🔗 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. 

🔗 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.

🔗 Astounding video from the Starling Academy of Music

Watch here!

Just click the link above. I am breaking my belief of absolutely detesting Facebook video and their agitation of the open web. I hate that this video is not available on YouTube and must be viewed on Facebook, and I hate that I cannot even embed it in this post, but I wouldn’t share it if it wasn’t so good. Just check it out! I did not take a breath until about half way through the video.

🔗 The Washington Post - Why my guitar gently weeps

This article is fascinating. It also comes at an interesting time for me since I recently, and for the first time ever, purchased a six string electric guitar.

A few quotes...

The Washington Post - Why my guitar gently weeps:

In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month.

What worries Gruhn is not simply that profits are down. That happens in business. He’s concerned by the “why” behind the sales decline. When he opened his store 46 years ago, everyone wanted to be a guitar god, inspired by the men who roamed the concert stage, including Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page. Now those boomers are retiring, downsizing and adjusting to fixed incomes. They’re looking to shed, not add to, their collections, and the younger generation isn’t stepping in to replace them.

Gruhn knows why.

“What we need is guitar heroes,” he says.

...

But there were already hints of the change to come, of the evolutions in music technology that would eventually compete with the guitar. In 1979, Tascam’s Portastudio 144 arrived on the market, allowing anybody with a microphone and a patch cord to record with multiple tracks. (Bruce Springsteen used a Portastudio for 1982’s “Nebraska.”) In 1981, Oberheim introduced the DMX drum machine, revolutionizing hip-hop.

So instead of Hendrix or Santana, Linkin Park’s Brad Delson drew his inspiration from Run-DMC’s “Raising Hell,” the crossover smash released in 1986. Delson, whose band recently landed atop the charts with an album notably light on guitar, doesn’t look at the leap from ax men to DJs as a bad thing.

“Music is music,” he says. “These guys are all musical heroes, whatever cool instrument they play. And today, they’re gravitating toward programming beats on an Ableton. I don’t think that’s any less creative as playing bass. I’m open to the evolution as it unfolds. Musical genius is musical genius. It just takes different forms.”

🔗 Music theory, explained with Oreos

Music theory, explained with Oreos

No comments necessary, just click the link and enjoy.

🔗 Why Reach Navigation Should Replace the Navbar in iOS Design

Speaking from the perspective of a user interface nerd, I found this blog post from Brad Ellis to be very interesting. 

Why Reach Navigation Should Replace the Navbar in iOS Design:

The UINavigationBar, navbar for short, has been around since the original iPhone. Historically, navbars have been convenient and clear, easy to understand and easy to build.

Then phones ballooned, enough that the iPhone 7 Plus supplanted sales of the iPad mini. Now, if you own a modern iPhone, navbars can feel unwieldy — literally out of touch.

Burgeoning screens mean the distance between the navbar and our thumbs has grown. The screen on a 7 Plus is so tall it would take a thumb-length increase of 150 percent to reach those pesky buttons with one hand. Just another knuckle or two. Nothing weird.

As devices change, our visual language changes with them. It’s time to move away from the navbar in favor of navigation within thumb-reach. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call that Reach Navigation.