🔗 SoundCloud, Which Rose to Stardom on Indie Talent, Lays Off 173

SoundCloud, Which Rose to Stardom on Indie Talent, Lays Off 173: 

Not long ago, SoundCloud was one of the fastest-growing and most influential players in the streaming business. Now it is shrinking, and faces an uncertain future in the rapidly consolidating online music market.

On Thursday, SoundCloud announced that it was laying off 173 employees, about 40 percent of its work force. The company will also close its offices in London and San Francisco, concentrating its business in Berlin and New York.

Note: this article is a couple of weeks old now.

SoundCloud is a brilliant service, essential for new and upcoming artists to be discovered, and perfectly applicable in a music education setting for sharing projects. It is great for hundreds of other things too, including podcasting, though my own is not hosted there. I am not sure what the solution for SoundCloud is but I would hate to see them go. If they do, I would be curious if someone could think up a more disruptive and pervasive model for an audio based social media platform.

🔗 Ethan Hein - Teaching Myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live

Ethan Hein - Teaching Myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live:

Gorgeous though the chaconne is, my enjoyment has been hampered by my inability to figure out the rhythm. All classical performers insist on doing extremely expressive (that is, loose) timekeeping. I don’t have the sarabande rhythm internalized well enough to be able to track it through everybody’s gooey rubato. Bach’s rhythms are complicated enough to begin with. He loves to start and end phrases in weird spots in the bar–the very first note of the piece is on beat two. So I needed some help finding the beat. A chaconne is supposed to be a dance, right? Bach wrote those note values the way he wrote them for a reason. Did he really want performers to assign any length they felt like assigning them? My gut tells me that he didn’t. I suspect that he probably played his own music in tempo, maybe with some phrasing and ornamentation but still with a clearly recognizable beat. I imagine him gritting his teeth at the rubato that modern performers use. Maybe that’s just me projecting my own preferences, but this sense comes from listening to a lot of Bach and performing some too.

So, I wanted to hear someone play the chaconne in tempo, just to hear how it works. And since no one seems to play it that way, I finally went and got the MIDI from Dave’s JS Bach MIDI page and put it into Ableton Live. I added a bunch of triple meter Afro-Cuban drum patterns to help me feel the beat, and had them enter and exit wherever I heard a natural section boundary in the music.

My personal favorite way to enjoy this piece is by performing it on vibraphone, but this is cool too. :)

🔗 Best Music Technology Books for Teachers | Midnight Music

Best Music Technology Books for Teachers | Midnight Music:

I love buying books – both digital and paper – especially when they are relevant and useful. Here are a number of music technology in education books I recommend. I own almost all of these books and they contain excellent ideas for music technology curriculum integration.

I am honored that my book is on the list. Definitely check out the link. Some of these books are epically good, especially if you teach a music technology subject. Others, like mine, are suitable for a music teacher of any subject.

🔗 Noteflight as a DAW | The Ethan Hein Blog

Noteflight as a DAW | The Ethan Hein Blog:

Notation software was not originally intended to be a composition tool. The idea was that you’d do your composing on paper, and then transcribe your handwritten scores into the computer afterwards. All of the affordances of Finale, Sibelius and the like are informed by that assumption. For example, you have to enter the notes in each measure in order from left to right. If you’re copying from an existing score, that makes sense. If you’re composing, however, it’s a serious obstacle. I can’t speak for all composers, but I’m most likely to start at the end of the bar and work backwards. If I want to put a note on the last sixteenth note of the bar in the MIDI piano roll, I just click the mouse on that beat and I’m done. Notation software requires me to first calculate the combination of rests that’s fifteen sixteenth notes long. I’m told that Dorico has finally addressed this, and lets you place your notes wherever you want. Noteflight, however, follows the model of Finale and Sibelius.

This is a super fascinating explanation of the way modern students are learning to create music on a screen. And I can vouch for Dorico that yes, it deals with note input in a non-linear way, much the same way a MIDI editor functions.

🔗 Three synched performances of Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead

Three synched performances of Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead:

This is really awesome and interesting. Fun to note how much darker and expansive their mix becomes in the 2003 recording. Other than that, the change in Thom Yorke's vocals is most noticeable. Younger Thom has more control, is brighter, and clearer but I don't necessarily prefer that. Most of all interesting is how little their arrangement of this song has changed over the years. 

The 6 Best Automation Apps for iOS

UPDATE: I address my favorite automations and advanced workflows in a recent episode of my podcast. Listen and subscribe below…

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Interested in learning some apps this summer that will make your school year easier in the fall? Here are my favorite automation apps for iOS and a very brief explanation of each. Don't worry, I am planning on blogging about a few of these at length later this year. 

Note: All of these apps take a little bit of an investment to learn but the payoff is HUGE. You will find yourself doing things on your iPhone and iPad you never thought were possible. If customizing your own automations seems daunting, every one of these apps has a user-submitted gallery where you can download actions that other people have already made.

1. Workflow 

Download here

Workflow is an automation tool that allows you to string together various different actions so that they can be initiated with a single tap. The list of actions you can choose from is dense and many of them are easy to understand without any coding experience. You could do something as simple as open the camera, take three pictures, and generate a .gif file all in one tap (see below). This idea is novel of course. The real power is in figuring out how to take tedious actions that require multiple taps and apps and string them all up into one tap using Workflow’s rich list of integrated apps. One of my favorite Workflows looks into my Dropbox folder for a PDF of a seating chart, generates a copy, and opens it in Notability on my iPad, where I can scribble information about my student’s progress with an Apple Pencil. (See this workflow depicted below). 

Apple just purchased Workflow earlier this year. My hope is that this will allow users to better automate Apple’s own apps and even system level actions down the road. 

2. Drafts

Download here

Drafts is a clean and minimalist text editor that allows you to send text to other apps. Think of it as the starting point for all text on you iPhone or iPad. It functions like a simple, text based, note taking app, until you swipe left and reveal a series of actions you can perform on the text. You can perform actions as simple as posting your text as a Facebook status, Tweet, text message, or email. You can also create actions so complex that they can include JavaScript. One of my more basic Drafts actions takes a list of items I have typed in a rush and imports them all into my Grocery list, which is a list I keep in the Apple Reminders app. 

3. IFTTT 

Download here

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web service that allows you to create If-Then statements that trigger actions to happen in apps. First, the user logs into all of their connected services (Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Philips Hue Lights, Gmail, etc…). Then the user creates “Applets” where something that is done in one service can trigger something to happen in another service. For example, I could say “IF I am tagged in a Facebook post, THEN save that photo to my Dropbox. Or “IF I favorite that YouTube video, THEN save it to my Evernote notebook and tag it videos.” Of course, you can get really crazy with home automation apps and do things like “IF someone mentions me on Twitter, THEN flicker my Philips Hue light bulbs red.” 

4. Editorial 

Download here

Editorial is a text editor meant primarily for longer form writing. If you have a blog and an iPad, this app really shines. The app supports plain text, Markdown, and TaskPaper. Markdown is a syntax that allows users to create formatting like headings, bullet lists, tables, and expressions for the web without actually using HTML. For example, when I wrote this blog post, I did not click around in the toolbar to make each of the sections of this post into headings. Instead I just typed '##' in front of each of them, and my blogging service of choice, Squarespace (which interprets Markdown), automatically did the formatting for me. See below for an example.

TaskPaper is an amazing app for Mac that allows you to create checkable todo lists using only plain text. The syntax that the app uses also goes by the same name - TaskPaper. It is a really friendly way to work with checklists without taking your finger off the keyboard to format things. See the example below to get an idea what TaskPaper does. TaskPaper doesn’t have an iOS app, so the fact that Editorial works with TaskPaper files is great!

Much like Drafts, Editorial also has powerful user customizable workflows that you can perform on your text. You could have it post to your Wordpress blog in one tap, for example. My favorite Editorial Workflow takes a list I wrote in the TaskPaper format and uses it as a template for reoccurring projects in my task app of choice, OmniFocus. Certain projects that I perform over and over again contain similar tasks. For example, I always do the same fifteen to twenty things every time I put on a band concert at my school. I keep a checklists of these tasks stored in Editorial so that every time I have a concert, take a sub day, or go on a field trip, I tap one button in Editorial and it imports the list into OmniFocus, complete with due dates, flags, and tags. 

5. Launch Center Pro

Download here

Launch Center Pro is kind of like a springboard (the screen of apps you see when you unlock your iPhone) only it launches actions instead of apps. Actions can do almost anything. In fact, all of the apps in this post can be launched from within Launch Center. For example, I can publish my Workflows as buttons in Launch Center. I can create buttons in Launch Center that trigger IFTTT Applets. Launch Center actions can also launch apps, turn lights on and off in my house, take me into specific lists within my todo app, and more! 

Launch Center Pro took me a little more time to get my head around because it assumes that the user knows a little bit about something called x-callback-url. This is a protocol that most of the apps in this post take advantage of but don’t quite expose to the user. With Launch Center Pro, I felt like I really had to learn this system before digging in. Fortunately, MacStories has a great tutorial that you can read here.

6. Launcher

Download here

Launcher is a much simpler and friendlier version of Launch Center Pro. Setting up actions is very straightforward and a number of them are available as pre-built templates. Launcher lives entirely inside of a Today Widget, which is a special widget that you can invoke on iOS by dragging down from the top of the screen or by swiping to the right of your first screen of apps. Launch Center Pro also has a widget available that does much the same thing, but you might find that you prefer Launcher if the learning curve for LCP is steep.

🎙 New podcast episode: Working With Audio, featuring Will Kuhn

Check out the latest episode of my podcast here. 

Will Kuhn and I discuss our strategies for managing audio across all of our devices. We also speculate the future of pro audio and video editing apps for mobile. This was a really fun one to record and the articles in the show notes are especially interesting this week. Enjoy!

🔗 5 Podcasters Share How to Overcome their Biggest Audio Challenges

5 Podcasters Share How to Overcome their Biggest Audio Challenges:

The top audio challenge is to balance the music and the voice of our anonymous host to help the listener immerse in the story. I address it with a selection of iZotope tools. RX 6 is my go-to solution, and I also use Neutron, Alloy 2, and Ozone 7 to create the best sounding experience I can. The podcast is still being recorded in a spare bedroom somewhere in Australia, and there are a lot of challenges that come with that such as background noise, barking dogs, and neighbors. It's safe to say that without iZotope I would be lost!

Having invested in some of the Waves and Native Instruments audio plugins, I have never invested in iZotope. I only hear good things though. 

🔗 8 Ways to Spend a Lesson when your Student has not Practiced - Carlos Gardels, pianist

8 Ways to Spend a Lesson when your Student has not Practiced - Carlos Gardels, pianist:

Unless one has the luxury of teaching only the most devoted and driven of music students (or children of the most devoted and driven of parents), a reality that must be faced by teachers is that at the majority of lessons, week after week, month after month - the amount of practice we hold ideal for our students is simply not met. When I started out teaching, during such lessons I would plunder with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as the student plodded through their piece, asking "What note is that?" for what felt like the 33rd billionth time that week. (My apologies to my students at the time!!) As the years went on, however, I came to realize that - in a certain light - a student coming to a lesson with virtually nothing to show was an opportunity that could be capitalized on. Since we have a certain number of minutes to fill, we might well fill them to the extent our imaginations will allow. 

The following are a list of activities that have proven fruitful and interesting in most circumstances, and I hope that they will be able to aid you in dispelling the inevitably occasional boredom that accompanies our profession, and enrich the minds of any students who could benefit from them. I'll state that not all of the things on this list are mine - some have been adapted from ideas by wonderful colleagues I've had the pleasure to know from around the world (both in person and in cyberspace), and I've attempted to give due credit where merited. 

Some great tips in this list. Be sure to click the link. As is usual with articles like this, some of these are just good teaching practices in general. I actually include a little bit of “practicing how to practice” in every single lesson I teach, even if in small bite sized pieces and for short periods of time. I would add to the list that there are a lot of things you can do with equipment management and maintenance. And in the world of percussion (my area) there are infinite little niche instruments and styles to dig into that don’t always get weekly attention. Tuning a drum head, learning hand drum basics, auxiliary instrument technique, etc. all fall into my regular rotation of things to do when a student didn’t come prepared. It goes without saying that some of these essentials get taught no matter what, I just change their place in the sequence when a student is obviously not ready to progress on the weekly assignment.

Of course, these strategies, or any I have devised on my own, always come paired with the inevitable parent conversation afterwards, paraphrased rather cynically below:

“I love working with your child and I love making money, but it isn’t valuable for you are your child to practice in my basement while I check my email.”

🔗 OmniFocus, my task manager and probably most used app of all time, is now free to try on the App Store

I switch up my task manager every now and then to stay on top of what is out there, but for the vast majority of the past four or five years, OmniFocus has been my todo app of choice.

Free downloads: OmniPlan and OmniFocus for iOS are free to try - The Omni Group:

The first, OmniPlan 3.6, features a better dark theme and optimized inspectors, designed to reduce the number of taps required to manage your project. We’re also transitioning OmniPlan—and OmniFocus—to free downloads. Both updates contain a free 14-day trial; the Standard and Pro features are unlocked (and discounted for existing customers) via In-App purchases.