Muze

What Muze is

Muze is a platform for private music lessons. Its homepage describes it as "an online music education platform built for music teachers, by music teachers," and the pitch is that the tools a music lesson needs come built in: a tuner, a metronome, visual cues, recording and playback, and note sharing. It is meant for the teacher who runs a studio of individual students, whether those lessons happen online or in person. The homepage puts it this way: Muze "offers music teaching tools and an online platform tailored to enhance both in-person and virtual music lessons."

The product sits in a narrow and specific niche. It is built around a teacher's own studio: the teacher subscribes, the students use it free, and Muze gives both sides one place for the lesson tools and for everything the lesson produces: notes, recorded clips and the material a student needs to practice during the week. The site's own tagline for it is "The Future of Teaching Music."

The music tools

The tuner is the first tool on the features page, under the heading "Stay in Tune." It has an auto mode "for super fast tuning," a chromatic tuner and alternative tuning sets, and clear visual feedback. The site pitches it at both ends of the ability range, with "Professional accuracy for advanced players" on one side and a "Simple and intuitive" interface for beginners on the other. For a string, wind or brass teacher, having a tuner inside the lesson means a student can tune at the start of a session and again mid-lesson without reaching for a separate app.

The metronome ("Keep with the Beat") has a "Natural click timbre" and lets the teacher set accents, subdivide the beat and change time signatures. Those three controls cover most of what a lesson asks of a metronome: accenting the first beat of a bar, practicing a passage in eighth or sixteenth notes, and switching meter for a piece that changes time.

Visual cues ("Always on Cue") let a teacher signal to a student while the student is playing. The features page lists three uses: giving visual cues during a performance, avoiding audio interruptions "through on-screen visuals," and giving applause for an excellent performance. The point is that a teacher can correct or encourage without talking over the music.

Record and playback ("One More Time!") lets teachers and students record their own clips, store and share those clips from a digital library, create and share notes, and play recordings back later for practice. A teacher can record a passage played correctly for the student to copy, or record the student's own attempt so the two can listen back together and talk about what to change.

The digital library and studio organization

The second half of the product is organization. The homepage describes a "digital music library featuring notes, clips, and more," and says that "the digital music studio organization means teachers are prepared for every lesson." In practice, the library is where the clips and notes from each lesson are kept, so a student has the teacher's remarks and the recordings in one place between lessons rather than scattered across messages.

The testimonials on the site come back to exactly this. A parent, Sally, writes that "the ability to keep notes and videos from the lessons in one place for access during the rest of the week was awesome." A student, Karen, says that having the instructor's notes, recordings and tools available means "I can go back and refer to remarks from my last lesson or two which helps me remember what I need to focus on." A bassoon teacher, Gerik, writes that "Muze helps fill in some of the holes of other platforms have for musicians," and a student, Carolyn, recommends it "as a format for online music lessons."

Plans and pricing

Muze charges teachers and is free for their students. The pricing page lists three options:

• Yearly, $120 a year, marked "Popular Choice," including a 21 day free trial and a bonus the page describes as "TWO MONTHS FREE!"
• Monthly, $12 a month, also including a 21 day free trial.
• Students, $0 a month, with the line "Muze is ALWAYS FREE for students!"

All three list the same features: unlimited class sessions, the metronome and tuner, recording and playback, the digital music library, and note sharing. So the teacher plans differ only in billing, and students get the same tools at no cost. The pricing section also invites music teachers to "Join Our Free Early Access" as an alternative to subscribing, and every page carries a "Start Free Trial" button.

The people behind it

The About page tells the story. Megan Kehren and Erin Archer are "musicians, teachers, and identical twins." In the spring of 2020, as many musicians began teaching online for the first time, they found that a better platform for music instruction was needed. By the fall of 2020 their idea had been built with developers and entrepreneurs Joseph Nother and Brandon Rochelle. The team page lists all four as founders: Kehren and Archer as Founder / Teacher, Rochelle as Director of Development and Nother as Creative Director. That teacher-led origin is visible in the product, which centers on the small, practical tools a lesson uses rather than on course catalogs or certificates.

For help, the site has Support, FAQs and Tutorials & Troubleshooting sections, a contact form, and a blog called Muzings.

Who Muze suits

Muze fits a private music teacher, or a small studio, teaching one student at a time, especially one who moved lessons online and missed having a tuner, a metronome and a way to signal a student mid-performance. It suits teachers who want students and parents to have the week's notes and recordings in one place, and the free student accounts make it easy to bring a whole roster across. At $12 a month or $120 a year the cost is low enough for a solo teacher to try with a 21 day trial first.

Muze's pages describe lesson tools and studio organization rather than course sales, catalogs or certificates, so a musician who wants to sell recorded courses to the public is looking for a different kind of product. A teacher whose work is the weekly one-to-one lesson gets a focused tool built by people who teach the same way.