Had no idea that METT guest, Ethan Hein, had written this cool page for Ableton's website. It is worth checking out.
Many producers struggle with music theory. In this module, we make concepts like chords and scales intuitive using the MIDI keyboard, Push, and Live’s MIDI devices.
Composer and teacher, David MacDonald, returns for a discussion about the apps we use for notes, research, writing, and clipping data to find later.
Other topics:
App of the Week: Robby - Stream Deck Mobile App David MacDonald - Reincubate Camo & FiLMiC Pro
Album of the Week: Robby - Owane | Yolo EP Vol. 1 David MacDonald - Scary Pockets YouTube channel
Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
David MacDonald - Twitter | Website
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I am thrilled that Music Ed Tech Talk is sponsored by MusicFirst this month. What is MusicFirst? In their own words:
MusicFirst offers music educators and their students easy-to-use, affordable, cloud-based software that enables music learning, creation, assessment, sharing, and exploration on any device, anywhere, at any time.
MusicFirst Classroom is the only learning management system designed specifically for K-12 music education. It combines the flexibility of an LMS with engaging content and powerful software integrations to help manage your students’ progress, make lesson plans, and create assignments.
And for younger students, MusicFirst Junior is the perfect online system for teaching elementary general music. It includes a comprehensive K-5 curriculum, hundreds of lessons & songs, and kid-friendly graphics to making learning and creating music fun!
Whether you’re teaching remotely, in-person, or in a blended learning environment, MusicFirst will work with you to find a solution that fits your program’s unique needs. Try it free for 30 days at musicfirst.com.
This past school year, I piloted our district's General Music II class. It marks the first time in our school system where a middle school level music class has built off of a prior year of skill development. Along with this development, our school's Mac lab began to get phased out and replaced with Chromebooks.
I decided to invest in MusicFirst, a holistic, all-in-one, solution for teaching music with computers.
A small grant covered the cost of some low-end MIDI controllers, and my 8th graders were off! MusicFirst, and the integrated third party apps, blew open the doors. Suddenly we could compose notation with the clarity and creativity that Noteflight offers. Soundtrap, one of the digital audio workstations that you can bundle with a MusicFirst subscription, stores its content in the cloud, meaning students were never limited to the instruments or loops that happened to be installed on the Mac they sat down at that day.
To top it off, we were able to apply our piano skill from earlier in the semester to record our original parts into the computers. The fact that this software runs on the web means students can work on projects at home. It's fantastic!
In March, when schools shifted to an online model, MusicFirst suddenly increased in value. I honestly don't know how I would have taught my music class without it. Soundtrap kept students engaged in creating music once every week and collaborating on projects.
MusicFirst's content library is massive. You can download an entire course-worth of units and lesson plans from dozens of pre-built classes.
In my early curiosity, I downloaded MusicFirst's "Middle School Music Technology" class to my account and invited all of my students to it. I was able to easily drag and drop lessons and units from this course into dates on a calendar and have them appear as tasks to students. These lesson plans include clear instructions, engaging media, and assignments that link directly out to whatever software is required to get the task done.
For example, we spent some time learning the blues last spring. There is a unit in the pre-made music tech course that teaches students some blues basics. It starts with a lesson plan that has a pre-made playlist featuring artists like B. B. King. After listening to some recorded examples, it links students to a discussion task, where they can comment about the stylistic features of the music. Next, students move on to a lesson that explains the blues scale and links directly to a Soundtrap project, where the are tasked to record an improvisation using the notes of the blues scale. Saving their work in Soundtrap automatically saves it to the assignment in MusicFirst, where I can review and grade them all in the same place.
The pre-made content is a life saver if are teaching out of your content area and are feeling overwhelmed. Even if you are not, the content will speed things up for you. (Aggregating Spotify playlists, images, and instructions into a meaningfully structured lesson takes time, even if the ideas are already in your head!).
The course content is also fully customizable. In the blues example above, I wanted the improvisation assignment in Soundtrap to have a 12 bar bass line and shuffle beat pre-recorded, so that students felt like they were playing along to something. I was able to accomplish this, and saved a lot of time due to the instructions and embedded media having already been curated.
Give MusicFirst a try. It is such a comprehensive offering, that I am sure it can enhance your teaching! Click herefor more details.
These posts will never happen if I don’t make it fuss free. So here is it! With little introduction or fanfare, the ‘stuff’ that made up my year. My favorite albums, live shows, apps, and ‘things’ of 2018.
Next up, live music!
Hard to write about this one in few words but I promised myself this would be fuss free. My wife all but dragged me to this festival, affirming all year long that it would be worth the journey. My camping chops are a long way from my Eagle Scout years. Anyway, the memories outlast any annoyance I felt camping at a music festival.
Some of the highlights include:
Seeing Live From Here with Chris Thile recorded...well, live
Bela Fleck featuring Brooklyn Rider String Quartet (think Bartok meets late 20th century strings for string quarter and banjo)
Edgar Meyer and Christian McBride bass duet set
St. Paul and the Broken Bones
Sturgil Simpson (always killer)
Edgar Meyer and his son, George Meyer on the small stage
Hawktail on the small stage
I'm With Her, Nightgrass set (You can enter a lottery to get tickets to see certain artists perform at the local opera house in town. I'm With Her sounds stunning around a single mic.)
We saw them four times this year if you include three times at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. One of the most memorable of these performances was on the main stage where they debuted their new album, All Ashore, in its entirety. It is a beautiful record and my family will share really special memories of hearing it live with the crisp mountain breeze washing over us.
But perhaps one of the most memorable shows I have ever seen was later that night when Punch Brothers performed a Nightgrass set in town. The band member’s musicianship was on full display. And due to this intimate audience, (and a long weekend of performing tightly organized sets), they let loose a little. They were kicking back Manhattans, lengthening solo sections, and engaging in banter. Things that made their earlier performances memorable for me but that have since become less a part of their live show due to a lengthier song repertoire and wider audience to please.
Let me give you an example. During the solo section of a bluegrass standard, each member completely deconstructed the I-V progression. During the banjo player Noam Pikelne’s solo, he hinted at motif from a song on the new record (in an entirely different key and time signature), and Chris made a gesture to the band. Then somehow they morphed this small suggestion into the entire introduction of the other song, while the bass still wavered between I-V, ultimately transforming completely into a performance of of the entire song, back into a I-V progression, and into more solo’s. Chris Thile’s solo (equally ridiculous) somehow managed to transform into one of the Bach Violin Sonotas, which he performed in its entirety, followed by the band transforming that back into the head of the bluegrass tune they had originally started off with.
As an encore, Chris came out into the center of the audience with Sarah Jarosz, and they sang a few old folk songs together. Chris’s parents were in the balcony, seeing him perform at the festival for the first time together since he was a kid. At one point Chris called out to his father to sing one of the verses with him in harmony. I’m not crying, you’re crying. This was an easy top five-er for me, and a reminder of all the reasons I love Punch Brothers.
I am cheating by including this show. It happened right around the new year, but technically in 2017. The Bad Plus is another artist that has been with me for a while. I learned about them in a formative time of musical discovery, and while their sound has not really evolved in recent records, it was nice to see them on their last tour with Ethan Iverson playing piano. The show was bittersweet. On the one hand, they played a lot of old favorites I had not heard in a while. On the other hand, they seemed kind of done with one another.
See my tidbit on Gabriel Kahane’s record, ‘Book of Travelers,’ from my recent Favorite Albums of 2018 post. He played most of the album at this show. The venue, Jammin’ Java, was small and quiet. The upright piano was inconsistent and out of tune. I thought the beauty of Kahane’s songs might be disrupted, but this quirky and intimate situation made a perfect frame for the message of Kahane’s songs.
The Centennial High School Wind Ensemble was invited to perform at The Midwest Clinic this year. This is a point of pride for my teaching community because it takes place in the Howard County Public School System, the district in which I teach. More directly, my school, Ellicott Mills Middle School, is a direct feeder of students into Centennial. Having had the opportunity to work with a small few past EMMS students, and by having a private student of mine in the group, I take serious pride in the accomplishments of Centennial High School’s band program and their director, David Matchim. It was unreal to hear a high school ensemble play an hour of music at the level they did, and in December of the school year! Check out their wind octet below...
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Music theory, explained with Oreos
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