It is likely to be some time before music ensembles – especially larger ones – can come together to rehearse and play again. A well structured online ensemble session will enable you to maintain a supportive musical community and encourage peer learning, practice repertoire and develop technique.

Whilst latency (delay) won’t allow you to all play and hear each other at the same time, there is much you can do! As with all online music teaching, planning and structure are key:

  • Provide clear instructions for your ensemble members about how to access and login to the session, including information about what to do if they have technical issues
  • Use cloud software to share resources with participants and plan how you are going to share music, tracks and resources during the session
  • Think about a longer term project that you can collaborate on so that you have a focus to work towards
  • Send out a schedule, music and parts in advance – and remind your participants to warm up before the session
  • Test all technology, charge your devices and practice your session beforehand
  • Prepare any backing tracks/recordings that you want the ensemble to play along to in the session
  • Structure your weekly virtual ensembles to allow for both social and playing time – have some time at the start and end of each session when all participants are unmuted to enable chat and interaction
  • When rehearsing each piece, play your part/backing track and keep all participants on mute
  • After each section/piece encourage participants to feedback about how it went
  • Keep in touch with participants between sessions with support, tips, signposts to practice resources and reminders of the next meeting.
  • There are a range of different platforms and approaches that you can choose from for your online ensemble activity – Click here for more information on this topic.