess I just got to deal with blues guitar. Because there's nobody that you can really find that does flamenco. But if you can get somebody virtually in a different part of the world to teach you flamenco, that's how I thought of the specialized knowledge. You want to learn, it's like people who go off to a college program overseas to learn the culture of whether it's Japan or Chile or no matter where it is, that's the best way to do it. And how else are you going to do that as a kid? And it started when I was 10 years old, I wanted to learn guitar. My dad takes me to this guitar teacher, shows me an Alfred book, and I'm like, I want to learn Led Zeppelin. The guy's like, sorry, Reuben Reuben first. I'm like, oh, there goes that idea. So 3 years later, I want to learn guitar again. Mom and dad, they bring me to a guitar teacher, and he plays in church. He's like, we can do Kumbaya at my 11 o'clock mass if you can learn an E major chord. I said, that's, that's the end of that guitar lesson. So at 15 years old, I found this guitar teacher. He looked like— I don't know if you know who Randy Rhoads is— he had hair down to his waist, and he had 30 guitars in his basement, a full recording studio. He taught me Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin, my first song, and I was bit by a bug. For 12 to 14 hours a day for the rest of my life, I would play guitar. For the rest of my life. It just took finding that one special teacher, that one special coach. So if that special coach doesn't live in your local music school area, what do you do? You just give up or you conform? You don't play flamenco, you play blues? It's not the way. So I thought virtual would be a great platform to do that with the tools to provide that ultimate virtual music lesson experience.

Wow, that's a great story.

Yeah, totally. It's beautiful.

So you know what, um, Eric, why don't you ask some questions about—

yeah, yeah.

Okay, so Mike, I think, uh, could you talk to us a little bit about what's different about Rocket Lab Live and you know, how it's superior to Zoom and other options?

Oh my gosh, I love, I love answering this. If this was about a 3-day conversation, I could probably ask for 4, but I'll do this as quickly as I can. So first is it's super important to understand that Zoom was not built for music coaches, music teachers, music educators, music institutions. It's simple, they're built for board meetings and conference rooms. So besides being the most successful failure in music, which I am, I'm also a chief technology officer and a certified hacker for a company on on Park Avenue in New York City, the financial firm. So I know technology. I also know how Zoom works because whenever we do a boardroom meeting with Zoom, it's basically a presentation in PowerPoint and then we all call in on a Polycom because the audio is just so awful. So when you have these Zoom conversations, you pull up a Polycom, you pull up a PowerPoint presentation, it's all for that video. You really don't care if the audio cuts out because you might be looking at some slides. I reversed that. So the big difference here is I went from concentrating on video to concentrating on audio, and audio takes precedence where video degrades if you have a poor internet connection. So to me, that was, that was the ultimate experience, is making sure audio comes through. And the next thing I wanted to really focus on was what the real problem is with virtual music lessons. It's not the student, it's not the teacher, it's not the virtual music lessons, it's not being in front of them. It's the mom and dad. I think parents are the worst thing that ever happened to music lessons. And I could just picture you guys getting these email and messages. Look at that, everybody's like— I'm going to tell you why parents are the killer of virtual music lessons. Mom and Dad, this is the reason. After we have the most incredible music lesson with your son or daughter, the first thing we say is we're going to say, Sally, we're going to email Mom and Dad that lesson, and Mom is going to print it out. You're going to practice the whole weekend. Boy, it's gonna be amazing. And next week we're just gonna take part 2 of this lesson. So what happens is, well, mom and dad's printer is broken, we got caught in spam, they didn't check their email. Oh, I was so busy, I'm so sorry to get a chance to give them that lesson. And then the next week would roll around and little Timmy or Sally doesn't practice. And then you get that dreaded phone call. Well, you know, our child just doesn't practice anymore. He's just not interested. He's not showing any interest. And we're gonna wait until we go back in person.

And I said, maybe that's not the problem.

Maybe the problem is the parent not giving your child the lesson. That to me is the problem. So if we remove mom and dad, maybe we can make these virtual music lessons really, really happen. So it's exactly what I did. I created, which was patented on Monday, the ability to upload a PDF in real time in front of your student in seconds and have them download it on any one of their devices. So if they have a mobile phone and they use the Rock Out Loud app, they basically download the the music, which I'll pull up now. It is awesome. So let me pull up what it looks like, and I'll hopefully be able to see this visually. So this is the application. So if I pulled up Fur Elise and somebody wanted to learn Fur Elise on my application, right there is Fur Elise on the student's mobile phone. You have 3 options. Those icons are video icons, so if you wanted to see your teacher, you click that. Then the chord icon, if you want to select the chords, you can see that, and all the chords will appear that this teacher provides. And then there's the sheet music and a little button right over there, you download that, and that downloads your music lesson. So we wanted to remove the parents from the equation entirely, and by doing that and giving them the tool, that student downloads it and that goes right to their computer, their MacBook, their Chromebook, their PC, their Android, their iPad, their iPhone, every single device. So we actually have testimonials of 4 or 5-year-old kids on their iPad because that's where it's going these days. Everybody's got their iPads practicing guitar. This little kid Dean, it was amazing.

Kids are better with technology anyway. Yeah, absolutely. I hate to say this, but it's true. Yes. Yeah, so.

They're so fast on catching up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tech support for their parents often.

That's exactly right. So by doing that, we've really removed such a big pain point, and we noticed that we had such a— it was a smooth transition to virtual lessons because kids, like they were coming to your studios, would walk out with a lesson, except for this time it was just digital. That was the next thing. We also offer features like song searches. We can search— piano teachers especially can search 1.8 million songs, Fur Elise being one of them. Pulls up immediately into the portal and shows up right there in real time with your student. We also have the ability to make this as simple for your student as possible. I knew that going from Zoom and Skype and WebEx and FaceTime to over to Rock Out Loud, we had to make it simple. Because nobody wants to go out and register for their new program, the new application. Parents have to get involved, they have to submit a form, then they have to go to their email, then they have to activate it, then they have to log in for their child. It's like, oh my gosh, I can't do it again, because this was tough. I mean, music teachers were really thrown right into the fire on March— on March 16th, I think, and we all had to figure it out. I knew it had to be simple, so we don't ask for any personal information. You all join my call, and if you recall, I mean, Eric, you just typed in your name, you joined the room, room. That was it.

Super easy.

Yeah, you didn't have to go out and register and fill out an activation code or any of that stuff. So these are really important things as part of keeping this experience very free-flowing, removing the parents and having them— it's the students to have that ability to get that ultimate virtual music lesson. I think we fulfilled that, right?

So Mike, can I ask a question? I've been trying it out, you know, for a couple weeks, uh, me and, uh, One thing I noticed, maybe I'm not doing it right, when you share music, you can only share PDF, right? Like, so oftentimes I send my students, or they have their music books, you know, in their score. They would take a picture and send to me. So normally on Zoom, I would just share that. But right now when I share, it seems like I lose my face. All of a sudden they would tell me that you turn into the music. Or if I share the PDF, I have to convert into PDF. Is that how it works, or—

Well, so just— I'm so glad you brought that up, Clara. And that— the reason why I'm glad you brought that up is because I listen. People have asked the same exact question, and unlike Zoom, after 4 months you get an email that says, hey, you still having a problem with this, you know, issue that you had? If not, let us know, we're going to close the ticket. I took that and I went back to my developers and I said, let's create a whiteboard, let's import PDFs or images or JPEGs or whatever it is the teacher wants into the lesson without sharing a screen. Then let's be able to annotate that right there in the lesson without sharing a screen. And then what if we remove the parents again? Because unlike Zoom, when you share a screen and then you pull up an image and then you annotate, then you have to connect that image with the picture in the image and create a file. And then you have to email it. We've removed that entire process. So let's say your student sends you something. You can pull it up in your whiteboard, which is in your screen, and your picture of you and your student appear in the bottom right. Pull up that, annotate it, and then your student has a big download button. They can download it right there into their experience so they don't have to worry about an email anymore. So they can have all that. That's the annotation feature. That feature is coming out hopefully next week, and that's all, all for the paid subscribers.

Okay, got it.

Great question.

Yeah, thank you so much for answering.

Yeah. Yeah, Mike, I wanted to ask you, can you talk a little bit about duets? Because that is really the promised land when it comes to virtual lessons, right?

Yes, I'm very glad we're going to talk about that. The Ear Technology enhanced audio recognition technology, it's based around peer-to-peer connection. It's also, it's limited in terms of what you can do. You cannot do more than 2 people. It's got to be person-to-person. It's no— there is no such thing as no latency, zero latency. I just want to make sure everybody's on the same page here. You can't get rid of latency unless you're right in front of that person. So unless you want to defy physics, there's no such thing as no, zero latency. However, we will be able to offer the least amount of latency possible, and I'll explain to you how it works. Peer-to-peer networking is my computer attaches to your computer, Eric, for example, and we connect like this. There's no media server. So what that does is it creates the least amount of lag or the least amount of hops that you can go from point A to point B. So if you have something like Zoom or Skype, they all use media servers, which means you connect your computer to a media server in the cloud, and then Eric, you'll connect your computer to a media server in the cloud, and then you'll redistribute that signal. So just there, you're increasing more latency because you have more, more path. That you have, you know, you have to basically go from hop 1 to hop 2 to hop 3. So just, yeah, so just exactly, just by removing one of those out of the equation, you've just removed, let's call it, 20% latency. I don't know that exact number, but you're removing a significant amount of latency. So just by the fear that the mere fact of creating peer-to-peer networking, you're going to reduce that latency significantly. The next thing that we've done is we removed any ability to have— there's no compression, there's no EQ, there's nothing. It's a raw signal that goes from point A to point B, giving you that HD audio. So depending on your equipment, if you have a USB mic and a good set of headphones, you're going to get an amazing experience. And what we also offered with this particular feature is the ability to measure all of your statistics network-wise. So when you connect on a call, you'll be able to determine the exact amount of latency you're going to expect as a teacher. And that's called E2E RTT. So if you hover over your student's image and you go to the top left corner, there is a Wi-Fi symbol. And that icon gives you all the statistics of your student's network. And that's incredibly important because whenever you connect, you don't know if it's your computer, your Wi-Fi, your student's computer, your student's Wi-Fi. You don't know if someone's on Netflix. But all of these statistics— and they're on our user guide— are there to help you try to figure out where you sit on your experience. If you have poor network connectivity, you'll know that immediately. And you might say, hey, Tim, could you ask your brother to stop playing Xbox? Is somebody watching Netflix? Because those are the things that will really help you. But back to the duets, the E2E RTT is a very, very important statistic for your network. E2E RTT means end-to-end round trip time. That means those milliseconds are the amount of milliseconds it's taking from your computer to their computer, from their computer back to your computer. So if you can use those to judge how badly or how good your latency is going to be. That's gonna determine your experience. So Microsoft deems 20 to 40 milliseconds for round trip time being optimal for people playing video games. So if you're playing Xbox, those milliseconds when you shoot somebody in COD, those are the milliseconds that Microsoft's determined to be a great experience, optimal, 20 to 40. I am in New Jersey and I could tell you I've had between 11 and 19 milliseconds for people in the New Jersey area who are up to about 50, 60 miles away. And that latency was so minute that, yeah, I heard it, but it was not bad. It was not something I couldn't deal with, but it made such an amazing experience. And the last thing I'll end with is when the teacher starts performing and the student plays along, there is zero latency, and it'll be in HD quality. So it's all about giving that ultimate lesson to your music student. This is what it's about. So your teacher starts, the student plays along. That student doesn't know if you're in that room or not in that room. So that's an amazing accomplishment, I think. And you get to hear the ability of going back and forth without squashing, without that underwater gobble sound, which drives me mad.

Oh, me too.

We all have experience of that.

Yeah, that's all gone. That's all gone.

Amazing. Now, so when you try to use Rock Out Live. Do we all have to have the app to do it, or can we use like a Google Chrome or something to—

That's a great question. I'm so glad you brought that up because not 99% of the time, 100% of the time, if there is something that doesn't work in our application, it's simply because you're not using Google Chrome as a web browser on a PC, on a Mac, on a laptop, on a Chromebook, or you're not using the app that's made for the mobile applications, which are all free, by the way. So on the Google Play Store and in the Apple Store, it's a, it's a free app. It's the Rock Out Loud app, and that Rock Out Loud app for the phone allows you to switch between icons: video icon, chord icon, sheet music icon. And we've made it that way because when you're actually taking a lesson on a mobile device, we've made it so you can read the actual sheet music without disabling the camera, and the teacher can focus on the technique while the student is reading the piece of music. There's no need for the student to see the teacher at that point. You want the focus on that music, and that app allows you to do that. So 100% of the time, if there are audio issues, there are lag issues, it's 100% of the time not using Google Chrome and they're not using the app.

And since we're here, we're talking about, you know, concerts. I've been doing a lot of concerts, you know, and we normally do it on Zoom, so we're trying it out. The next one, we want to try it on rock all out, right? But so right now I'm trying to figure out a few things. Is there a way we can spotlight the main performer like, you know, what Zoom does? And also sometimes they do these lecture recitals, right? So I want to see the student as well as what they're showing. Is there a thing?

So right now for recitals, we found that the best experience with recitals is muting everybody. And it's important to know that when you have it, because we can hold up to 35 people in a class, if you don't have the ability to mute everybody, because we have full duplex, unlike Zoom, which is sort of like half duplex, which is like a walkie-talkie, you press a button, you speak, you release the button, you listen. But with us, we're full duplex, so we hear all the noise. So you might have headphones on and a great mic, which is excellent, but you might have a loud air conditioner or a ceiling fan on. That is getting picked up, and that's gonna go through all 35 people on the on the phone call, the video call. So you mute everybody except for that person. So yes, you— that person just generally because they're speaking will be presented as the presenter. But the students have the ability to toggle into tile view and put everybody into tile. So you might want to push them into that, but the student on the other side can just simply hit toggle view to see everybody in the group. The teacher, however, can make themselves the presenter only. They can't make somebody else presenter unless they wanted to.

I see.

Ultimately, it's in the hands of that. But there's another feature that we've created that somebody, Ian Biloso of Simply Music, pointed out. To be honest with you, I created this feature because a lot of those folks with the acoustic pianos, and you all know who you are as I look at you guys, sometimes it's just so loud. There are, in the Rock Out Loud Live application, there are little volume controls on every single person's video. So I could change and create mixes of everybody on my call individually. So if your piano is too loud, I can lower you, and if your vocals, you know, need to be brought up, I can make— maybe make the other people lower just so I can get that real perfect mix. But when you're doing groups, you would mute everybody, and based on privacy rules, they have to unmute themselves. But then you'd get the ability to really hear the sound of Rock Out Loud Live compared to Zoom because we have this full spectrum of audio, where Zoom, even if you enable original sound, which they say works, it still compresses the upper and the lower registers. So if someone's playing piano and you have the lower end and you have the higher end, you're not going to get those frequencies, especially to work so well. So I would encourage you to mute everybody on the call and just hear what that sounds like, because the other people on the phone call don't have to worry about headphones, they don't have to worry about ceiling fans and background noise. You've muted them all. You're only hearing the performer. And it's an amazing experience. That was a great question, Clara.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, we're going to try it out. So hopefully— but definitely we cannot share the music yet, but I'm looking forward for that to be added in the future, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Great.

So I was wondering, you know, as piano teachers, oftentimes I like to have— see, can you see it over here? It's not in the picture, but I have those little stands here so I can do a camera over my hands when I'm demonstrating. How do we do a multi-camera setup like that on Rockout Live?

Well, we could do it a couple ways. We have the ability to— if there's right next to the leave button is a video camera button, you can toggle your cameras there. People have used OBS as well. They connect OBS, which is an amazing experience with OBS. So OBS is a little difficult, there's a tough learning curve, but once you get past that, then it's a great way to use Rock Out Loud Live. I can tell you that in the works, and it could be 3 to 6 months from now, but it is going to be in the works. I signed the sign-off for the, for the, for the project a few weeks ago, and that's the ability to add multiple cameras at the same time inside the Rock Out Loud Live experience. Just like you have the whiteboard is inside, we wanted to keep everything inside so you'd be able to use multiple cameras. You'll have some scenes, you'll be able to put splashes sort of like Manycam does without using all the resources. Lots of things like Manycam, they really overextended the need of all of the, the things they throw in, everything, emojis, they throw characters. You don't need that as music teachers. You basically need a way to put in more, more screen options with choice options for your fingers, left hand, right hand, overhead, and your head and your face. So that's hopefully coming. So that's the one thing about Rock Out Loud Live is going to be growing. What you saw July 4th looks totally different is what it looks now, and in 2 weeks it'll look different again with the whiteboard, and then it's going to look different again in 6 months because we keep adding features to make that music lesson better and better and better.

That's exciting. It's fantastic that you're really making this platform for music lessons exclusively. Yeah, like you're building this for this kind of meetings or that, but it's really exclusively for music teachers and students, so it's wonderful.

You want to hear something funny? I have a guitar teacher who's also a doctor. He's an MD. He's using Rock Out Loud Live for his, uh, for his patients. And I said, what in the world? Are you diagnosing them with high blood pressure and then pulling out your acoustic guitar? So, you know, he said to me what he's doing is he has a call with them and then he uploads as a PDF their prescription and they download it right to their phone, go right to their pharmacy, and That's all they do. So they don't have to worry. It's amazing because some pharmacies don't accept anything other than the physical. And that's what they do. They go with their phone. So, and then there is a Bible study group I heard are now using this for Bible study. And I said, what in the world are you using it for Bible study for? Because Zoom and Skype and WebEx is so difficult with the registration for older folks. The Bible study people are generally be in their late 60s, early 70s to 90s, and they don't know technology. So all they do is they upload the hymns or the scripts or the scripture right there in the, in the lesson, in the lesson, in the video, and they download it and they're done. So they don't have to worry about checking their email and enabling original sound because they can't hear the person preaching. It's amazing what people, they're using it for, but yeah, it's, it's, it's expanding beyond music lessons, but my focus is on music lessons.

Wonderful. Great.

That is really great. Yeah, and that brings me to my actually last question. There is currently no break rooms, correct?

There won't be. That's a great question. There won't be? They're not going to be. And the reason why we're not going to do it—

Oh, I see.

So let me explain quickly how it's so important for me to preserve the audio bandwidth. When you connect peer-to-peer, that's the ultimate virtual music lesson experience because there's no media server. The moment you add things like breakout rooms, you add media servers, and to me that's unwanted usage of bandwidth, which that basically means the bandwidth's got to come from something. Well, we've already capped out the video bandwidth, but if we're going to start now working with the audio bandwidth and starting sucking some of that bandwidth out for audio recordings, which we're not doing any recordings, or breakout rooms, which we're not offering breakout rooms, it's going to be less of an experience and more like a Zoom experience, which we don't want to do. We want to make sure that we preserve that audio stream. And we've tried 3 or 4 different applications who said that they don't affect the audio stream, but all of our tests found that in fact it does affect the audio stream. So until there's something that can make it where it doesn't, which I don't think it will, we're not going to be doing breakout rooms and we're not going to be doing video recordings.

Got it. All right, so you're not sacrificing anything, just for the sake of music. Exactly. I love it.

Yeah, I really appreciate it.

Students are very excited with the duets. So yeah.

Yes.

Mike, if you have a student that seems to have a poor connection, what are some things we can do to deal with that during the lesson?

I love these questions. So the best part is you're able to see these statistics before the lesson starts. So this way you can at least navigate to a couple of things. The bitrate tells you the bandwidth. So when you see the statistic of a bitrate less than 2,000, That basically means that there's something going on with the network. Well, it could be a lot of things. Like I said earlier, it could be that their brother is taking a Zoom call for their English class or for their social studies class, and that can consume bandwidth. Or they might have a problem with their Wi-Fi. They might want to get closer to their, their access point. Or if they're playing piano and they can't, you might want to see if someone's streaming Netflix. There's a lot of these things. But most of all, sometimes people don't even realize that if they have their email up application open— Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, whatever it is— email literally checks every 15 to 30 seconds for another email. So naturally, that's going to require bandwidth up and down, polling to see if a new email comes in. And if someone sends you an email attachment, well, then that's going to take some more bandwidth too. That could affect your lesson. Also, packet loss. We have the ability to check packet loss, which indicates more of a hardware issue, like if your router is dropping dropping the packets. So you can ask them to reset their router. So all these things really come into play. So it's important to know that those are some of the things which we have on our user guide in terms of troubleshooting. So we have a user guide which is super intuitive. You type in the problem like Wi-Fi and everything related to Wi-Fi issues appears right there. You can walk out and do it with your student, go over everything. But one thing that I can tell you, that there is not another application that has in the world today is live telephone support for your paid subscribers. So let me give you an example. Eric, you're on a call with a student, you're having a problem. You can call our live technical support, which happens to be My Music Coaches, who've been using this application since inception. They'll pick up the phone, they'll walk you and/or your student through it. They'll even connect to your room just to make sure that your room ID and everything else is working perfectly. And make sure that that lesson gets fixed because the last thing we want is any teacher saying, "Can we make this lesson up or I'll refund you your money?" I think that that's the worst thing in the world. So to have live tech support, not just a trouble ticket, this is for paid subscribers. I mean, our packages start at $9.95 a month, no cancellation fees, cancel any time, and it's like 30 cents a day or something like that, 50 cents a day just for this support. If that saves you one student, or if that brings back a student that canceled because they had a poor Zoom experience, then that subscription was paid for for the entire year when they come back for that one month. So just to put it in perspective, that we want to make sure that you have all the tools and resources. So if you do have network problems, if you need technical support, if your student's having a problem and you're a paid subscriber, give us a call 1 o'clock to 8 o'clock Eastern Standard Time and Saturdays 9 to 3. And I got some, you know, emails from people in Australia, New Zealand. They said, what about us? Those times don't work. First thing I did was I went out, I found and hired and trained tech support, and that rolls out on Monday. Within 2 weeks, I've completely trained, set up Australian phone numbers and a chat service for everybody in Australia and New Zealand just to make sure that their lessons go smooth. I don't think you'll get that from any other platform, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I don't think so either. Um, can you talk a little bit about, uh, your different subscription, uh, models and what are the differences between them?

You bet. So the zero free subscription was basically for actually to say, listen, give us a try, and we're better than Zoom. We're not going to give you any restrictions like cutting you off after 40 minutes if you have a group, because sometimes when you have a lesson and a child is having a problem, you don't want to just say, sorry, Zoom says it's 40 minutes and your time is done. So to me, I wanted to remove that. Um, the free version gives you the PDF upload, so you can you can still share music and your student can still download music. And the only— there's a lot of downsides to the free version in that you don't have a static URL, which basically means if it's the Yukimi Song Studio, that's your URL you send out to your students. It never changes. It lasts the lifetime of your membership. But every time on the free subscription that you want to set up a virtual music lesson, you got to go in, you got to log in and create a lesson. It gives you an ID. That ID is only used once Can't be used again. You mail it to your student. Once that lesson's over, it's over, and you got to regenerate it every single time. It's— this is a great opportunity to check the product. The audio is going to be the same. You're not going to have the ear technology, but you get to see what it sounds and hear what it sounds like. Get to experience the PDF upload to see how much value it provides. But then on the paid subscription— and the paid subscription is if you teach one instrument. If you just teach piano, you just get a piano subscription. You get access to 1.8 million songs on a song search. You get all of these song chord— I should say these piano chord resources. You click on a chord, it shows up right there in your student's video within seconds. So if you want to show them what an A major looks like, the A major chord, you click on as a teacher and it appears in real time for your student, which is an amazing feature. You get a custom URL, like I said, so if it says— if it's Eric Hunter Piano Class, That could be your custom URL. You send it out once, you never have to send it again. We also offer waiting rooms. So if your student comes with that URL a little bit early, they'll sit in a waiting room so you don't have to worry about them barging into a lesson. We have annotations, and the annotations are enough to knock your socks off. We have real annotations, not annotations in Zoom where you share a screen and you get a couple of magic markers and some screen shapes. You're not going to have a rectangle and a circle. We have that too, but we have the bass clef, treble clef, the staves come up. You can actually select on a note and notate that right there. You could teach the circle of fifths right there. You can upload a piano keyboard and select the pen tool and do scales like an A major scale by selecting A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#. And the best part is you can download it and your student can download it right onto their computer. Unlike Zoom, you have to look at all the steps. In Zoom, if you want to screen share and annotate, your screen share is only One, two, you pull up a PDF, three, you make it, you mark it up, you annotate it, four, you take an image because you can't save it if you're not saving as an image, and five, you email it to a parent and parent never gets it to the child. This, you download the button inside the whiteboard, it literally downloads the entire annotations right there in front of your student. And the teacher gets to do it too and save it as well. And that's where, back to what you were saying, Clara, you'll be able to upload images JPEGs, anything your student sends you, PDFs, annotate, do as much as you like, and all that is downloaded right there. So that's part of the paid subscription as well. As we spoke about the ear technology enhanced audio recognition, which is a little checkbox, and that checkbox, once it hits, it literally changes all the codecs in the background. You start the lesson, you get a big banner that says, hey, you got to have headphones on both sides. It's one, one-on-one, it's a duet, and you must be using your web browser, not mobile device, and you'll get the sound of a lifetime. I would, you know, I encourage you guys to do a one-on-one with me just to hear what it sounds like. It's just amazing. And then I think most of all, which I think really with the paid subscription really hits home, is that technical support. Because we've had this, this one gentleman on one of the Facebook forums said, you know, I had to cancel a lesson because the student had poor internet connection, we couldn't figure it out, now I got to give him back the money. And that's what really made me just, you know, reflect and say, how can we fix this pain point? And that's what I did. So that's the single license. But now if you have a multiple— if you have a music school and you have teachers that teach multiple instruments, so let's say, Eric, you teach piano, drums, guitar, and ukulele. Well, that gives you the ability to do song searches for every guitar song ever written, bass— every bass song ever written. You can pull up chords for ukulele, chords for the guitar. You could pull up drum, percussion, everything, piano as well. So you have every musical teaching room instrument and the ability to switch between rooms. You have that under one multi-lesson license. So that means that if you teach more than one instrument, you're going to want that for $13.95, and that will also include all of those other features. But the ability to pull up now 15 terabytes of music, and that's all with the ability for the student to download That's a pretty significant number.

Wonderful. All right, so that concludes our interview, I guess. But lastly, would you like to promote something?

Yes, that's— I absolutely do. I killed zoom.com. Now, Yukimi, you had said to me, I didn't know about it. So yes, ikilledzoom.com is huge. And this is what happened. So I'm like, This is so much better than Zoom, but what can I do to really grab somebody's attention? Now, Rock Out Loud Live is cool. So this— here's the difference as teachers. You ready? You got a young student, 10 years old, and I don't know, Eric, Yukimi, Clara, do you have students that are 10, 11 years old?

Yes.

And you know what, let me ask you then. You answer this question for me because now I have a question for you. Is it cooler to say, are you ready to rock out loud, or let's get on a Zoom call, let's get a pianist I mean, you tell me, are you ready to rock out loud or you ready to Zoom?

Eric, we'll start with you. Rock out loud, yeah.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Rock, rock, rock, rock. Yeah, because when you think about it, children now are associating Zoom with English. My son is taking Zoom lessons in school and he's doing gym classes. I mean, it's like, let's connect on Zoom and let's do jumping jacks.

What?

There's nothing exciting about that. But if you're like, let's go on Rock Out Loud, let's do an awesome kick butt piano lesson, piano lesson. To me, that's the juice, right? So if you go to ikilledzoom.com, you'll not only see and hear the difference between me and Zoom, but you'll hear me playing acoustic guitar and you'll get that audio quality difference. And I would encourage you guys just to check out that video because it's me playing a little Led Zeppelin, and you'll hear "Over the Hills and Far Away" in both Zoom version and my version. And then you get to see the graphic EQ. That graphic EQ shows you if it wasn't clear enough audibly, it shows you how there's so many deficiencies in the levels where they take out the top end and the bottom end. So you can see that as well. And I also offer— you'll see in the bottom right, I'll offer you a demo. Book a demo. You guys book the demo. I do demos. I do 22 demos a day since the 7th of— 6th of July. So since July 6th, because July 4th was a Saturday, I've been doing demos Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 8:30 PM. This week covers the New Zealand and Australian folks, but I go through these demos for every everybody. 22 a day. I've done almost 1,000. And every single day it's introducing this to a new person and they're using it. And the feedback in the Rock Out Loud Live forum, which is on Facebook, I'd encourage everybody to join. The feedback has been great, whether they're doing one-on-one lessons or they're having a great experience for the first time with people who have poor internet. Because remember, we've developed this so if there's poor internet, we're going to reduce the video quality. And we're gonna maintain that audio quality. So people who've had horrible experiences with that, that's coming through. People doing duets for the first time, albeit with a little bit of latency, are actually experiencing this. I had a woman, Anna, who did a duet with me with incredible low latency experience, and she started to cry on the call. So you could just imagine what that was like. So man, if you haven't tried it, try the free version. You have nothing to lose. And heck, go for the 7-day free trial on the paid version. The 8— I'm sorry, $9.95, you got up to 8 days to use it. We charge you on the 8th day, so you have 7 days. Do whatever you like, cancel it at any time, you won't get charged. But just to see what it's all about, I think it's worth a try. Not for us, it's for your students. And I, I just want to make a point, so to end this, we're not doing this for anybody else but the student. We can't lose sight that Rock Out Loud Live was not for the teacher, not for the school, but it was for that child who wants to learn how to play Let It Go by Frozen. You know, we want to do this for that child to put that smile on their face, especially now when all they have is music because school, they closed down and they can't go out or they're still in lockdown in different parts of the world. But if we can give them music like they really had it, that's what this is all about. You know, to me it's not about the platform, it's really about the child.

Noble goal.

Yeah, for sure.

So that concludes the third episode of our podcast. Thank you, Mike, for joining our program, and we want to thank our audience for watching or listening to this episode.

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