Hi, everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of The Piano Pod.
I'm Yukimi Somb.
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.
It's not like Zoom.
We just spent the past five 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 I'm sorry.
A Zoom replacement.
A Zoom killer.
Let's call it a Zoom killer.
A music Zoom.
Exactly.
I'm just trying to communicate through an 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 on that 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 Incrobat
of the Music Color Method and Carly Walton of Teach Music Online.
And 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 three 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, five year plan is everything's virtual.
It's like, ah, no, it's never going to be virtual.
I said, I'm building this application.
It's going to be virtual.
Danny has since closed down his school to do only virtual now.
So this is three years in the making.
Literally on Monday, this past Monday, my patent, which was three years and 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, yes, so that has been three years in the making, July 4th this year.
After about seven or eight 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 to 20,000 lessons every single week.
And yeah, we have a couple of thousand schools all over the world subscribe with including
students and teachers.
Students aren't even counted.
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.
I think that's the market saying, hey, we needed something like this.
Totally.
Wow.
Congratulations on your success.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So Rock Out Loud itself is a music school or a music school?
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I opened up, so I've had the Staten Island School of Rock, which is not associated with
the School Rock franchise.
I've had that now for 16 or 17 years.
And if you ever do the numbers of the School Rock franchise, the only borough in New York
that can't get into a Staten Island is they just can't compete with me.
We have hundreds of students.
Everybody recognizes us.
We've been there forever and they've wanted to work with me and kind of combine schools,
which I'm not going to do.
But they did say if you go to Jersey, which is where my second school has opened up and
you do anything School Rock related there, we'll sue your butt off.
So Rock Out Loud was born a few years ago, which is about two or three years ago.
The name came up and I found the place.
It took me about, it's funny.
It took me three years to actually open and only four or five months to build out the
space.
So I said, well, what was the two 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.
It took them two 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?
How do you respond to that?
Because that's such a great question.
And they had no answer for that.
So four months later, we opened up in November, November 2nd.
It was great grand opening.
And this build out cost me almost $700,000.
The place looks amazing.
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 four months later, we closed.
We closed and 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 in July 4th, we just released it live.
Wow.
Hey, 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.
And Thinking Grow Rich has always been a book that I've read.
I love Napoleon Hill.
Look at that.
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 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, you know, 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 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, Ruben Ruben first.
I'm like, oh, there goes that idea.
So three 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, my 11 o'clock mass, if you can learn an E major chord.
So 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 Rhoades 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, Eric, why don't you ask some questions about...
Yeah.
Okay.
So Mike, I think, could you talk to us a little bit about what's different about Rocket Lad
Live and how it's superior to Zoom and other options?
Oh my gosh, I love answering this.
If this was about a three day conversation, I could probably answer for four.
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 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 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 reverse 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 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 hate mail 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 going to be amazing.
Next week, we're just going to take part two 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, a child just doesn't practice anymore.
He's just not interested.
He's not showing any interest.
And we're going to wait until we go back in person.
I said, maybe that's not a problem.
Maybe the problem is the parent not giving your child the lesson.
That to me is the problem.
So 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, it basically download
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 for release and somebody wanted to learn for release on my application,
right there is for release on the student's mobile phone.
You have three options.
Those icons are a video icon.
So if you wanted to see your teacher, you click that then the cord icon.
If you want to select the cords, you can see that and all the cords 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 four or five 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.
So kids are better with technology anyway.
Yeah, absolutely.
I hate to say this, but it's true.
We're so fast on catching up.
Back support for their parents.
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 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, as piano teachers especially, can search 1.8 million songs, Ferro 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, you can't do it again because this was tough.
Music teachers were really thrown right into the fire on March 16th.
We all had to figure it out.
I knew it had to be simple.
We don't ask for any personal information.
You all join my call.
If you recall, Eric, you just typed in your name, you joined the room.
That was it.
It was super easy.
You didn't have to go out and register and fill out an activation code or any of that
stuff.
These are really important things as part of keeping this experience very free flowing,
doing the parents and having 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 for a couple of weeks.
One thing I noticed, maybe I'm not doing it right.
When you share music, you can only share PDF.
Oftentimes I send my students, where they have their music books 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?
So I'm so glad you brought that up, Clara.
The reason why I'm glad you brought that up is because I listen.
People have asked the same exact question.
Unlike Zoom, after four months you get an email that says, hey, you still having a problem
with this 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 that can download
it right there into their experience so they don't have to worry about an email anymore.
So they can have all of that.
That's the annotation feature.
That feature is coming out hopefully next week and it's all for the paid subscribers.
Okay, got it.
I have not tried that yet.
Great question.
Yeah, thank you so much for answering.
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.
Duet 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 two people.
It's got to be person to person.
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 service, 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 path that you have,
you know, you have to basically go from hop one to hop two to hop three.
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, 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 students 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 students network.
And that's incredibly important because whenever you connect, you don't know if it's your computer,
your Wi Fi, your students computer, your students 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?
Or 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
going to 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 card, those are
the milliseconds that Microsoft's determined to be a great experience, optimal, 20 to 40.
I am in New Jersey.
And I can 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 will 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.
Yeah, we all have experience with 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?
That's a great question.
I'm so glad you brought that up because not 99% of the time, 100% of the time that 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 free app.
That'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 concerts.
I've been doing a lot of concerts and we normally do it on Zoom.
So we're trying it out.
The next one, we want to try it on Rock Out Loud.
So right now I'm trying to figure out a few things.
Is there a way we can spotlight the main performer like 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 going to go through all 35 people on the phone call,
the video call.
So you mute everybody except for that person.
So yes, 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 a 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 Veloso 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 need to be brought up, I can 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, Clare.
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.
Yes, absolutely.
Great.
So I was wondering, you know, as piano teachers, oftentimes I like to have, 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 Rock Out Loud?
Well, we could do it a couple of ways.
We have the ability to, right next to the lead 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, man, it's a great way to use Rock Out Loud Live.
I can tell you that in the works, and it could be three to six months from now, but it is
going to be in the works.
I signed the sign off 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 Manicam does without using all of the resources.
Lots of things like Manicam, they really overextended the need of all of the things they throw
in everything, emojis, characters.
You don't need that as music teachers.
You basically need a way to put in more screen options, 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 two weeks, it'll look different again with the whiteboard.
And then it's going to look different again in six months because we keep adding features
to make that music lesson better and better and better.
It's fantastic that you're really making this platform for music lessons exclusively.
Yeah.
Not 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 patients.
And I said, what in the world?
Are you diagnosing them with high blood pressure and then pulling out your acoustic guitar?
So 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.
And then there was 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 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 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 that there is currently no break rooms.
Correct.
I have and there won't be.
That's a great.
There will be.
Okay.
They're not going to be.
That's the reason why we're not going to do it.
I see.
Let me.
So let me explain quickly how it's so important for me to preserve preserve the audio bandwidth
when you connect peer to peer.
That's the ultimate virtual music lesson experience because there's no media service.
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 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 three or four different applications who said that they don't 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 music.
Exactly.
I love it.
Yeah, I really appreciate that.
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, 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 bit rate tells you the bandwidth.
So when you see the statistic of a bit rate less than 2000, that basically means that
there's something going on with the network.
But 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 could consume bandwidth.
Or they might have a problem with their Wi-Fi.
They might want to get closer to 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 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.
And 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 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 to date 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 have no 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 your money?
I think that that's the worst thing in the world.
So they 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 anytime.
And it's like 30 cents a day or something like that, 50 cents a day just for the 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 them in perspective, 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 students have
a problem and you're a paid subscriber, give us a call one o'clock to eight o'clock Eastern
Standard Time and Saturdays nine to three.
And I got some emails from people in Australia and New Zealand.
They said, what about us?
Those times don't work.
The first thing I did was I went out, I found and hired and trained tech support and that
rolls out on Monday.
Within two 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.
Can you talk a little bit about your different subscription 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.
But to me, I wanted to remove that.
The free version gives you the PDF upload so you can still share music and your student
can still download music.
And 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 Kimi Song Studio, that's your URL you send out to your
students, it never changes.
It lasts a 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 is over, it's over.
And you got to regenerate it every single time.
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.
You 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 the access to 1.8 million songs on a song search.
You get all of these song called these, I should say these piano called resources.
You click on a call that shows up right there in your students video within seconds.
So if you want to show them what an A major looks like, the A major called 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 bodging 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 on 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 can 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 sharp, D, E, F sharp, G sharp.
And the best part is you can download it and your student can download it right onto their
computer.
And in Zoom, you have to look at all the steps and Zoom, if you want to screen share and
annotate, your screen share is one.
Two, you pull up a PDF.
Three, 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 the 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 it 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 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 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 one gentleman on one of the Facebook
forums said, you know, I had to cancel lesson because the student had poor internet connection,
we couldn't figure it out.
And now I got to give him back the money.
And that's what really made me just 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 search 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 pretty significant number.
Wonderful. Alright, 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 you gave me, you had said to me, I didn't know about it.
So yes, I killed zoom.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 that live is cool.
So this is the difference as teachers you're ready, you got a young student 10 years old.
And I don't know Eric, you give me card, do you have students that are 10 11 years old?
And you know, let me ask you then you answer this question for me because now I have a
question for you.
Is it cool to say, are you ready to rock out loud or let's get on a zoom call.
Just get a piano lesson.
You tell me what are you ready to rock out loud or you ready to zoom?
Eric.
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.
There's nothing exciting about that.
But if you're like, let's go and rock out loud.
Let's do an awesome kick butt piano lesson to me.
That's the juice, right?
So if you go to I killed zoom.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 the 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 seventh of sixth of July.
So since July six, because July fourth was a Saturday, I've been doing demos Monday through
Friday from 8am to 8.30pm.
This week covers the New Zealand and Australian folks.
But I go through these demos for everybody.
22 a day, I've done almost 1000.
And every single day it's introducing this to a new person and they're using it and the
feedback and the rock out loud live forum, which is on Facebook, I'd encourage everybody
to join the feedbacks 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 this poor internet, we're going to reduce the video quality, and we're going to 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 at 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 seven day free trial on the paid version.
If you keep, I'm sorry, 995, you got up to eight days to use it, we charge you on the
eighth day.
So you have seven 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 just want to make a point.
So to end this, we're not doing this for any 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.
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.
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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Bye, everyone.
Bye.