Music Instruction must come into the 21st century

With many music programs in schools, the need to integrate 21st century technology components into the curriculum have become paramount. For a musician, we currently can create, edit, produce, and distribute music from our own computer stations using computer technology as a vehicle for creating a marketable product for the music community. In the past, we have had to visit a live performance in order to experience art. Now, we can use the computer to create our own musical field trips. This software will allow a new generation of young music composers, singers, and players opportunities to interact with music.

In music production, software such as Finale and Sibelius are the industry standards. There are less expensive versions of software that can be used to create and edit music. Musescore is an open source music writing program that can be used to get you introduced into electronic composition. As with any software program, there needs to be some learning time involved with how to navigate and create your scores. Finale makes "Notepad," which for less than a nice evening meal at a restaurant, allows the user to start creating their own music. Finale and Sibelius both allow realtime performance input via midi, mouse, or note name via the computer keyboard. The trick for real time performance is the quantization settings. It is quite tricky to play in perfect time, so editing your recorded performance will be in order in most cases. As with learning anything that is new for us, it seems difficult at first, yet with repeated practice and repetition, it becomes easier. Many of the tools are very powerful, once you learn to use them. This can be saved, and then the software will create a recording of your composed work, which is a great benefit for copyright, as well as distribute the creation using webpages, blogs, and the Sibelius and Finale music sites as well.

In my experience, there are very few students who are exposed to this type of music immersion. We are busy teaching music literacy and performance skills for our students for the school and local community. The standard that Students will read and write music apply's here partially. Music creation software allows the students to focus on a best practice in learning music by writing it, editing it, producing it, and distributing it.

Garageband Ipad Application

Being a musician, portable recording and listening devices have been used for generations. Apple's Garageband application for Ipad has some pretty nice features for a portable mixing and recording device. First, you can create numerous musical related projects on it.

Podcasting is a snap on the application. You can pull in sounds from a prerecorded library on the tablet, or record your own. You set up your bumper music, record your podcast quickly, save it and take it with you to edit of complete. Then it uploads to itunes when you sync your Ipad.

The sampler can record any sound an turn it into a musical instrument. It reminds me of the composer that recorded frog sounds one summer night, and then created Christmas carols using the sample as a musical voice. Mix this track with more traditional instruments such as drums and bass, and you end up with a musical masterpiece.

Recording live voices and instruments is easy to do, however, the quality may be somewhat limited due to the very small size of the microphone. This can be edited and tweaked a little bit, yet for such a small mic, the recording quality is good enough to record your ideas and then improve them with a better mic on the Mac version of the App.

Apple has done a great job and allowing users to understand form in music by labeling Sections using a puzzle piece such as "A", "B", or "C" composers can now work entire segments of a musical idea without having to get bogged down in the music theory concepts that can be confusing to novice and younger musicians. Two part song writing, or three part song writing becomes easier to organize for the writer, and allows the composer to focus on one segment at a time while they develop their ideas.

This program allows a musician of any age to create, record, edit, mix, and produce their own music on a portable device they can carry with them and work when musical inspiration hits them. Can you imagine how more music Bach or Beethoven could have written with such an application.