If you teach privately, you are the whole organisation: teacher, receptionist, timetabler and the person who chases late payments. The lessons are the good part. Everything else tends to happen on the sofa in the evening: moving a lesson, re-sending a backing track, answering a parent who wants to know whether next week is still on. Each job is small. Added up, they take hours every week. Good music studio software does not make those jobs disappear, but it puts them in one place instead of scattered across your phone.
What a private music teacher actually needs
A lot of software in this space is designed around front-desk work for large schools: registration, billing runs and reports. If you teach on your own, your priorities are usually different. For most independent teachers, four things matter:
- A timetable that looks after itself. Weekly lessons, school holidays and make-up lessons, without rebuilding the week every Sunday night.
- Lesson material students can find at home. Not another PDF that disappears into a chat thread.
- Visibility of practice. Knowing whether a student has practised before they walk in.
- One channel for parents. So your personal number stops being the helpdesk for your studio.
How Musicdott fits into your teaching week
Scheduling and make-up lessons
You set up a weekly lesson series per student: day, time, length and, if you need it, a room, with a start date and an optional end date. Enter your school holidays once and lessons in those weeks drop out automatically. If you double-book yourself, you get a warning. When a student cancels, you mark the lesson as one to make up, and Musicdott suggests free slots over the next two weeks based on your availability. Students with an email address get a reminder the day before, and your timetable is available as an iCal feed for Google, Apple or Outlook calendars. More detail on thelesson scheduling page.
Lesson content built from blocks
This is where Musicdott differs most from tools that focus on scheduling and invoicing. You build lessons from blocks: text, YouTube or Vimeo video, sheet music as PDF or MusicXML, Guitar Pro files, GrooveScribe drum patterns, chord diagrams and chord-over-lyrics sheets, ABC notation, audio and images. You assign a lesson to a student and it is waiting in their account at home. After each lesson you write a short lesson note with the homework, so next week you can see in ten seconds where you left off. See thelesson platform for the full list.
Teach Mode in the lesson room
Teach Mode puts the lesson on a second screen: a TV, a monitor or an iPad on the music stand. You pair the screen by scanning a QR code, then step through the lesson from your own device while the student follows on the big screen. No more crowding round a laptop or holding your phone up to a nine-year-old.
Practice between lessons
Students press "I practised this" on a lesson or exercise and earn XP for it, once per item per day. They can also time a practice session. You, the teacher, score how far they have got on a simple scale from "still needs practice" to "can apply it". The assessment stays with you; the motivation stays with the student. Read more on the practice tracking page, or inwhy students don't practise.
Parents and messages
Parents get their own login showing the timetable, lessons and progress, and can message you from there. If two siblings learn with you, the parent sees both under one login. Students can use "Ask your teacher" to send a question, with a short video if they are stuck on a passage. That keeps your studio separate from your personal WhatsApp, which matters more than it sounds. Seewhy WhatsApp is not a student tracking system.
There are also free tools your students can use without an account, such as themetronome, the tunerand slow down audio.
Studio admin: what Musicdott does and doesn't do
People searching for "music teacher admin software" often mean two quite different things. So, plainly:
| Task | In Musicdott? |
|---|---|
| Student and parent details, lesson arrangements | Yes |
| Timetable, holidays, make-up lessons | Yes |
| Lesson content, lesson notes, progress reports | Yes |
| Practice log, teacher scoring, XP and badges | Yes |
| Tracking which lesson fees are paid, reminders, receipts, CSV export | With the Manager add-on (€19.95/month) |
| Numbered invoices, card payments, direct debit | No, use your accounting or payment software |
| Tax returns, VAT, year-end accounts | No, that belongs with your accounting software or accountant |
For most independent teachers on a fixed termly or monthly fee, the split is simple: Musicdott for everything around the lesson, accounting software for the money. If you are still deciding what to charge, readwhy low rates can be expensive.
Pricing for an independent teacher
The Standard plan is €29.95 a month excluding VAT, for 1 teacher and up to 25 students. If you have more, you pay €4.50 per block of 5 extra students. As soon as Pro (€49.95, up to 3 teachers and 75 students) works out cheaper, Musicdott moves you across automatically. The first month is free and there is no annual contract. Prices are in euros because Musicdott is an EU company; your data is stored in the EU and adata processing agreement is included, which helps if you teach in the UK, Ireland or elsewhere in Europe. Everything is on the pricing page.
For your instrument too
Musicdott started in a drum school, but teachers of many instruments use it, whether they prepare students for graded exams such as ABRSM, Trinity or RSL or teach purely for enjoyment. See examples fordrums, piano,guitar, voiceand violin.