“I can’t find a voice coach I want to work with locally – are Skype singing lessons effective and worth it? Is studying online with someone better than in-person?”
Are Skype singing lessons effective? Yes (as with all things, instructor dependent).
Skype vs In-person is not necessarily a better/worse thing, as they both have distinct advantages.
In person
For example, in-person breeds natural rapport with people as soon as you in the room with them. You can get a feel for someone pretty quickly in person, and there are subtleties to the human voice that are most evident when you are in the room with the singer, which is very helpful for the coach and their coaching method.
Skype lessons
In contrast, studying via Skype has it’s own advantages. There is no travel time for a start, so you can literally be keeping your voice warmed up and singing songs right up to the start of your lesson, and then as soon as it finishes you are “back” at home, mainly as you’ll never have left home in the first place! The compression effects of the microphones used in Skype also help bring out other subtleties that are most obvious when heard over a microphone.
The cons of each are obviously the reverse of the pros of the other, so whereas you don’t have to travel for Skype, you do have to travel for in-person lessons. Skype lessons also can have a slight time delay. These are usually too slight for singing to be an issue, but it does sometimes mean you’ll occasionally talk over one another briefly, but no differently to the same thing that happens when you are talking on the phone to a friend.
Conclusion – it’s up to you!
Personally I don’t think there’s a clear winner. I personally study with coaches overseas, so Skype is an instant winner for me, because to get the education I need to continue developing, there’s not really anyone even within the country that would be helpful in the way that I need right now. I also have clients who live within travel distance that prefer the convenience of Skype lessons once they’ve started with me and we’ve generated that rapport off-line, and we can continue that via Skype.
What I’d suggest is that if there’s a coach in particular you’d like to study with and the only way you could work with them is over Skype, give it a shot. If you don’t like the format after a lesson or two, you don’t have to continue… but I think you’ll find the results with a good coach online are worth learning over Skype.
As always, any questions just let me know.
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