🔗 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - NYTimes.com

More on the doom of SoundCloud…

At least the article ends with a little bit of hope.

If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - NYTimes.com:

SoundCloud’s fan base may soon learn this lesson the hard way. The service’s founder, Alexander Ljung, declined to be interviewed for this column, but after Chance the Rapper tweeted about his interest in saving SoundCloud, the men talked on the phone, which Chance reported was ‘‘very fruitful.’’ Ljung agreed, tweeting that for now, SoundCloud was ‘‘here to stay.’’ Whether SoundCloud can last another 10 years remains to be seen. But the moral of its struggle is clear: As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

🔗 Howard County Public School System Spotlight: Play it Forward

This is a video from the school district I teach in highlighting one of our middle school bands and their efforts to commission new works every school year.

Andy Spang, Director at Folly Quarter Middle School, is a fantastic educator, and I think all teachers in the performing arts can be inspired and learn something from what he is doing with this program.

🔗 SoundCloud, Which Rose to Stardom on Indie Talent, Lays Off 173

SoundCloud, Which Rose to Stardom on Indie Talent, Lays Off 173: 

Not long ago, SoundCloud was one of the fastest-growing and most influential players in the streaming business. Now it is shrinking, and faces an uncertain future in the rapidly consolidating online music market.

On Thursday, SoundCloud announced that it was laying off 173 employees, about 40 percent of its work force. The company will also close its offices in London and San Francisco, concentrating its business in Berlin and New York.

Note: this article is a couple of weeks old now.

SoundCloud is a brilliant service, essential for new and upcoming artists to be discovered, and perfectly applicable in a music education setting for sharing projects. It is great for hundreds of other things too, including podcasting, though my own is not hosted there. I am not sure what the solution for SoundCloud is but I would hate to see them go. If they do, I would be curious if someone could think up a more disruptive and pervasive model for an audio based social media platform.

🔗 Ethan Hein - Teaching Myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live

Ethan Hein - Teaching Myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live:

Gorgeous though the chaconne is, my enjoyment has been hampered by my inability to figure out the rhythm. All classical performers insist on doing extremely expressive (that is, loose) timekeeping. I don’t have the sarabande rhythm internalized well enough to be able to track it through everybody’s gooey rubato. Bach’s rhythms are complicated enough to begin with. He loves to start and end phrases in weird spots in the bar–the very first note of the piece is on beat two. So I needed some help finding the beat. A chaconne is supposed to be a dance, right? Bach wrote those note values the way he wrote them for a reason. Did he really want performers to assign any length they felt like assigning them? My gut tells me that he didn’t. I suspect that he probably played his own music in tempo, maybe with some phrasing and ornamentation but still with a clearly recognizable beat. I imagine him gritting his teeth at the rubato that modern performers use. Maybe that’s just me projecting my own preferences, but this sense comes from listening to a lot of Bach and performing some too.

So, I wanted to hear someone play the chaconne in tempo, just to hear how it works. And since no one seems to play it that way, I finally went and got the MIDI from Dave’s JS Bach MIDI page and put it into Ableton Live. I added a bunch of triple meter Afro-Cuban drum patterns to help me feel the beat, and had them enter and exit wherever I heard a natural section boundary in the music.

My personal favorite way to enjoy this piece is by performing it on vibraphone, but this is cool too. :)

🔗 Best Music Technology Books for Teachers | Midnight Music

Best Music Technology Books for Teachers | Midnight Music:

I love buying books – both digital and paper – especially when they are relevant and useful. Here are a number of music technology in education books I recommend. I own almost all of these books and they contain excellent ideas for music technology curriculum integration.

I am honored that my book is on the list. Definitely check out the link. Some of these books are epically good, especially if you teach a music technology subject. Others, like mine, are suitable for a music teacher of any subject.

🔗 Noteflight as a DAW | The Ethan Hein Blog

Noteflight as a DAW | The Ethan Hein Blog:

Notation software was not originally intended to be a composition tool. The idea was that you’d do your composing on paper, and then transcribe your handwritten scores into the computer afterwards. All of the affordances of Finale, Sibelius and the like are informed by that assumption. For example, you have to enter the notes in each measure in order from left to right. If you’re copying from an existing score, that makes sense. If you’re composing, however, it’s a serious obstacle. I can’t speak for all composers, but I’m most likely to start at the end of the bar and work backwards. If I want to put a note on the last sixteenth note of the bar in the MIDI piano roll, I just click the mouse on that beat and I’m done. Notation software requires me to first calculate the combination of rests that’s fifteen sixteenth notes long. I’m told that Dorico has finally addressed this, and lets you place your notes wherever you want. Noteflight, however, follows the model of Finale and Sibelius.

This is a super fascinating explanation of the way modern students are learning to create music on a screen. And I can vouch for Dorico that yes, it deals with note input in a non-linear way, much the same way a MIDI editor functions.

🔗 Three synched performances of Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead

Three synched performances of Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead:

This is really awesome and interesting. Fun to note how much darker and expansive their mix becomes in the 2003 recording. Other than that, the change in Thom Yorke's vocals is most noticeable. Younger Thom has more control, is brighter, and clearer but I don't necessarily prefer that. Most of all interesting is how little their arrangement of this song has changed over the years. 

🔗 5 Podcasters Share How to Overcome their Biggest Audio Challenges

5 Podcasters Share How to Overcome their Biggest Audio Challenges:

The top audio challenge is to balance the music and the voice of our anonymous host to help the listener immerse in the story. I address it with a selection of iZotope tools. RX 6 is my go-to solution, and I also use Neutron, Alloy 2, and Ozone 7 to create the best sounding experience I can. The podcast is still being recorded in a spare bedroom somewhere in Australia, and there are a lot of challenges that come with that such as background noise, barking dogs, and neighbors. It's safe to say that without iZotope I would be lost!

Having invested in some of the Waves and Native Instruments audio plugins, I have never invested in iZotope. I only hear good things though. 

🔗 8 Ways to Spend a Lesson when your Student has not Practiced - Carlos Gardels, pianist

8 Ways to Spend a Lesson when your Student has not Practiced - Carlos Gardels, pianist:

Unless one has the luxury of teaching only the most devoted and driven of music students (or children of the most devoted and driven of parents), a reality that must be faced by teachers is that at the majority of lessons, week after week, month after month - the amount of practice we hold ideal for our students is simply not met. When I started out teaching, during such lessons I would plunder with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as the student plodded through their piece, asking "What note is that?" for what felt like the 33rd billionth time that week. (My apologies to my students at the time!!) As the years went on, however, I came to realize that - in a certain light - a student coming to a lesson with virtually nothing to show was an opportunity that could be capitalized on. Since we have a certain number of minutes to fill, we might well fill them to the extent our imaginations will allow. 

The following are a list of activities that have proven fruitful and interesting in most circumstances, and I hope that they will be able to aid you in dispelling the inevitably occasional boredom that accompanies our profession, and enrich the minds of any students who could benefit from them. I'll state that not all of the things on this list are mine - some have been adapted from ideas by wonderful colleagues I've had the pleasure to know from around the world (both in person and in cyberspace), and I've attempted to give due credit where merited. 

Some great tips in this list. Be sure to click the link. As is usual with articles like this, some of these are just good teaching practices in general. I actually include a little bit of “practicing how to practice” in every single lesson I teach, even if in small bite sized pieces and for short periods of time. I would add to the list that there are a lot of things you can do with equipment management and maintenance. And in the world of percussion (my area) there are infinite little niche instruments and styles to dig into that don’t always get weekly attention. Tuning a drum head, learning hand drum basics, auxiliary instrument technique, etc. all fall into my regular rotation of things to do when a student didn’t come prepared. It goes without saying that some of these essentials get taught no matter what, I just change their place in the sequence when a student is obviously not ready to progress on the weekly assignment.

Of course, these strategies, or any I have devised on my own, always come paired with the inevitable parent conversation afterwards, paraphrased rather cynically below:

“I love working with your child and I love making money, but it isn’t valuable for you are your child to practice in my basement while I check my email.”

🔗 OmniFocus, my task manager and probably most used app of all time, is now free to try on the App Store

I switch up my task manager every now and then to stay on top of what is out there, but for the vast majority of the past four or five years, OmniFocus has been my todo app of choice.

Free downloads: OmniPlan and OmniFocus for iOS are free to try - The Omni Group:

The first, OmniPlan 3.6, features a better dark theme and optimized inspectors, designed to reduce the number of taps required to manage your project. We’re also transitioning OmniPlan—and OmniFocus—to free downloads. Both updates contain a free 14-day trial; the Standard and Pro features are unlocked (and discounted for existing customers) via In-App purchases.