🔗 Noteflight Learn Now Integrates with Google Classroom:

Noteflight Learn Integrates with Google Classroom:

Noteflight Learn offers direct Google Classroom integration! All student and teacher logins, classes, and assignments are seamlessly integrated, offering several advantages:

• Google login is automatically synced; simply login to Noteflight Learn using Google.

• Individual classes, schools, or entire districts can integrate with a single Noteflight Learn site.

• Google Classroom classes are mirrored as Noteflight Learn Groups, so sharing scores and assignments with classes is easy.

• Noteflight can create assignments in Google Classroom and students can turn in or mark as done from their Noteflight score.

This new integration looks fantastic! The list of reasons to subscribe to Noteflight just keeps getting longer and longer.

🎬 Ellicott Mills Middle School Faculty Recital 2017

Last February, my music team put on a Faculty Recital to raise money for our program. You can now watch the entire thing on YouTube. Aside from a fairly stressful week or two coming up on the date, it was fairly easy to put together. Note: we had a lot of parent support and leadership. It turned out to be a great way to share our passion and musicianship with our students, all while making money to support the program in the process. Nothing beats hearing your colleagues practice in the rare five minute gaps between classes, planning, and putting out one of the 600 fires that come up each day as a teacher.

🔗 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - NYTimes.com

More on the doom of SoundCloud…

At least the article ends with a little bit of hope.

If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - NYTimes.com:

SoundCloud’s fan base may soon learn this lesson the hard way. The service’s founder, Alexander Ljung, declined to be interviewed for this column, but after Chance the Rapper tweeted about his interest in saving SoundCloud, the men talked on the phone, which Chance reported was ‘‘very fruitful.’’ Ljung agreed, tweeting that for now, SoundCloud was ‘‘here to stay.’’ Whether SoundCloud can last another 10 years remains to be seen. But the moral of its struggle is clear: As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

🔗 Howard County Public School System Spotlight: Play it Forward

This is a video from the school district I teach in highlighting one of our middle school bands and their efforts to commission new works every school year.

Andy Spang, Director at Folly Quarter Middle School, is a fantastic educator, and I think all teachers in the performing arts can be inspired and learn something from what he is doing with this program.

🔀 My digital workflows featured in Teaching Music magazine this month

There is a new Teaching Music magazine out. Here is the cover:

Even more fun is what's on the inside! There is a two page article on using technology to be better organized. It features some of my Todoist, Notability, and Dropbox workflows. Also featured is the amazing Amy Burns, who explains how she is using the apps iDoceo and Seesaw in the elementary general music classroom.

It is totally worth checking out. Also, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers is featured in the recommended resources section of the magazine, along with the next book in the Prestissimo Series, Recording Tips for Music Educators, by Ron Kearns.

Check out some pictures below...

🎙 New podcast episode - Working With Video, featuring Kevin Eikenberg of Four/Ten Media

A new episode of my podcast was just released. Kevin Eikenberg joins the show this week to talk about working with video projects. Kevin’s work with Four/Ten Media is really great. They even produced the video trailer for my book, which you can watch here.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

🔗 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.