How to Use MemberVault to Create and Manage Music Lessons for Easy Access

In this episode of Made with MV, Hannah Harris, shares her strategy for using Membervault to create a tune library for her fiddle music students. She discusses the concept of flipping the classroom and how she transitioned from sending individual video tutorials to creating a library of nearly 200 tune tutorials organized by tune type. Hannah takes us through her five-step framework for creating and organizing these tutorials, offering valuable tips and insights along the way. Tune in to learn how Hannah leverages Membervault to streamline her teaching process and provide a wealth of resources for her students.

Key Topics & Highlights

• Creating a tune library on MemberVault
• Recap of flipping the classroom concept
• Transition from sending individual video tutorials to using MemberVault for efficiency
• Organizing the tune library by tune type (jig, reel, hornpipe, polka)
• Managing the overwhelming number of videos
• Sharing a 5-step framework for creating the tune library

Connect with Hannah

Website 
MemberVault Site
Instagram 
Youtube 
Podcast 

Episode Full Transcript

Hannah Harris [00:00:01]:
Hey there, this is Hannah Harris. Many of you may know me as Hannah Graham, and if you have written in to chat support anytime in the last year and a half or so, chances are we've already had a conversation before. So yes, I am on Team MV. I work primarily in customer support role and I'm also a longtime MV account owner myself. So I have been using MemberVault to host my fiddle courses online since January of 2021. I help fiddle players get the real feel for irish traditional music, whether they're self taught or coming from another genre like classical music. So I don't just teach tunes, I teach you how to play the tunes and actually sound like an irish fiddler rather than someone who's just reading notes on a page and playing irish fiddle music like you're actually getting the real feel for the style. And I'm really excited to share today my strategy on using MemberVault to share my tune tutorials.

Hannah Harris [00:00:57]:
So this is going to be a great strategy for you if you are a music teacher or you have one on one clients who share similar material among themselves. What I'm doing here is that I'm essentially creating a library of tunes that all of my students can access and it's been a real winner in my studio. So a little bit of a backstory on my strategy. I first got the idea to do something like this from Christian Howes, who is a great musician and thought leader in the online music teaching space. And he has this concept called flipping the classroom. So flipping the classroom is where your students do a lot of the work outside of the lesson, and then they come to you to fine tune what it is they're doing. So usually my students would go learn a tune on their own and then they come back to me for style and finessing. So I'm teaching them rhythm, phrasing, tone, all those fun things.

Hannah Harris [00:01:50]:
Now, at first, when I first started teaching one on one lessons online, I would send individual video tutorials to each student. And as my studio grew, this got a lot more time consuming, especially as I had students that were learning a lot of the same tunes. So if you rerecord a video every single time to send them a tutorial, it really starts to add up. So enter MemberVault and enter the tune library. So what is the tune library? It is a product that I created on MemberVault and I have it organized by tune type. So your fun fact for the day is that irish music is mostly comprised of different dances. So a jig, a reel, hornpipe, polka. So what I've done is I've made these my modules.

Hannah Harris [00:02:35]:
So I have a module for jigs and I have a module for reels, et cetera, et cetera. And within each of these modules are the lessons with the actual tune tutorials. I sort these alphabetically for my sanity and also for my students because if I didn't mention this already, there are nearly 200 videos in here. Now, before you get overwhelmed and think, oh, no, Hannah, I cannot do 200 videos, hang on a second, I'm going to tell you how I did it and how you can make this really, really easy on yourself. Plus, you might not even need this many videos in the first place. I've been constantly adding to this product for over a year now, and usually once a week I set aside this time to record. So it's definitely been a long term work in progress. I have a five step framework here of how you can go about creating this.

Hannah Harris [00:03:28]:
So let's go ahead and go down our list. So step one, of course, is assigning a day of the week to film and a time to film. So I tend to work my customer support role with Team MV from 09:00 a.m. To 03:00 p.m. In my time zone. And then I have a couple of hours before my husband gets home from work and I want to be more present with him. So I have that two hour window between three and five to get work done on my music business. And usually in the past I've just said, you know what? Tuesdays are a good day.

Hannah Harris [00:04:00]:
So Tuesdays between three and five, that's when I'm going to record. Now a quick disclaimer. I have two cats. I have no kids, so I don't have any napping schedules to work around because my cats nap a lot. I have a cat sitting on my lap right now as I record this. She's being very quiet and very good. But needless to say, I don't have that kind of. I have a pretty consistent schedule from week to week unless I'm traveling or hosting family or anything like that.

Hannah Harris [00:04:31]:
So for the most part, I can guarantee that I have this time window. If you don't have that kind of schedule, then the important thing is to know that when you have a window of time, that's when you're going to work on this project. And if you can assign it ahead of time, great. And if not, then just have it kind of in the back of your mind to get to. So I've assigned Tuesday afternoons between three and five to film my tune tutorials now step two is in your project manager or maybe on a postit note on your desk you can jot down your video topics. So for me, these are the tunes that my students request from me. So they'll email me throughout the week or they'll mention them in a lesson and then I can go into notion which I use for project management and planning out my week and I have a task there that is just a list of upcoming tunes that I'm going to be filming. So when someone says okay, this week I want to learn the bag spuds or the boys of Blue Hill, these are tune names.

Hannah Harris [00:05:35]:
I will just go in and I will make a note for upcoming tunes and I'll just list them in order of how I receive them and that's how I know which topics and which tunes I'm going to record that week. Now step 2.5, a bonus step that you can do is you can actually collect this information in MemberVault, which I do. I kind of collect it in multiple places. So like I said, emails, lessons, but you can also enable comments in your library product which is what I've done. And you can have your students request new videos there instead. So I have this at the very last lesson of my modules and like I mentioned, I have 200 videos in here. So it is getting kind of long with my lesson list. So I think what I might end up doing is I might enable comments on my modules instead of at the very end of the lesson and then I will have my students request that just at the module level instead of the lesson level.

Hannah Harris [00:06:32]:
I think that's going to help give a better experience for actually finding where to submit this information. So that's a little edit that I'm going to introduce down the road. And as you can see here, constantly tweaking the product, making it better as I go. And that's the beautiful thing about MemberVault is that it really does support these little shifts over time. So that's our step two is to get your project manager, get your video topics and you can enable comments if you want. That's great. Step three is to actually film the tutorial. So I use loom.

Hannah Harris [00:07:07]:
I just do a straight take whenever possible. So I have kind of a framework of how I record these. I record the tune up to speed, I break it down phrase by phrase. I record it at a slow speed and a medium speed. And so that's just like all my videos are like that. I know what to follow. I don't really need a script for it because I kind of have it memorized for what I'm going to do there. And if there's like a side tip that I can share with my students, then I will.

Hannah Harris [00:07:36]:
Maybe there's something like, oh, hey, pay attention to this Boeing pattern here because it comes up a lot in jigs. You'll want to know how to do this, or this is an ornament that comes up a lot in this particular tune, so pay attention to that. We'll do a little mini tutorial here so I can sneak those in. And it still goes pretty straightforward throughout the video. Not a whole lot to edit there. So whenever I can, I just do one take. I have that outline that I'm following in my head. So I know that I'm recording the fast phrase by phrase, slow and medium.

Hannah Harris [00:08:07]:
And that takes me, I don't know, 20 minutes depending on how many parts are in the tunes. So anywhere from like a twelve to a 25 minutes video there. Just one take. And then I will step four, add the video to MemberVault. So I take the embed code from loom, and I use loom as well for transcript for the timestamps. So basically, I want to let my students know where to find the fast, the phrase by phrase, the slow, and the medium. And so I'll just look on the transcript to see where that is. And I'll pop that into MemberVault as well to help categorize it.

Hannah Harris [00:08:45]:
So you've grabbed your embed code from loom and you can just paste that into the video section in your lesson. And we have a help article all on how to do that. And I'll also add in just a couple of details from the video. So whether that is a link that I mentioned to maybe another video of another musician playing the tune, I like to add what key it's in. So that helps my students sort these tunes as well as the popularity. So are they played in lots of places around the world? Are they only played in a few countries or cities or are they really, really not well known? Usually that's like a tune that I've written because my tunes aren't super popular. Feel like probably not a lot of people know about them. So I'll have that category as well.

Hannah Harris [00:09:31]:
But there are people that they'll listen to my CD and they'll think, oh, I really want to learn this tune. So I'll be happy to do a tutorial for that. So the really cool thing about MemberVault is that you can use the search feature. So anytime you have these categories in your lesson text like I've mentioned, I sort my modules by the tune type so my students can search jigs, but maybe they don't necessarily want to look for a jig, but they really want a tune that's in d major. So they can go to the search bar, they can type d major and MemberVault will populate a list of lessons in the tune library that have d major written in the lesson description text there. It's the coolest thing. It's such a great way for sorting your tunes and maybe if you have recipes, I know that a lot of people have used it for sorting those as well, so just a really great feature. The search function has been just wonderful and I know a lot of my students have used it to search for popularity because a lot of my students want to learn tunes that they can travel around the world and they can sit in at an irish music session somewhere in a pub and they can play tunes with anybody, any of the musicians there.

Hannah Harris [00:10:44]:
So I try to keep that popularity category in there as well. And then our last step, step five, is to organize. So like I said, I have my tunes in alphabetical order. So you'll use the drag and drop feature to reorder your lessons. Make sure that they're all in a good, easily searchable format. So one thing I would like to try doing again is sending out an email to let my students know that there is a new video and have like a one click link to the lesson. Right now I just kind of put the video up and I know a lot of my students are in the tune library fairly regularly, so they'll see that there's a new lesson that they haven't looked at and so they'll be able to go in and find it pretty easily. However, just the more tunes, more tutorials I'm adding, the easier I can make it on my students.

Hannah Harris [00:11:32]:
I would love to just have a section where I'm talking about the new videos I've added. And another hot tip here is if you're regularly emailing your list so I have a weekly irish fiddle Sunday newsletter. You can also be like hey, this week I recorded this tune and this is for the tune library. So I'm so excited to share this with my students. Here's a link to buy the tune library. If you don't own it already, you can say it differently than that, but essentially that's what you're doing is you're not only letting your current students know that there is a new tune library link and if they click the one click link, they can just log right in. But you're letting people know who don't own the product already that, hey, you have this awesome product with this cool tutorial that you've created this week, and you're actively creating content week by week. So that's just a side tip strategy there.

Hannah Harris [00:12:23]:
Now, this strategy has a couple of pitfalls, so you might want more professionally edited videos for your account. Maybe you actually, like, teach video editing or just the type of audience that you're working with. You might need to spend more time where you're actually creating these videos and spending a lot of time on editing them. So the whole one take with no edits and getting a whole library of tunes up within a year, week by week, might be a little bit of a slower process for you. And then another pitfall is that you want to be really careful not to overwhelm your students with too much content. So I know when I say 200 videos, it's like, wow, that's a lot of videos. Now, my students do not have to learn all these tunes. Like, there are more tunes out there in the world that any musician can learn.

Hannah Harris [00:13:10]:
I don't even know all the irish fiddle tunes there are out there and people are writing new ones every day. So it's just kind of one of those situations where there's a lot of tunes and you don't have to learn them all. So I make it work because again, they don't have to complete the library. It's not like you have to get 100% done in this product. It's more of like, hey, this is a resource that you can keep coming back to. You can keep referencing. It's an abundant place of lots of different tutorials that you can reference, but you also don't have to look at them all. So it's a little bit like having a tune book, like an actual book of sheet music, but it's actually made digital and it's in video format.

Hannah Harris [00:13:54]:
And I was going to try and think of a third pitfall here, but honestly, I just really love this strategy. So I don't really have anything else for a pitfall. I hope that you found this episode inspiring. Be sure to share in the MemberVault collaborative at Forward Slash Collab with your takeaways from listening, and let us know if you're going to try it for yourself. You can find me on Instagram at Hannah Harris Keel, that is Ceol, and at my website, hanaharriskiel.com. My MemberVault website is learn hannaharriskill.com and if you're curious, keel C-E-O-L means music in the irish language. The Facebook page for Hannah Harris music was already taken back in the day for when I was creating a Facebook business page. So I went with Kyol and it's kind of just stuck because I'm pretty much in irish music for life here.

Hannah Harris [00:14:44]:
And of course, if you're a MemberVault account owner, you'll find me at that little green help button in the bottom right corner of your account, and I'm happy to help you troubleshoot the steps for this strategy in chat and email support.