COVID-19 forced extreme measures in cities worldwide, including school shutdowns and limited social contact. Semi-structured interviews with 14 Israeli music teachers were conducted to expose the challenges of teaching musical instruments and vocal during social distancing, focussing on struggles and technical challenges, teacher-student relations, and creative leveraging. The study explores solutions or advantages to online teaching offered by the participants' experience, while also stressing advantages of face-to-face lessons, which could have been taken for granted. Music educators who participated in the study reported that the pandemic forced them to accommodate teaching methods, demonstrations, and physical guidance, which required reshaping to online communication; latency and poor sound quality required compromise and adjustment. They shared perceptions of online learning, coping methods, creative approaches, attentiveness to students, temporary solutions to technical problems, and forward-looking insights. The role of the teacher as a source of empathy and human connection was highlighted, as was the need for face-to-face, intimate lessons. Findings indicate that online music lessons enable creative methods that may enrich future post-pandemic lessons, but that their positive effect on the learning process is of a short-term nature. The study's limitations include teachers' nationality, and future research could examine cultural and gender coping differences.