Weekly Recap: Learn OmniFocus, Teaching for MSDE, and New Online Store

The past eight or so days have been very exciting and busy for me. I have been engaged with a number of online learning opportunities and resources. Here is a recap:

Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks

Last week, I launched my store on this website. I am selling my first ever resource for teachers: Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks with Trap Beats underneath them. You can buy just the audio play-alongs, or the Logic and GarageBand projects I produced them in to edit them in any way you like.

You can find my store here, a blog post about them here, and watch the promo below.

Learn OmniFocus Workflow Guest

On Saturday, I was a Workflow Guest for LearnOmniFocus, a fantastic website and community where you can learn not only about the task manager application OmniFocus, but about other great productivity apps and the very nature of being a mindful and productive worker.

You can read about the appearance here and join the community here. There are educator discounts. The video of my session will be made available publicly and for free very soon. 

Links to two of my more recent blog posts about OmniFocus can be found below:

- Never Miss a Task, with OmniFocus Project Templates

- Staying on Top of Teaching Responsibilities With Omnifocus Perspectives

Creating and Using Virtual Performances in Your Music Instruction

I am teaching this online class for the Maryland State Department of Education with my awesome friend and colleague, Peter Perry. Peter's book, Technology Tips for Ensemble Teachers is third in the same series as my own, and is worth checking out.

You can learn more about the class here.

It has been a busy week or two but I am excited at these opportunities to share my love of technology with these different communities.

Making Just Intonation Play-alongs with Trap Beats for Band Rehearsal (Using the Yamaha Harmony Director and Logic Pro)

My band classes meet online using Google Meet once a day for 45 minutes. I am trying to keep them playing as much of this time as possible while slowly introducing the tech tools we will be using to submit work this semester.

Using the Yamaha Harmony Director, plugged in through Logic (along with some trap beats and 808 bass lines I recorded in with software instruments), I have started to make some play-along tracks to route through the Google Meet via Loopback.

This is kind of like a hardwired version of my Tonal Energy/Garageband workflow I have written about here before, only the keyboard hardware and pro editing software allow for much more precision.

They sound like this:

See below for the Logic Pro setup. I am using a drummer track for the trap beat, an 808 bass instrument as a software instrument to record the bass line, and the Harmony Director is being recorded live as an audio track. The HD is plugged directly into my audio interface to do this.

I decided to keep the bass part droning in the key area of the scale because that software instrument plays in equal temperament by default. It also sounds more like an authentic trap beat this way, where the bass line functions similar to a bass drum.

I already used this method in my first period class this morning and the band loved it. This is just the beginning. I whipped this together in a hot minute and anticipate making a variety of scale patterns in different musical styles.