What's on my desk?

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Earlier this year, I wrote a guest post for the Club MacStories newsletter showing off all the technology on my desk. With permission from the editors, I am cross-posting that below.

This desk is in my home music studio in Maryland. I run a private percussion teaching studio out of this space and produce my blog/podcast Music Ed Tech Talk.

My 14" MacBook Pro is the core of my computing life. It goes with me everywhere, from this desk to my day job as a middle school band director. I teach out of four different classrooms. USB-C hubs at all of my desks allow me to have distinctive hardware setups specific to each room while maintaining continuity through the consistency of my macOS settings and apps.

My secondary monitor is an LG Ultra Wide. I don't love it. I originally got it as a cheap way to interact with my Mac mini (dominantly used to serve up Plex content and run a Homebridge server.) I have phased out the Mac mini and hope to one day replace this monitor with something nicer now that it is used with the MacBook.

When my school district moved to virtual learning last year, I wanted to upgrade my webcam. The Logitech C920 was one of the most popular options I was coming across, and it hasn't let me down yet. I have a snake arm from Amazon (link) that allows me to easily adjust the angle of the camera and the ring light behind it. The arm can bend the camera down to face the surface of my desk and show what my hands are doing during virtual classes, presentations, and live streams.

These M-Audio BX5a monitors were on sale ten years ago, presumably because red is a less popular color than black. I actually kind of like having an accent color. They sound balanced enough to reference the diverse musical projects I edit. They produce enough output for my students to jam along to recordings on drum set.

Because the studio monitors are my primary sound output, the HomePod mini is used mainly for controlling Siri. I often ask it to turn on the baseboard heaters (with the Mysa HomeKit thermostat), the lights, and a red light outside the door to let my family know if I'm recording.

The Focusrite Scarlet 6i6 is my current audio interface. It has just enough ins and outs to plug my MIDI and audio input devices into my computer while outputting sound to the studio monitors. I don't currently do any fancy recording down here beyond my podcast and student audition tapes (which only require stereo recording).

The AKG P420 is my favorite mic for generalized recording in its price range. It's a resonant and balanced condenser microphone. I honestly think it compares to some microphones up to double the price. I use it primarily for virtual class, presentations, podcasting, and in a pair to record student audition tapes in stereo.

My Audio Technica headphones are pretty old and junky (I couldn't even find a link to this model online), but their long life speaks to the quality of AT's gear. I sometimes plug my AirPods Max into the Scarlet if I am already wearing them.

My Lamy Safari Fountain Pen and Rhodia notebook are my entry point into the world of better-than-average writing tools, and I am open to learning more!

I love the feel and simplicity of Apple's Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse. It took some time to learn to use the trackpad on the left. Still, it gives me a powerful workflow where I can quickly make refined edits in audio software by zooming in and out of the project with my left hand while precisely manipulating content with the mouse.

I love my 12.9" iPad Pro! Sometimes I use it as a laptop at home and work. In my studio, I usually rip off the tablet and read full-sized sheet music on it using the forScore app. I also depend on the Tonal Energy Tuner, which is the most powerful app of its kind on the App Store and does not currently have a Mac version.

My Ableton Push 2 works primarily as a control surface for Ableton Live. It is a new addition, and I am overwhelmed by its potential. Ableton Live is a very advanced application, and the Push allows you to control almost all of its features with tactile, performable knobs and buttons. It makes the software feel like an instrument. You can use it to record note input, manage the tempo, trigger loops, edit samples, and more!

I play with music production for fun, but I also use the Push as a supercharged metronome when teaching private students. It allows me to get my eyes off the computer screen and focus more on the teaching because all the buttons can manipulate the app even when it isn't in the foreground.

I use a Stream Deck for all the same reasons MacStories readers might find it useful- live streaming, Shortcuts, and other automation. I also use it to navigate the deep menus and feature sets of Dorico, a music notation application.

Notation Central has pre-built Stream Deck profiles for major music notation apps available on their website (link).

The MicroKorg is a fun little synth that can be highly programmed to produce absolutely otherworldly audio. I also use it for MIDI note entry in digital audio workstations and music notation apps.

My electronic reference piano is a Korg Concert C-150, which I also use for MIDI note input. It's an electric upright piano from the 80s with the legs chopped off. A high school was going to throw it away in the early 2000s before I asked if I could have it instead. I like it because it has a flat surface for putting stuff on (like other keyboards).

On top of the Korg is a Roland Octopad SPD-30. This is a great electronic drum sampler. It has an excellent library of its sounds and can trigger note input in music software using my most comfortable input method (drum sticks).

Next to the Octopad is my Yamaha Harmony Director. It's a keyboard that plays sustained tuning drones and can easily switch between different tuning systems. The drones can be played through speakers, or in my case, be used to create play-along practice material for students (link).

Apple TV. I wish I could say I use this for something other than playing Sonic the Hedgehog while my kid naps.

Instruments! The desk is a fun command station, but it's really only the hub of my digital productivity and creativity. The real bread and butter of my professional life are the instruments I play and teach. Depicted here are my vibraphone, marimba, timpani, drum sets, snare drum, wind instruments, and other fun!

Reflections on the Drafts app, and their 10 Year Anniversary

One of my favorite and most depended-on apps of the past decade has been Drafts.

Developer Greg Pierce (who you can hear on this podcast episode) recently celebrated the 10 year anniversary of Drafts. I strongly recommend you check it out, even if you just use the free version.

In preparation the anniversary, Greg asked me if I could write some words about my experiences with Drafts. He featured some of my words in this promotional post, but you can read all of them below...

I remember a long road trip with my wife back in the spring of 2011. It was my turn to drive, and I was listening to the Mac Power Users to help engage my mind and stay awake. The hosts mentioned an app called Drafts that could take my spontaneous thoughts, organize them, and powerfully act on them later.

I was intrigued! When my wife took the wheel, I downloaded it immediately and began poking around. Never before had the utility of an app become so quickly apparent to me.

Of the many professional domains I juggle, my job as a middle school band director alone requires me to manage a lot of responsibility. I have to be a master teacher, performer, arranger, composer, conductor, data clerk, fundraiser, field trip planner, and more. During class, I am often managing the needs of 60 or more students in a room at once while trying to be a professional at all of those other things. Being able to tap the Drafts icon on my dock and quickly enter any thought that enters into my mind has been nothing short of life-changing. I used to be overwhelmed by my responsibilities, but through organization systems, and particularly Drafts, I have been able to take away the friction between the thoughts that grab my attention and what gets permanently saved in a computer. Drafts turns my devices into a second brain, and my rampant thoughts fade out of sight, out of mind.

The ability to perform actions on text is crucial for determining where a draft goes. Is it a message? A calendar event? A note? Task? Most of my Drafts become notes or tasks, and actions to save them as such come free with the app! But on top of this, the ability to design my own automations has made it easier to get thoughts out of drafts and into other apps on my devices, allowing me to be better organized FASTER, and to therefore have more free time to focus on the part of my job that matters: making awesome music, and connecting with my amazing students.

I love Drafts so much that I recommend it to everyone I know. I mentioned it in my book Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, I have interviewed developer Greg on my podcast and even once bought it for all of my administrators at my school as a holiday gift. It is really worth a try, whoever you are. Drafts is simple enough to be a no-nonsense, minimalist, note-taking app for the masses while remaining customizable enough that nerds can build their own tool with it. As an educator, I appreciate experiences with low floors and high ceilings. And Drafts is exactly that.

Communicating Student Learning Objective data to administrators with fancy Numbers charts

I would like to give a shoutout to Numbers, which remains an essential tool on all my Apple products.

It took minimal clicks to get some really fancy, legible, and engaging charts into my SLO data tracking project for the school year.

Listeners of my podcast will remember Ben Denne and I talking all about our Music Mastery Sequence, and the tool he built to track it. In his more recent podcast appearance, we followed up on this subject, explaining how we have moved away from FileMaker and towards other tools.

My current method for tracking student progress is a giant Numbers spreadsheet with clickable star icons for how many "stars" they earn on each performance. I am using Craft to give students more transparent, informal, and qualitative feedback about what they should be working on.

This same Numbers spreadsheet was able to pump out the above table, graph, and charts. Their graphical nature and intuitive ease allowed me to better understand my own shortcomings in this process and what resources, changes, and school supports I needed to make improvement. This helped me to construct a meaningful narrative in a recent SLO meeting.

I hope to cover Numbers and Craft in greater detail later on down the road, as well as my successes in teaching instrumental music performance at an individualized level. If you want more on this, I certainly recommend the hyperlinked podcast episodes above.

Pixelmator Pro 2.4 gets an update!

Pixelmator Pro 2.4 was recently released.

You can read more here. This version adds tons of new stuff, including color adjustments and effects layers.

Pixelmator Pro is always my recommendation for people who need a Photoshop-like tool, but without getting a degree in Photoshop or buying a monthly Creative Cloud subscription.

Pixelmator seems like it gets easier to use every update. It’s wild how much power they pack into an interface that is inspired by Photoshop workflows, but immediately accessible anyone who has used a personal computer.

My favorite features of Pixelmator Pro in recent years include:

• One-click machine learning feature which can remove things from the background or foreground, and sharpen low-quality images
• Shortcuts support (which can automatically batch edit images on my computer, generate my podcast show art, and more)
• It’s easy to use interface

Check it out on the Mac App Store.

Dorico 2.2 Out! - features tighter integration with the iPad file system

When Daniel Spreadbury joined the podcast recently he teased the release of "Open in Place” on the iPad version of Dorico. The feature is now out for public use and available on the App Store.

Prior to this release, you could open Dorico projects from the file system of the iPad, but then a duplicate copy was saved inside of the Dorico app, which would not save back to the same location without first exporting that duplicate copy back to the same place, resulting in two copies. With version 2.2 your files stored in the Files app (or your iCloud/Dropbox/Google Drive by extension), will open directly from the location you have saved them on another device, and save them back to that location when you close the project. These projects still conveniently appear in the Open Recent page of the Hub when you launch Dorico.

Once opened, Dorico files will generate a thumbnail preview of your project contents, visible right from within the Document Picker.

Open in Place has increased my use of Dorico on iPad immeasurably. On the Mac, I keep my projects in iCloud Drive by default, so now I simply open them from that same location on iPad, edit, and exit out of the project to save it back to the same location.

Syncing has been reliable throughout my testing. Dorico does not recommend having the same file open on two devices at the same time as you may get unintended duplicate copies. As Daniel mentioned in the episode, further iCloud support is coming that will improve Dorico’s handling of this problem, at least if your files are kept in iCloud Drive.

With Split View multitasking, I can now do my favorite workflow on iPad, which is to have forScore opened on one half and Dorico on the other. This allows for me to easily reference my music library when arranging music, recreating parts, or designing practice resources based on the literature.

Recent iPad feature updates have also included Split View multitasking and the ability to preview thumbnails of your scores in the Files or Finder app, which can be previewed using Quick Look. Between “Open in Place,” the multitasking, and thumbnails, my top Dorico feature requests have been met, and the iPad version has become a fully integrated part of my cloud-based computing workflow.

Project contents now have preview thumbnails. You can initiate Quick Look by pressing the space bar. This will allow you to preview the document more fully without opening the file.

You can read more about Dorico 2.2 in their blog post.

Microtuner by Ableton

Ableton released a Microtuner recently. I have had a lot of fun playing around with it using these Scala files.

Microtuner by Ableton:

Microtuner by Ableton is a MIDI device that lets you import, edit, and generate microtonal scales. Load scale files, create custom scales, and morph between tunings in real time – all with polyphony, MPE, and Lead/Follow modes to sync your scales across instruments.

One of these days, I'd like to make more Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks, and this tool very well might help me get the process done quicker.

Be sure to check out the demo songs in Ableton's blog post. Very cool.

Audio Hijack 4, Shortcuts, Podcasting Automation

Audio Hijack 4 is Here! | Rogue Amoeba Blog:

Today, we’re thrilled to unveil a major upgrade to Audio Hijack, our flagship audio recorder and processor. Audio Hijack 4 brings both powerful new functionality and powerful new interfaces, to make its ability to record any audio on your Mac more accessible than ever. With an absolutely ridiculous 107 new features, enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes, Audio Hijack has never been better.

Read on to learn more or just click to download Audio Hijack 4!

Audio Hijack is an essential tool in my workflow. I use it to do everything from recording my podcast to capturing audio from apps. It's sort of a Swiss Army Knife of audio utilities on the Mac. And today it gets better.

You can read the post from Rogue Amoeba above to get the full scoop. You can read my previous post on Audio Hijack to get a feel for how I use it. I also had Rogue Amoeba's CEO Paul Kafasis on Music Ed Tech Talk to talk about all sorts of creative ways to use their audio apps in the classroom.

My favorite new feature of Audio Hijack 4 is the Shortcuts integration.

I can now automate features of Audio Hijack by adding actions in my Shortcuts. One example of this is my "Podcasting" Shortcut which I trigger before I record my show (or go on Zoom calls).

This Shortcut...

• reminds me to turn off my fan (using the speak text action)
• tracks how long I record in the time tracking app Timery
• sets a reminder to turn back on the fan later in the evening
• opens Craft and Obsidian (where I keep my show outline and show notes, respectively)
• opens Zoom, launches the meeting, mutes my mic, and records the call (as a back up)

Now I can add Audo Hijack as a step. In the action above, I am having it automatically start running my "Input Device" session, which takes the audio input of my Scarlet 6i6 audio interface and records it as an AIFF.

This Shortcut also puts my devices into a Podcasting Focus mode which silences all notifications except the ones from my wife.

Tweetbot for Mac and iOS is the sanest way to use Twitter

Do you have a love/hate relationship with Twitter?

Perhaps you enjoy interacting with people from various circles all over the world, connecting professionally, and learning things from other music educators?

Perhaps you also hate the constant dumpster fire of negativity and hatred that can be seen on the service. Or, if you are like me, you are burnt out on algorithmic social timelines and would prefer to curate your own online experiences.

I'd like to recommend Tweetbot for iOS and Mac. It displays the tweets of the people you follow, in the order they tweet them. It has great mute filters, does not show ads, and doesn't show recommendations or "liked tweets." This is not to mention that it has a beautiful user interface.

Twitter used to not allow third party Twitter clients to do a lot, but this is recently changing. Tweetbot is a viable Twitter experience these days and does not lack any major features that I miss on a daily basis. And they are constantly iterating. Version 7 came out recently and adds statistics. You can read more about it here.

The Tunable Mac App is my Preferred Tuner on macOS

I have said a lot of positive words about the Tonal Energy Tuner app. Every day I yearn for them to release a Mac version of the app.

Playing just intonation tuning drones in combination with a metronome is one of my most common technology uses in the band classroom. Though I have a phone and a Mac wired into the sound system, my Mac is where I am most comfortable playing audio in class. In a few of my classrooms the Mac is my only device plugged into a sound system.

I'd like to give Tunable some love. Software developer Seth Sandler is killing it with this app. After speaking with him on the Music Ed Tech Talk podcast, he reminded me that there is a Mac version.

I have been using Tunable in my classes for the past few months and I really like it. It has great drones, metronome, multiple tuning systems, and design elements that make it feel like it lives on macOS.

My favorite calendar app Fantastical releases version 3.6 with "openings" and "scheduling" features

My calendar app of choice, Fantastical, released version 3.6 this week.

Fantastical is an amazing calendar app that works with numerous calendar and task services and packs tons of powerful features in a graceful user interface.

The version adds some huge productivity boosts. My favorite of which is a feature called "Openings" which, if you have ever used the service Calendly, adds similar function right into the app.

By setting up a few quick templates, I can now quickly reschedule a private lesson with a parent by texting them a URL. I give Fantastical a window of time; it looks at the free time in between my calendar events and provides the parent with a website that prompts them to choose an available slot. Their chosen time is then added right to my calendar. It is going to help me save tons of time!

There is a video of this feature in action below, and you can read about all of the new features in 3.6 here.

Fantastical has an aggressive subscription price for the premium version, but updates like this make me feel glad I can fund their continued development.