Learning to play a musical instrument can be a life-changing moment. Josh Holliday understands this as well as anyone.

"My parents gave me a drum kit one Christmas many years ago. It was totally unexpected, but what was more surprising was the way music changed my life.”

Holliday’s other interest is engineering. At Musora, a music e-learning platform, he oversees staff operating three fulltime studios, remote productions across the globe, and a post production pipeline for audio and large parts of video, as well as designing and building new studios.

If you’ve spent time on YouTube trying to teach yourself how to play drums, guitar, or piano, you’re probably familiar with Musora, whose brands include Drumeo, Pianote, Guitereo, Singeo, and PlayBass. They have a combined 100 professional instructors offering lessons to over 100,000 active students.

And if you’re more of a music listener, you might have seen one of their viral videos. In one viral video from Drumeo, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ drummer Chad Smith makes a beat on the fly to a rock song he’d never heard before. It has over 30 million views.

But Musora says they remain driven by two simple goals. One is to create more musicians. And the other is to keep them playing longer. Musora has grown since its inception in 2015. So too has its video production pipeline, keeping pace with new studio builds, a growing set of lessons and social media content to support the platform.

Scaling up to meet growth demands

Holliday describes how Musora’s platform growth creates new technology needs. To meet these demands, Musora’s team leaned heavily into Blackmagic Design’s suite of offerings, such as HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro, DaVinci Resolve Studio, and ATEM Mini switchers.

“With this extra filming cadence and higher camera count, our reliance on a dependable video ingest workflow became vital. Leaning hard into the HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro really unlocked that speed and reliability we need,” said Holliday.

Innovating with live, on-screen graphics

The visual requirements of piano instructional videos is one example of how Musora’s team tackled a new challenge with both creativity and engineering.

For the Pianote brand, online students are typically shown a picture-in-picture display which allows the viewer to see what keys the instructor is playing in real time.

But the team soon found a better way to do this.

“Originally, we placed a simple graphic above the piano but over time considered whether there was a better way,” said Holliday. “It was one of our engineers, Chris Young, who came up with a unique method to create real time highlights that live underneath the hands of the instructor. This would also reclaim valuable screen space on the image.”

This innovation required some creative thinking, however. And an upgrade.

“We originally had another ATEM, but we quickly found that we maxed out the outputs. The ATEM 4 M/E Constellation 4K was a major upgrade for quantity of inputs, scaling on every input, output count, and the internal functions we utilize,” explained Holliday.

“Now, to achieve our PIP effect, we use several ATEM chroma keys and mix engines to isolate the layers, then recombine them to produce the final image. Given the ATEM has so many features built in, we were able to connect the tech with some creative thinking to make it work.”

Blackmagic Design’s ATEM Constellation4 M/E Constellation 4K is a powerful HD and 4K live production switcher. ATEM Constellation includes advanced features such as DVEs, ATEM advanced chroma key, media players, multi-views, and SuperSource processors. Plus the built-in Fairlight audio mixer includes a compressor, limiter, 6 band parametric EQ, and expander on each input. Free ATEM Software Control is included, or you can add a number of advanced panels.

All-in-one music learning app

To further enable music education for curious learners, Musora began working on a comprehensive “play to learn” app. It aims to give people everything they need to go from nothing, to playing drums, piano, bass, guitar, and being able to sing.

“Naturally, it required a lot of video content,” explained Holliday. “Which we filmed almost every day for a year. The content itself features many guest artists and specialists on their instruments.”

Each lesson has up to eight camera angles to ensure students can see the most relevant visual being taught. To make this happen, the data stacked up quickly.

This is where automated workflows came in.

Automating the process

“Leaning into an automated ingest workflow was essential to our success,” noted Holliday. “Not only were we capturing the new content, but we were also still producing our usual content for our YouTube channels.”

Holliday met the need with Blackmagic’s HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro broadcast decks. 24 of them, in fact. HyperDeck Studio allows the user to record broadcast quality video files directly onto SD card and SSD media. After recording, media can be mounted on any computer to access the files using your favorite video software. The input then goes to the ATEM switchboard.

Holliday outlined a typical workflow: “A drum lesson on our platform starts with about eight camera feeds. Two main talking angles, an overhead, a footcam and several side shots depending on the content. All signals go first to the HyperDeck for recording, then both the UHD loop out and 1080 status monitor output go to the ATEM 4 M/E Constellation 4K.”

“At this point we are recording and seeing every input in the ATEM. The ATEM then feeds all the studio outputs, including the control room TVs, video engineer monitor and director of photography monitor, as well as feeds into the control room for the talent, including confidence monitor, displaying sheet music, an on-screen timer or scripts, and teleprompter feed.”

“After filming, we simply run our automation pipeline to ingest all the media to our main server, do checksum and playback verification, and provide a report of the automation. This workflow is very impactful and was built custom by Hriman and Tugrul from our in-house IT team. We still manually verify content as a last safety measure and to also review any lighting or visual aspects for tweaks before repeating the record process the next day."

What’s next for Musora?

Holliday said Musora will be working with Phil Collins, John Stamos, and other well-known musicians and celebrities in the future. No doubt these people will lend more viral potential and mainstream visibility to the platform.

But Holliday strongly believes Musora’s initial purpose remains as true as ever and will guide the company and their brands moving forward.

“...At the heart of it all is that it’s all in the name of making more musicians and keeping them playing longer,” he said.

And Holliday knows personally, still recalling how his first drum set, that gift from his parents, was the catalyst that made him who he is today.

“Being part of a company that seeks to do the same for others is truly inspiring.”

For information:

Blackmagic Design

ATEM 4 M/E Constellation 4K

HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro

Lead photo: Pictured is Josh Holliday. Photo credit Shane Miljevic.

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