 Hi guys, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music. In this quick guide to using Zoom, I'm going to talk about specific settings just for musicians or any kind of musician to coexist. Very important if you're a student of music, very important, specifically important if you're a teacher of music, very important if you're a sound producer, a music producer and you're collaborating with your fellow musicians or your clients, you want to play them the audio and pristine sound quality and maybe even important for people in the medical profession. So Zoom tells us in their manual or guide, so to speak. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at a few specific settings which you need to enable in Zoom and a follow up for this lesson to continue this journey is if you want an even more tighter quality setup, especially if you're a music producer, you have a studio, you have an audio interface, you have a bunch of cables and a recording microphone with XLR inputs is to watch another video which we link up in the description which is a three part series where I talk about an app called OBS, I talk about a few other things really, a few fancy apps, a few camera apps and so on and so forth. So the general way first of all to connect yourself for a class as a teacher or as a student, let's first look at for an education perspective is what do I'm going to talk from what I want, I'm a teacher so what do I want from you the student, I would love to see your face that'll be nice, I would like to see your fingers playing the keyboard with a good view of maybe your wrist, your arm optional but at least your wrist and your fingers and your face, I hate teaching people who just show me their fingers or only show me their face. So that rules out a few possibilities, make sure you never use a mobile device, try to always use a laptop or a desktop with a big enough screen so you can see an instrument like a keyboard or a guitar in a class and you have a good view of what you're learning. So as a student, now to integrate these two things we have an app called OBS, I've done an entire detailed video on OBS usage essentially in a nutshell, what do you need? You need a phone which I'm sure all of you people have and then you need to connect the phone to the computer which also charges the phone which is really cool and then you just need a few free apps. You can try out droid cam for Android when I last checked that worked fine. You can look at camo for iPhone when I last checked that was fine. All of these apps are free or they may have one app logo watermark so to remove them you'll have to pay a very nominal amount of money and you may get a few pro features like camo pro allows you to share 1080p HD quality as video. So what you then do is you connect your phone to the computer, open up the app, you'll have a client server kind of relationship between the phone and the computer or your desktop, laptop etc. And then you integrate the two into an app like OBS. So what you're going to integrate is your face angle and your keyboard angle or your guitar angle. You have different kinds of mounts, you have basic pole mounts which you can mount from a wall, you can mount through a suction cup like thing, you have magnetic mounts for certain phones. You can also use these Gorilla Pod mounts where you can kind of clamp it onto anything like a stand or it's used a lot everywhere or even a tripod, a camera tripod which professional videographers and photographers use. Whatever works for you, whatever suits your budget and the better it looks for the teacher, the better you're going to learn. And similarly, if you are a teacher, the better it looks from your perspective, the better it is for your students to learn. So you then integrate the two in OBS and then you need to start virtual camera and OBS. OBS though is absolutely open source which I should say, I shouldn't say free. So get your cells that software for sure, all of that is in the description. In fact, we have a manual, we have a booklet which will help you sequentially step one to step end to do this stuff, tactically speaking. This video, you could think of it also as a refresh because I did one in 2022, but then the zoom settings have changed to serve musicians even better than the video guide I made in 2022 or so. So hence I'm making this video primarily to now show you the features in Zoom. So you hit start virtual camera from OBS or let's say you worst case don't have OBS. Somehow you've entered into this classroom with the teacher or you're trying to teach your student, it ain't over yet. You need to now focus on audio. So one way to get audio to work well is from your own end. In your house, maybe if your fan is insanely loud, reduce it. If there are random folks shouting outside your window, tell them to keep quiet your learning or something like that. Or if you're a kid learning and your folks are getting ready for office, you may want to request them or close the door or just tell them, see, my class time is from 6.30 to 7.30, my teacher will get really angry with you. So be a bit careful and let me learn peacefully. Improve your lights, you don't want the lights to glare. You don't want a teacher like me staring at the sun rather than staring at you. So figure out your lighting situation, the curtains, etc. Once all that is done, you join the Zoom call, we see you, but now we need to hear you really well. So there are a few settings and this is not just for a music class. I'm talking from that bias as I'm a teacher, but this will work if you're a music producer. It will work if you're trying to jam with people. So hear me out for all these settings. So now let's get into the Zoom app and try to see what we can do while we're in a call with our teacher or with our student and what are the crucial settings you need to do. And everything I show you on the Zoom app will most definitely work on a phone. So if you're worst case scenario, you have a mobile tablet or a mobile phone, you can still do these same settings on those phones and those tablets as well. So I'm currently in a Zoom call right here. So the first thing you want to do is go to your audio settings. On Mac, the shortcut is command comma, but you can just find settings from the Zoom app itself, just go to settings. And once you're in settings, you then go to audio. So I'm in audio. And now that I'm in audio, you need to just see if the teacher or the student is not able to hear you, check your microphone level. If your microphone is off, clearly something is wrong from your end and it's not Zoom's fault. Once you're getting a signal, you can adjust the volume through trial and error or you can do the automatically adjust microphone volume setting, which is usually more than enough. Similarly, if you are listening, you can adjust which speaker you're listening to which speaker you're listening from. Now, in a lot of cases, if you use a Bluetooth device by mistake, you'll realize that the audio is coming from the Bluetooth device, like a Bluetooth Apple AirPods, which is automatically connect, which is quite cool actually. What medium are you listening from? How are you sending your audio to broadcasting through Zoom over the call? So set your speaker to be the speaker you want to listen from. And if your speaker or if your headphone is not showing up here, well, you need to install the drivers and you need to make sure it's compatible with your OS or your computer. Then you have a microphone. You can even do a microphone test. You'll hear a little beep. That's quite cool. And you can adjust your microphone. Now I have a more fancy microphone setup, which you can watch in my other video guide, but that's only if you're a music producer. So for now, this could just be your Mac inbuilt in microphone or the inbuilt mic of your laptop. So now most most of the time this is what's going to make your call good or bad or horrible. So you have Zoom optimized audio. Now Zoom says recommended for most users and by default, it's auto automatically adjust noise suppression. This setting is for speech for a normal call. It works great for a normal call with you and your family or whatever. Do not ever bother about that for a music class. So for a music class, you want to turn this to low worst case scenario low. So at the very worst, you need to make this low. So then your piano will not be considered as noise. Strangely enough, Zoom will consider your piano or your guitar as noise if you don't hit low. So hit low there. However, Zoom has now offered or in recent times, a setting called as original sound for musicians, which is great. But however, there's a caveat. It says recommended for studio environment. So what I mean here by a studio environment is a quiet environment with free from distractions, free from kitchen noises, free from people on the street yelling at people or free from anyone in your house doing their thing. So original sound for musicians, if your room is quiet enough, this will work great. If not, make sure you go back to Zoom optimize audio and make it low. Original sound for musicians, ideally you would want to tick all these three things. However, this and this may need to be off if your internet connection is poor. Now how you can optimize your internet connection would be by taking a LAN cable from your existing wireless router and not going Wi-Fi going through the Ethernet line using a LAN or a Cat5 or a Cat6 cable connecting it directly from your router. And trust me, it won't be a lot of money. It'll be about 200 or 300 rupees to get a good high quality Cat5 or Cat6 cable. Connect that and you'll be surprised at least where I'm from, from Bangalore. The internet speed goes up drastically. It sometimes becomes about eight times faster than even if I'm near the Wi-Fi router and I have a good Wi-Fi router. So you may want to make sure your internet connection is good. Sometimes the sound quality and the video quality goes really busted because your internet connection is not able to send and receive packets of data very well. So assuming your internet connection is damn good, you need to turn on the high fidelity music mode, which will be really good and you can enable stereo audio. Stereo audio will make it sound beautiful, whether it's guitar, piano, however stereo audio will increase your CPU utilization and consume greater network bandwidth. If you have a stereo setup, this will be awesome. High fidelity music mode ticket, but as Zoom says and what I also just said now, use an Ethernet connection and Zoom says not Wi-Fi, which is also what I just said. However, you need a good CPU. So do this trial and error. If you feel your computer is conking out, you may want to leave those unticked, but whether without fail, always have echo cancellation turned on at all times. It's very important. Otherwise, it's just an unpleasant and experience. Always have echo cancellation on. And in the advanced mode, echo cancellation currently is set to aggressive. You could start with auto and then if you feel there's still an issue, you could make it aggressive. Aggressive may cut some audio, so be a bit careful. So I'm going to go ahead and tick all of this stuff and then all you have to do once you close the settings box is go back into Zoom, go to the top left of your Zoom screen and you'll find original sound for musicians. The option is here and it would be off by default. You need to touch the off button and it'll be on a rather weird additional step, which is a bit tricky. I had an issue with it until I figured it out. So go to original sound for musicians. It's to the right of the meeting information tick button here, which gives you your meeting information. Original sound for musicians is on or off. When it's off, it goes back to Zoom optimized audio. So turn it on and now noise suppression, the noise suppression algorithm of Zoom would be disabled. And then it's business as usual. You have your audio and your video. You can put it on and go ahead with your particular class. Now there is one more setting I want to leave you with when you're jamming with with a set of musicians or even when you're doing production, you can share your computer audio. When you do the share screen share, you don't have to actually share your screen. Zoom has a setting where you can share your sound, your computer sound. So you could try that if you're a music producer or if you're a teacher trying to play something from YouTube, you can send the exact audio to your students. So it's a very useful strategy. If you want the audio of your computer to exactly go into your meeting, to all the members of the meeting, works great if you are into production. However, there are other apps which I personally use, which save me a lot of time. Do check that out in the description. We've linked that with a good study guide. The last thing I have for you is what if you want to jam with each other? You have a guitar player, you have a piano player, you all are in distant parts of the world. So what Zoom offers is they give you this setting, a live performance mode for musicians. What can happen there is the sound quality will obviously be degraded. They squash or reduce the bandwidth, but it gives you a max of about 40 or 50 milliseconds of latency, but at least you can jam. So if you're a teacher trying to play a few chords on the instrument and you want your students to follow you real time, you want to hear them. They want to hear you. It's a nice way to kind of jam, hoping, you know, of course, if you're the bandwidth is better, the internet connection is better, it'll be a much more pleasant experience. So that setting, again, we go back to settings in Zoom, go to audio and you then tick live performance mode. Live performance mode is still in beta. So I'm guessing Zoom will improve it, at least at the time of making this video, recommended for multiple instruments or voices in different locations. This will be fun, I think, if you want to jam. So I would say for a class, keep your room as quiet as possible, turn on the original sound for musicians, go into the Zoom app, hit the off button and the off button becomes on. You're good to go in a lesson and you can have a very good experience as a student or a teacher. Having said that, get your hardware, get your tech sorted, get a nice clamp for your phone, as I mentioned, see what works in your environment. Check things like lighting, maybe improve your webcam. The video could also improve, I guess. Check your computer, check your internet, check your land settings. All of this is covered in the detailed series which we have for you. So we'll put this all in one playlist and that's about it, guys. So at the time of making this video, which is around the latter stages of 2023, I think this is the best way of doing a music lesson or sharing your work with a client as a music producer or potentially even jamming with fellow musicians. So hope you found the lesson useful and I will catch you in the next one. Cheers.