Lessons & Band Coaching (kids): suggestions?

Greetings,

My 3 kids have been playing together in a band for ~2 years. The drummer (15 years old) has been taking lessons for 5-6 years on and off; the guitarist (12 years old) has been taking lessons for 5 years or so; and the bassist (11 years old) has been taking lessons for 2 years. They don't want to do this for a living, they just like spending time together and playing out in public for fun when possible. Most of what they do is in the rock category, but it is varied (Neil Young, The Chats, Pixies, Cranberries, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, etc.)

Each week they take 45 minutes of individual lessons and 1.5 hrs of band coaching together. The current band coach also gives the individual lessons to the bassist and drummer. The guitarist takes lessons from another teacher at the school. Since March, all of this has been remote/virtual through zoom (but using an audio interface for the band coaching).

There historically has been a fair bit of disruption in their teachers/lessons, as the music school draws its teachers from the local college and college students have their own lives/aspirations. They have had some consistency for the past 6 months, but the band coach routinely starts lessons 10 minutes late and ends them 5 minutes early, forgets to send the zoom links, etc. He's great, I just think he's trying to do too much and/or not very organized.

Given that they've been virtual since March and seem to be doing ok with it, we're not as tethered to instructors in a 10-15 mile radius of where we live, and I'm at least considering a change.

Any thoughts as to folks that do such a thing? Ideally it would be the same instructor for individual lessons and the band coaching, but I know that may be stretching it.

I gather that this is not the typical question that gets asked on TDPRI (and the guitarist doesn't even play a tele, she just "graduated" to an "S" type), but I figured I'd give it a shot. It is just the circumstance I found myself in when 2 years ago the oldest declared that they should start a band to raise money for dog rescue groups and I've been rolling with it.

Thanks!

 

Yep. Except the band portion is just my 3 kids. They like the virtual too As it is less time driving back and forth, it is just that no one seems to keep on top of whether links get sent out in a timely manner or whether the instructors log on/off timely. And we like the instructor, so don’t want to cause him any issues.

 

They wish that they could go see people play. Live music around here was hurting even pre-virus.

 

Thanks - we had a local teacher at their first school that was great, but he had a second kid and his wife went back to work, so he had to scale back. It is worth asking him if virtual lessons changes the calculus for him.

 

Thanks for this - I never heard of it.

And yeah, if it was 5 minutes here or there I’d have no issue. But the kids routinely sit waiting for a zoom link for 10-15 minutes and keep asking my wife to text him to remind him.