By default, Zoom has many great audio filtering tricks enabled to help reduce background noise and mute microphones when people are not talking. Unfortunately, this can then cut out live instrument sounds during music lessons. Along with pre-recorded music you may be playing over the call.

This cheat sheet will take you step by step through setting up your Zoom audio settings to be optimized for music lessons.

“Un-hiding” the settings.

1.    Open Zoom, click the Zoom.us menu up the top right. Click “Preferences”

2.    Under “General”, click “View more settings” at the bottom. This will take you to the web portal to edit your account based settings.

3.    You will be taken to the “Settings” page. Click “In Meeting (Advanced)”. This will scroll you down the page to the appropriate settings. Scroll a little further down until you see “Allow users to select original sound in their client settings”. Toggle the option on.

4.    Go back into Zoom.

Selecting the audio options.

5.    Once you are in a meeting, select the “audio settings” from the bottom left of the meeting screen.

6.    At the bottom right of this screen, click “Advanced”.

7.    Once in the advanced settings, select “Show in-meeting option to “enable original sound” from microphone”. Check box should display a tick.

8.    Return to your meeting window.

9.    Up the top left corner of your meeting window, you should now see a button saying “Turn on original sound”. Click this.

With this option enabled, the listener on the other end will hear your direct sound without all of the noise filtering Zoom adds to clean up the sound. The downside is you will have more background noise in the conversation. However Zoom will stop interfering and cutting the audio when no one is talking, allowing your music to play through clearly to the other person.

Please note: This setting works for sending audio only. If you need the person on the other end of the conversation to implement these settings so you can hear them better, they will need to go through the same process on their own end.