A Few Reasonable Words

“ One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. ”

     – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Happy New Year!

The most popular gift in the UK was the tablet. In the run up to Christmas, Apple reckoned that every 50 seconds an iPad was purchased online or in  the store. Kindles, Samsung and even the Tesco Hudl were flying off the shelves at similar rates. If Santa left an iPad under your tree, I’m recommending two apps. One is a utility app, the other a music app.

Documents, by Readdle, is the Swiss Army knife of the iPad. Basically, it’s a drag-and-drop interface connecting you to Box, Google Docs, iCloud, FTP, WebDAV (and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all!) You can make folders inside just like a computer. You can view and annotate .PDF files. You can view Office files, media and create text files. It’s a media player as well. You can connect via WiFi or USB and drag and drop between all your online accounts. Once you try it, it will soon become your go-to app for moving documents on and off of your iPad.

“What’s the cost?” I hear you say, “I bet it is expensive!” Well, you will be wrong. Documents is free. Like Apple offering the iLife suite free. If you bought a new iPad after 1 September, 2013, you can get Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie and  iBooks for free and use them in the cloud with your Apple ID in your iPad, iPhone and your Mac. Not to mention Mail and Calendar.

The music app is a chord-based sequencer with an intriguing twist. Gone are cheesy synths, synthesized drums.  SessionBand is world’s only chord based audio loop app. Recorded by London’s top session musicians, each volume as packed with musical fine touches. SessionBand comes in six “flavours” SessionBand Blues - Volume 1,
SessionBand Rock - Volume 1,
SessionBand Jazz - Volumes 1 & 2,
SessionBand Acoustic Guitar - Volume , and1
SessionBand Piano - Volume 1.

The interface is simple. I’m going to load up a demo song “The Girl Form Brazil” from the Jazz Volume 1 app. You can write your own changes as well. You tap on the “Play” button. You will probably want to hook up external speakers to your iPad.  Fifteen styles in each volume, ranging from Ballad, 12/8, Slow Swing to Bossa Nove, Fast Latin, Up Swing and Afro Jazz.  Volume 2 the palate gets extended to Slow Funk, Poinciana, ECM, all the way to Reggae, Boogaloo, 5/4 and 7/4!

Tap the “Write” an you enter into a mode where you tap on the end of the bar and insert chord by tapping on the keys of a piano.  Repeated tapping make the chords advance through the options. Pinch two fingers to shorten the chord or expand to make the chord longer. Elapsed time, fill, ends are all there for your asking. Transpose for the whole song – not pitch-shifted but the whole loop is substituted.

Tap the “Mixer” and the five-track mixer is brought forward offering individual volumes for the bass, drums, piano, lead instrument and metronome. You can record with or without automation. Go back to the main screen, tap “REC” to arm, tap “1,2,3” for lead-in bar, tap “Play” and you are recording. Press “Export” to save. Press it again and choose “Export” and choose from “Live Recordings” or “SessionBand Tracks”.  You are presented with AudioCopy, Email. AudioCopy is for GaragBand or other synthesizers who support AudioBus files. Email gives you and option of Audio Only, SB File and Both.

“What’s the cost?” I hear you say, “I bet it is expensive!” Yes, Virgina, it costs, but it not expensive. It’s available for iPhone £1.49 - £5.99 and iPad £1.99 - £5.99. SessionBand Jazz as £5.99 per volume, but there’s a massive 16,000 loops to play with. SessionBand Blues is £2.49.  Warning from SessionBand – don’t buy if your device is older than an iPad 2 or and iPhone 4S.

I guess it’s time for closing. Documents, by Readdle for organization and SessionBand for music.  That’s a fine start to the year.  See you next time!

SessionBand http://www.sessionbandapp.com

Documents http://readdle.com/products/documents/

Dreams and Hopes

“Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn’t that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?”
Roger Ebert, (1942-2013), his last review of “To the Wonder”

In spite of the weather here in England, the end of school is in sight. No ends of lyrics have addressed this event. Whether you subscribe to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” or The Happenings' “See You In September” or even Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”, the closing of the school year evokes mixed memories. Your mission, should you choose to accept Mr. Phelps, is composed of three parts:

Reflect: There are a lot of questions you can ask – it might be tough going. Søren Kierkegaard remarked, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Remember the goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the year? Reflection shouldn’t beat you with your own rods. Take a good look, a realistic look and judge how you are doing. Did you the meet them easily or were you frustrated in not achieving the goal? Can you set better goal for next year? Can you set more challenging goals next year? Can you set more realistic goals for you student and your self?

Re-create: Go wild. Explore. Travel. Paint. Dance. Read. Sketch. Take photographs. Whatever you do to re-create that joyful self. Be creative. Compose. Arrange. Sing. Play. Master that particular nasty spot in the piece that you’ve always wanted to play or sing.  No more attendance, fire drills, telling offs and dressing down. Refresh your spirit.

Re-juvenate: Wait a minute – doesn’t re-create mean the same thing? There’s a sting in the tail. Literally take another shot a being “youthful” and learn a new skill from the start. It is very hard to learn something ab initio. Learn a new instrument. Learn a skill. Learn a piece of technology. Learn a new sport. Get your perspective aligned with your students. Try a different style of performance on your principal instrument. Try bluegrass instead of baroque; art songs instead of jazz.  Experience the thrill of conquering new heights and challenges. Chaucer said, “And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”  Try your “inner student” on for size.

Teaching, like baseball, has its sages. I leave you with the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.”

Remember the three steps of your mission and have fun! See you next year!

Play To Learn and Grow

In a very short time technology has changed an entire generation’s behavior radically, and it behooves all of us who are not from that generation but whose daily life involves interaction with them, such as parents and teachers, to learn as much as we can about the new behaviors.

(If you are someone who doesn’t think behavior can change that fast around technology, try to think back to how quickly, when telephone answering machines first appeared, the norm went from “It’s rude to have an answering machine” to “It’s rude NOT to have an answering machine.)

Marc Prensky
The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native 3

Many of us are reminded daily that we are strangers in a strange land. We approach the field of play in the classroom from a different direction than our students. What is normal to us is quaint to them; what is normal to them is unknown to us. Luckily for us, we have a weapon that many of our colleagues in other disciplines lack: our work as performing musicians has a strong collaborative element to it. We ask our students to work together, share, criticise themselves and their peers and synchronise sounds created by various anatomic or mechanical means to achieve a collaborative result. The group can achieve what the individual cannot.

Likewise we have a strong individual component to our subject where there are levels of performance - benchmarks for want of a better word - against which performers can measure their technical and artistic prowess as they progress in their studies. There are competitions, festivals, master classes and more where students perform for a "master teacher" and are critiqued and helped to work through problems that may be holding them back in the advancement of their studies.

Or discipline also contains the "experimental" branch where an individual sets themselves against the task of transcribing what they hear in their head to paper, or analog waves or bits. Tonalities, tunings, harmonies, melodies; combinations of instruments. voices and, well, who knows what in order to create "in the air" what previously only existed in their imagination.

How lucky we are in this digital age, that many of the tools of our trade have become ubiquitous objects in the household and school environment! Our digital native students can't imagine not being able to use a sequencer with realistic sampled sounds to program a piece of music. Creating music tracks and burning CDs, editing and creating DVDs, stop-motion animation - all with edited original soundtracks or mixes and mash-ups of their favourite music. They think nothing of creating formulae in spreadsheets to simplify their calculations and explore "if, then" questions. Digital images, instant messaging, blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Meebo, Twitter are the ways that they communicate. The mobile phone that we digital immigrants struggle with, is the everyday tool of choice for the digital native: camera, SMS, for starters and the more advanced phones include GPS, radio, Internet browser and access to the normal "office" style applications. We digital immigrants buy CDs - our digital natives download, usually from a Peer-to-Peer source or a Torrent that is outside the normal legitimate channel of distribution that the record companies have created.

We ask them to record reflections and progress on worksheets: they would prefer to have a wiki where the entire group can reflect and interact as well as individuals have individual pages where they can "soliliquise" and accept comments from their friends. Our concerts are posted on YouTube and the performing groups organise sites on Facebook. I am inspired by my fellow teachers who have taken the first steps into social networking and used Facebook to organise reunions and school celebrations. I am also inspired by, and more than a little envious of, my colleagues who tell me that the audition materials we supply are posted on their school provided web sites and the students download them, record the audition, evaluate their own performance and submit their best efforts back to their teacher via E-mail or the department shared space.

What is the end of year message in al of this? Ah, grasshopper. As the spring turns into summer and we begin to de-compress and re-create, all of us digital immigrants need to take a little step out of our comfort zone and explore some of the technology around us. If you have an interactive whiteboard, prepare a set of flipcharts for a favourite lesson. If you don't have an interactive whiteboard but have a projector or beamer in your room, prepare some PowerPoint or Keynote presentations of a lesson that you teach. Explore that mobile phone. Grab the digital camera and take a photo essay of your your holiday and use one of the free or inexpensive photo editing tools or web sites such as Picasa or Flickr to share your images with your friends, family and the world. Open up that copy of Garageband, Acid Pro, Cubase, Sibelius, Finale or whatever new music tool you have and play. That's right. Play. Arrange a song, write the Romantic Composer Rap, score that arrangement that you've always heard in the the back of your head.

Enjoy exploring the technology and enjoy some of the "new ways" of approaching our subject.