Here is the first of a few "virtual band" videos I have been editing over the past few weeks. I am proud of my students for their hard work in unfamiliar conditions. I enjoyed making this a lot, but for different reasons than I enjoy teaching band.
I really refined my audio and video editing workflow for this. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a video post on how I made this using Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and handful of other indie Mac apps.
Today I am thrilled to feature my student Bruce Perry on the blog!
Bruce just finished up his senior year at Resevoir High School in Howard County, Maryland.
This past spring, Bruce was accepted into the University of Maryland, College Park, where he will be studying percussion.
Check out his audition tape below.
This time last year my private student, Ben Giroux, was off to start his first year at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD. Today, his fantastic playing can be seen on the βLessonsβ section of my website.
When I redesigned my website four years ago, my original intent was to feature all of the audition tapes I have recorded and produced for my college bound private students. For those entire four years only one of these videos has been posted while numerous others sit in untouched Final Cut Pro projects.
Well, no more! I am slowly working through these projects, and today you can check out Benβs college audition tape on my Lessons page. Or just play the video below.
As of Thursday, Google Drive Now Supports iOS 11βs Files app. Now that Google Drive and Dropbox support the new iOS 11 Files app, you can view all of your documents under one roof. This integration means that using third party cloud drives feels native to the iPad, something we have been able to experience with the Finder on macOS for years. You donβt ever even need to launch the Google or Dropbox apps again. I made a shoe video demonstrating the utility of this integration.
Last February, my music team put on a Faculty Recital to raise money for our program. You can now watch the entire thing on YouTube. Aside from a fairly stressful week or two coming up on the date, it was fairly easy to put together. Note: we had a lot of parent support and leadership. It turned out to be a great way to share our passion and musicianship with our students, all while making money to support the program in the process. Nothing beats hearing your colleagues practice in the rare five minute gaps between classes, planning, and putting out one of the 600 fires that come up each day as a teacher.
In the second most recent episode of my podcast, Paul Shimmons and I discuss apps for working with PDFs. One of the apps I mentioned, PDF Converter by Readdle, is an excellent solution for for turning content in apps into PDFs. PDF Converter turns a variety of data (websites, articles, documents, photos, etc.) into elegant PDFs and is available as an extension on iOS so it can be accessed from within any app. See the video below.
The result doesnβt look incredibly elegant in this case because PDF Expert struggled with the ads on the website. In most cases, it does a decent job and even with stuff like this web article, I now have a text searchable copy of that article on my computerβs hard drive.
forScore 10 adds a feature that allows you to add indexes to large scores by uploading a CSV file that links the song titles to specific page numbers of the PDF. This is especially useful for real and fake books that have hundreds of songs all associated with one giant file. A competing score app called unrealBook pioneered this feature to my knowledge. I used to keep it installed on my iPad just for that one feature, but now, I can do everything I need to in forScore.
I created a video tutorial of how to accomplish this. See below:
You can find the index files I reference in the video here.
I donβt have a full technical understanding of how this feature works, so I tried to avoid explaining what is going on with the file. I think I am explaining it well enough that if you imitate my steps, you will be successful in most attempts. If there is anything unclear, let me know and I will try to clarify it in a future post.
One thing I did not cover in the video are the page offset settings at the bottom of the index settings screen. I have attached about 10 indexes to my forScore library and only twice did I need to use those buttons. In some cases, the CSV score may be offset by a few pages leading to the index not linking you to the correct songs. In these cases, I simply fiddled around with the plus and minus buttons until I got the result I wanted. I would be happy to redo the video with that step included if enough people are interested.
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