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An electronic music community in your school?

While looking online for information on MAX/MSP patches I came across an online electronic music community. We don’t often hear about computers being used as instruments to perform in public schools and when it comes to electronic instruments we are usually referring to electric guitars, basses and keyboards. One of the topics I find myself returning to in this blog is the use of technology to go beyond what we have traditionally done in public school music programs. When I… Read More »An electronic music community in your school?

Pre-mixing Rjd2

 Pre-Mixing Rjd2 I’m a big fan of musicians allowing people to remix their music. Hip Hop musician Rjd2 is currently allowing people to pre-mix his music. Unlike a remix in which one works on a piece of music already created, Rjd2 has provided people with samples from a track yet to be released and inviting people to create their own music from the samples. Rather than providing loops he has provided samples as hits. It will be interesting to see… Read More »Pre-mixing Rjd2

Pitch Shifting Pop Songs….

Both digital and analog pitch shifting have been used for years by musicians to alter the sound of original musical material. Be it Ross Bagdasarian’s recordings of “The Chipmunks” , DJs using pitch shifting on a turntable to speed up or slow down a record in order to make it sync up with another record, or someone composing on a computer using digital pitch shifting software, the technique is widely used across musical genres. One recent application of pitch shifting… Read More »Pitch Shifting Pop Songs….

Living Composers and New Music for students

Composer Belinda Reynolds, a member of the common sense composers collective, is doing the kind of work I was thinking about when I posted about contemporary music and music education a couple of weeks ago. Her recent article on Newmusicbox “Writing Music for Young Players” offers a refreshing and promising perspective on the creation of original music for youth. It would be wonderful if her perspective became a trend (as it was at one point in the 60’s and 70’s)… Read More »Living Composers and New Music for students

Technology in music education in the eschool news

The company eschool recently featured an article on some ways technology is being used in music classrooms. The article mostly focuses on several software titles that are commonly used in music classrooms that make use of computers and software. In my own classroom my 6th and 7th graders are just starting to make use of FLstudio to create music. One great thing about the software is how it works so well with the way I teach my students how to… Read More »Technology in music education in the eschool news