When Eclectic Music started doing music lessons on Zoom, it was a bit of an adjustment for everyone.

Now, more than two years later, lots of teachers and students love the Zoom lessons and will never go back to doing them in person. But at the start, lots of us felt like we had to recreate the feeling of being in the same room as our student.

And that — on top of the ongoing stress and uncertainty of the pandemic — was freaking exhausting.

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I’m a guitarist, but not a very accomplished one.

The complexity of electric lead guitar has always eluded me. I didn’t take to it naturally or quickly, and I never found anyone who was able to help me take my skills to the next level.

For years, I thought that if I just worked hard enough, I could play lead. That would have been especially notable in the days when it seemed like you could count on one hand the number of female lead guitarists in history. I wanted to be one of them.

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I started teaching music lessons because it was a skill I had that matched what people were looking for.

Once I moved to my new city, it took a few months for people to find me, but after that, I had all the students I needed.

I didn't leave it there, though. I took a next step: What about all of the people whom I couldn't serve because I already had too many students? I needed to find a solution for them.

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In an online course I'm involved in, as in many self-paced online courses, some participants find themselves feeling behind when they have let a few weeks go by without getting started.

However, instead of getting into the meat of the course, they begin with the warmup lessons -- the lessons that contain no new material and are there mostly for people to get to know each other prior to the release of the "real" lessons.

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