We switched to online lessons in 2020 because we had no choice, and I expected to hate it. My daughter had been doing in-person piano lessons for about eight months and was making good progress. The idea of doing music instruction over a laptop camera seemed like a stopgap at best — a way to tread water until we could get back to normal.
And then she continued online lessons for two years after restrictions lifted. Not because we forgot to switch back, but because it was actually working and we made a deliberate choice to keep it.
I’ve now talked to enough parents in both camps to give you something more useful than “it depends” — which, frustratingly, is still the honest answer, but I can at least tell you what it depends on.
What Online Lessons Do Surprisingly Well
The teacher we found online was, frankly, better than the local options we had access to. This is the most underappreciated argument for virtual instruction: geography is no longer a constraint. If the best teacher for your child’s personality, instrument, and learning style happens to live in a different city, that used to be irrelevant. Now it’s not.
Scheduling flexibility is also real. No commute means no buffer time on either side of the lesson, and cancellations due to weather or illness are rarer when the teacher doesn’t have to get in their car to get to you. We lost very few sessions to logistical issues in two years of online lessons — fewer than we lost to various things in the one year we were doing in-person.
For an instrument like piano or guitar, where the teacher is watching technique and listening to sound rather than physically adjusting the student’s hand position, online lessons translate very well. The camera angle matters — you want to position it so the teacher can see the hands clearly — but with a little setup, the instruction itself is comparable.
Where In-Person Has a Real Edge
Younger kids, especially under seven, are harder to teach online. Attention management over a screen is genuinely more difficult, and some kids simply cannot stay engaged without a physical presence in the room. If your child struggles with video calls in general, assume that will carry over into music lessons.
Instruments that require a lot of physical correction — certain wind instruments, voice at higher levels, violin for very young beginners — can be harder to teach at a distance. A teacher who needs to see body posture from multiple angles, or occasionally demonstrate something by physically guiding a student’s embouchure or bow arm, will be working with one hand tied behind their back on video.
Ensemble playing and group classes also lose something online. My daughter’s group lessons in person had an energy that was impossible to replicate over Zoom, and when she returned to them, she immediately said they felt different — better. Social learning is real, and it has a physical component.
What I’d Tell a Parent Who’s Choosing Right Now
If you live in an area with strong local teaching options and your child is young or doing an instrument that benefits from hands-on correction, try in-person first. The physical environment of a lesson room, the ritual of going somewhere to do the thing, and the in-person relationship with the teacher all have value.
If your local options feel thin, if you have scheduling constraints, or if you have a self-motivated older child who can manage a screen environment, don’t dismiss online music teachers as a lesser option. The format has genuinely matured, and the best online teachers know how to work within it.
We eventually went back to in-person when my daughter started working on more advanced repertoire and wanted the hands-on feedback. But I’m glad we tried it, and I’d do it again.