Virtual Piano Academy

Yes. You are required to pay for and purchase any music you wish to learn, and have a copy of it yourself. Sheet music and music books are not included in your lesson fees. Legally, any copyrighted material you wish to use must be purchased by you. We don't want anyone getting in trouble for breaking the law. We can recommend legal websites where you can download music, and link you to music stores where you can buy grade books etc in due course. We also have our own music library, that all of our students can access (and use/download sheet music) for free.

Yes. Any internal or accredited piano exams you wish to enrol in, will incur an additional fee. Exams are held externally through an accredited examinations board (such as the Australian Music Examinations Board). They have their own fees for each grade, which need to be paid upon enrolling for an exam. If you're interested in sitting for a piano exam, Virtual Piano Academy can enrol you on your behalf ($40 admin fee, which covers postage for your certificate). We also have the option of sitting for Internal Exams. Find out more about exams on our Help Centre.

Your credit card will be charged on the 15th of every month for your continued access to your teacher and website resources. Please make a note of this in your diary, and ensure you have adequate funds available for when your monthly payment is due. If your credit card payment is unsuccessful, you will automatically lose access to Virtual Piano Academy (you won't be able to log on) and your student enrollment will be marked as expired. If your credit card payment is unsuccessful, we will attempt to automatically re-charge your card 4 more times within 1 week from the date of the 15th. You will receive email notifications from us informing you of a credit card payment problem, giving you the opportunity to address the issue. If the issue is addressed during these credit card re-attempts and payment goes through as successful, your access to Virtual Piano Academy will be restored, and your account will not be marked as 'expired' any longer. You can continue as normal.

Yes! Seems like a silly question, but we've been asked it many times before! Depending on your current level, the type of piano required may vary. At the absolute minimum, your piano (or digital piano) must be full size (88 notes), with weighted keys and have a sustain pedal. If your piano is not full size, it is still possible to begin lessons, but you will have to modify some lessons (and you will probably have to take some pieces off your wish-list). If you don't currently have a full-size piano, you should aim to get one within the first 6 months of lessons. Students at Grade 5+ level, ideally should be learning on an acoustic piano (not a digital piano), unless your digital piano is fully weighted and touch responsive.

You can still take lessons with us, and pay us with your international credit card/debit card. All international payments (from students who live outside of Australia and who don't have an Australian bank account) will be converted from your local currency to Australian dollars at the conversion rate on the day of your transfer. This will obviously affect the amount you pay in your local currency and will mean that the payment you make for your lessons each month is likely to vary according to exchange rate fluctuations. $217 Australian dollars might equate to $155.28 US Dollars one month and $141.42 the following. You will see the name "VIRTUAL PIANO ACADEMY" on all your bank statements, so you know which payments you have made to us. International payments may incur a currency conversion fee, which will depend entirely on your bank and their specific international conversion fees. It's usually only a small fee, worth a couple of dollars. If you're worried about this, contact your local bank to find out what they are charging you for currency conversion.

All lesson fees are to be paid via a monthly recurring payment via credit or debit card on our website. No cash payments, cheques, wired funds, bank account transfers or payments via hugs are accepted.

We charge $217/month (beginners); $325/month (intermediate) and $429/month (advanced). You're probably thinking, if lessons are say, $75/week, shouldn't my monthly bills be $75 x 4 = $300? In a perfect world, where the modern calendar was made up of months that had exactly the same number of days in each, then yes, this would be true. But each month is actually made up of a different number of days. Some months have 30 days, some have 31 days, some have 28 days, and some months even have 5 weeks! Because we charge you monthly (and not weekly), we need to account for the differences in the number of days in each month. It's not possible just to take $75 and times it by 4, because there aren't 4 even weeks in each month. We use a solution that is common across many businesses using regular monthly payments, including Real Estate agents and workplaces paying employee salaries. The solution is to take your weekly lesson fee ($50/$75/$99) and times it by the number of weeks in the year. So, $75 x 52 = $3,900. Charging you that much up-front in one go for a whole year wouldn't be very nice, so in order to break it down into monthly payments, we divide this by 12 (the number of months in the year) = $325/mth. This now takes into account all those uneven months, and evens the payment out equally across 12 months! But don't worry...if you're not enjoying lessons, you're not locked in for the year. You can quit at any time (with one billing cycle's notice).

Lets say you get to the end of your monthly billing cycle and you tally up how many Weekly Showcase videos you've submitted that month...and you've only submitted 3, not 4. You start to think "Why am I paying the same fee this month when I've received less tuition?" In a perfect world, where the modern calendar was made up of months that had exactly the same number of days in each, then yes, you would have a case for being ripped off! But each month is actually made up of a different number of days. Some months have 30 days, some have 31 days, some have 28 days, and some months even have 5 weeks! So if you've only received 3 feedback videos this month, there's a good chance you'll receive 5 in a future month! Our billing model is also different to traditional lessons, where you pay up-front for 10 lessons in a term. We don't charge you "per video lesson"...we are charging you a monthly subscription to grant you ongoing access to all the resources on our website, which includes however many video-lessons fall within that month. We're not charging you on a per-video-lesson basis. We will not give refunds or provide additional video feedback if you decide to start tallying these up. That's not how our payment model works. Think of it like a Netflix subscription. You pay monthly to access all the content on that site. It's the same with Virtual Piano Academy. You pay a monthly fee to access everything on our Site, and you receive personalised video feedback once a week (despite where that falls in the billing cycle).

You can leave Virtual Piano Academy at any time, with one monthly billing cycle's notice. For example: if you cancel lessons on the 12th of March, you will be charged on the 15th of March for one more month of lessons. Your lessons (and access to the website) will cease on April 15th, and your credit card will no longer be charged. If you cancel after you have already made payment for the month (say, on the 17th of March), your credit card will still be charged again on the 15th of April (for one more billing cycle), and you will cease lessons (and your payments will stop) on the 15th of May. Please take this into account when cancelling lessons.