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- Written by Chad Criswell
Imagine if you will the first day of school with a new group of students in your classroom. For most teachers their first task is to get the student making music either by singing or playing on an instrument and then, over time, teach them how to read music notation and relate the notes written on the page to their instrument. But what happens when the student can’t see the notes? If a visually impaired student was added to your classroom tomorrow how would you go about providing him with the potential to be just as successful as any other student?
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- Written by Chad Criswell
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Coming soon to a high school or middle school near you, a new curriculum for teaching about music that will supposedly be free, published by Scholastic , endorsed by MENC , and written in part by the former Bruce Springsteen guitarist, Steven Van Zandt.
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- Written by Chad Criswell
It seems like almost every day I find myself giving my beginning band students a recommendation of a free online metronome for them to use at home as they practice. A real one or even a mobile phone app is almost essential for any musician but the online variety works equally well, especially when faced with the financial issues many music parents have these days. If you know where to look you can even find online metronomes that do complex rhythm patterns and have most of the features of the expensive hand held units. So what free ones do I consider the best? Check out this quick list to find out and then bookmark your favorite.
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- Written by Chad Criswell
Neuratron's AudioScore Ultimate 8 seeks to automate a task that few musicians enjoy doing, that of transcribing audio performances of music into written music notation. The technology has come a very long way since its early iterations but is it solid enough to bother with? Read this review to find out!
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- Written by Chad Criswell
Finding decent, easy to play clarinet sheet music for free is not as hard as some might believe. The beautiful thing about the clarinet is that it can play sheet music written for almost any instrument as long as it falls within the playable range of the performer. In other words, a clarinet player doesn't have to play ONLY clarinet sheet music. If you are playing solo you can play almost any music that falls within your playable range. Focus on looking for sheet music for instruments that are also pitched in the key of B-flat like the trumpet, or tenor saxophone. Flute or piano music can in some cases can be played on the clarinet, making finding free sheet music a fairly easy proposition if you know where to look.
Read more: Free Sources For Downloading Clarinet Sheet Music
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Back in 2002 Google began to undertake a secret book digitization project of mammoth proportions. They partnered with some of the most prestigious universities in the world and began to digitize the tens of thousands of books that the held that were out of print and out of copyright. It was a lofty goal, aside from the technical hurdles that had to be overcome just to get through all of the books, but also to make them easily accessible for research and study over the Internet. They then went on to expand their digitization efforts to include even more books, and entered into agreements with publishers to make use of “orphan works,†books who are still in copyright but that are out of print and whose copyright owners are unable to be found. Basically Google wanted to make these orphan works available as well, and most people would probably say that this was a good thing at least on principal. For schools and educational institutions this would be huge, opening up vast amounts of hard to find knowledge and doing it in a way that would probably be very low cost or free. Not everyone liked the idea though, and maybe there are some good reasons why.
Read more: Why The Google Books Court Ruling Is Good (and Bad) For Schools
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- Written by Chad Criswell
For more than a decade now band directors have lamented the influx of ultra low-cost musical instrument brands being made overseas in China and in other countries. The complaints have, for the most part, centered around intonation problems, lack of durability, and difficulty in getting repairs done quickly. To have heard the complaints back in the late 1990's one would have thought that absolutely nothing good in the way of musical instruments ever came out of China in those early years.
Read more: The Myths and Realities of Chinese Made Musical Instruments
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Need a fun, seasonally appropriate motivation tool to help keep your students practicing? Although it works best if you do this during March to coincide with March Madness there's no reason why you can't use it at any time of the year. Special thanks to Elaine Menke, 5th and 6th grade band director at North Polk Community School District for passing this idea along. She uses this tool each year with her students but it works just as well with pianists or almost any music studio setup.
Read more: A March Madness Tournament Style Practice Incentive Idea
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There are dozens of web sites that allow you to download free sheet music, but only a select few offer downloads specifically for individual instruments such as the trumpet. The selection is further limited by the fact that in order for the sheet music to be offered for free, either it has to be out of copyright or the copyright holder must offer it for free of his own free will. In the case of the trumpet, good quality free sheet music is more difficult to come by than music for more popular instruments such as guitar or piano. In other words, with free sheet music you get what you pay for. Be ready for the fact that in a majority of cases the variety of music available for the trumpet will be very limited in terms of titles and in some cases the actual quality of the printed music itself may be less than ideal.
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- Written by Chad Criswell
With all of the new changes in SmartMusic including the new iPad app they released last winter I have been confused as to how exactly things are going to work for my students this fall with SmartMusic's change to a new per-user login system. I asked a bunch of questions to the SmartMusic guru's from a list of my own personal frequently asked questions about SmartMusic and how subscriptions will work between multiple computers or portable devices. Some of these answers may be explained in other places, but it took me so long to find the answers that I finally decided to write them all up in one place to hopefully help out any other teachers that are struggling with this. SmartMusic is a powerful program, but it does not always work the way you might expect it to.
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- Written by Chad Criswell
A musician's ears are the most important sensory organ they possess yet every day music students and their teachers irreparably damage that precious resource while participating in common everyday activities. We spoke with Mead Killion, Chief Technology Officer and founder of Entymotic Research and Joseph Pisano, Associate Chair of Fine Arts at Grove City College to dig into the realities of hearing loss by musicians and how we can use these tools effectively while still protecting our student's hearing as well as our own.