My iPad Homescreen - August 7th, 2016 Edition

There is nothing more fun for an app nerd than discussing their homescreen. The homescreen is the screen on a mobile device that contains the most essential apps for the conscious user. I am always changing this screen depending on the time of year, apps I am using frequently, and new apps I am trying out. Here is what my current homescreen looks like...

My current homescreen.

And a brief description of some noteworthy apps on it...

The Dock

Messages - With iMessage, my iPad is just another window into my text conversations. I use this app just as much on the iPad and Mac as I do on the phone.

Spark Mail - One of my favorite Mail app replacements. Spark has enough power features to merit its own blog post, but the feature I am finding quite useful right now is the ability to filter just the important notifications so I am not bothered by junk email throughout the day.

Notes - The Apple Notes app is increasingly becoming my go to for most of my note taking needs. I love using it for checklists, outlines, and sketching. The action extension (accessible from within any iOS app by pressing the square with the arrow pointing out of it) allows me to clip whatever I am looking at, no matter the app, into a new note or existing note.

OmniFocus - This app runs my life. I keep it on the dock for easy access to my tasks and projects.

Drafts - Most of what I type on the iPad starts here and then later gets filtered into the app that best suits its content. I am often sending drafts to Twitter, OmniFocus, Notes app, and my blog app.

Other Essentials

Dropbox - Pretty much all of my documents live here. This is where I browse, edit, and share them from my iPad.

Documents - Think of Documents as the missing Finder app on iPad. It allows you to work with files locally on the iPad but also from various cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. In fact, it allows you to see all of your content from all of your cloud drives all in the same window. Right now this is crucial for me because I am using a personal and professional Google Drive account simultaneously. Documents allows me to be logged into both of them at the same time, something not even my Mac can do.

Pages - Of all the basic "office" style applications I work with, Pages is perhaps the most essential. Pages is a beautiful and intuitive replacement for Microsoft Word. I love how it seamlessly syncs my documents across all devices through iCloud Drive.

Byword - Byword is a plain text editor. If I am typing a document of length that doesn't need to look pretty or include any multimedia, I usually type it here. Byword has a clutter free atmosphere that allows me to focus on just the text I am typing rather than buttons and tools.

forScore - My entire mobile score workflow is based on this app. I pull scores from my Dropbox account right into forScore where I can annotate them, perform from them, categorize them, and add all sorts of interesting metadata to them.

Blog - This is the app I use to post to my blog on my Squarespace website.

Notion - Still the best music notation software on iPad. I use it for small projects and defer to Sibelius on my Mac still for larger scale work. Notion allows you to scribble on a staff with the Apple Pencil and then it converts your hand writing into crystal clear notation. It's magical.

Recent Favorites:

Google Drive - I have been deviating a little bit from my entirely Dropbox based workflow recently, in part because some colleagues of mine prefer to use Google Drive for collaboration. I really like the Google Drive app. I just wish that the Google Docs and Sheets app took advantage of iPad Pro split screen multitasking.

Sheets - Of all the a Google Doc apps, Sheets is the one I use the most. There are a bunch of ways to use cloud drives to collaborate with others on spreadsheets but Google Sheets is the only one I trust to sync everyone's data reliably. I use this app very frequently to access docs related to scheduling and inventory.

GoodNotes - Although I am using Apple Notes for most things, I find that a few tasks require a little more power. GoodNotes is great at a couple of things. First of all, it has excellent Apple Pencil support for handwritten note taking and sketching. Next, I love how easy it is to combine my own notes along with other PDFs from my iPad all into the same notebooks. GoodNotes (and apps like Notability, which I was previously using until I started trying GN) does the best job allowing me to immediately scribble on top of PDFs. Many PDF annotation apps offer this feature but typically take a couple of taps to enter into annotation mode. GoodNotes feels more like a piece of paper. Also, while there are plenty of great dedicated score apps (including Notion from earlier in this post), I love that GN has a staff paper option. In fact, it is easy to intermingle a diverse range of paper styles all within the same notebook.

Slack - What is Slack? My favorite communication tool on the planet. Slack is an awesome collaboration tool for teams. I am not really sure this is the place to detail the range of its features, but I will share that the music team at my school has been using Slack for the past few months and it has been a real game changer. It is coming to replace both text messaging and email for us. The basic idea behind Slack is that a team can have multiple different "channels" within their team which are basically conversation threads. Any member of the team can be in any channel. For example, all of the people in our team who teach band or orchestra classes are part of an instrumental music channel where we have almost all of our digital communication about that subject. The choir guy doesn't have to see any of that conversation. There is a general channel for general communication and even a random channel so that my endless gifs do not annoy my coworkers by disrupting otherwise productive discussions. Slack takes the cruft and formality out of the picture, enabling simple text conversation while also empowering us to be way better organized about the way we collaborate on different projects. Slack also has tons of integrations with other services. For example, with the Google Drive integration, I can share Google Docs right from within a Slack channel and other users can comment on it or launch right into it.

1Password - My favorite app for managing passwords, software serial numbers, secure notes, and more. I never forget a password with this app. And Touch ID on my iPad allows me to log in anywhere by simply touching my thumb to the home button.

Scrivener - Scrivener is a non-linear writing tool. I used the Mac version to write my book. I am beginning to plan some other writing projects and am enjoying the ability to sync my projects from Mac to iPad and back again.

comiXology - I pretty much only have time to read comic books in the summer. If you are in to this sort of thing, Amazon's comiXology app is the place to buy and read your comics (actually, because Amazon likes to avoid paying Apple's 30 percent of every purchase, you will have to buy the comics from Amazon or comiXology's website). comiXology has this cool feature I like where it smartly detects the ends of the frames and allows you to scroll through each of them full screen. Right now, I am reading the Walking Dead series.

BusyCal - I am trying out this Calendar replacement right now. Usually, my calendar app of choice is Fantastical but BusyCal allows me to do some interesting things like, for example, associate contacts in my address book with events for better context.

Why hip-hop is interesting

Ethan Hein recently wrote a massive blog post diving into some stylistic analysis of hip-hop, including a theoretical analysis of Kanye West's song Famous.

I find myself relating to so much of what Ethan Hein values in hip-hop. Not to mention, he is totally leveraging the power of the Internet to provide countless links and references to very dense ideas that he only mentions in passing. This kind of comprehensive, media rich, exposition really leverages the diverse range and content of media on the web.

This is a must read. Don't let Kanye West's "offensiveness" stop you from checking it out.

Why hip-hop is interesting | The Ethan Hein Blog:

Hip-hop has been getting plenty of scholarly attention lately, but most of it has been coming from cultural studies. Which is fine! Hip-hop is culturally interesting. When humanities people do engage with hip-hop as an art form, they tend to focus entirely on the lyrics, treating them as a subgenre of African-American literature that just happens to be performed over beats. And again, that’s cool! Hip-hop lyrics have significant literary interest. (If you’re interested in the lyrical side, we recommend this video analyzing the rhyming techniques of several iconic emcees.) But what we want to discuss is why hip-hop is musically interesting, a subject which academics have given approximately zero attention to.

Much of what I find exciting (and difficult) about hip-hop can be found in Kanye West’s song “Famous,” from his latest album The Life Of Pablo. The song comes with a video, a ten minute art film that shows Kanye in bed sleeping after a group sexual encounter with his wife, his former lover, his wife’s former lover, his father-in-law turned mother-in-law, various of his friends and collaborators, Bill Cosby, George Bush, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump. There’s a lot to say about this, but it’s beyond the scope of our presentation, and also, words fail me. I’ll just focus on the song itself.

Side note: I am also really impressed with those embedded Noteflight players that display the brief excerpts of notation. Go Noteflight!

Past student, Evan Chapman, gets interviewed for Modern Drummer magazine

Read the interview here: Evan Chapman of Square Peg Round Hole: Juniper Album, “Name Not One Man” Video World Premiere | Modern Drummer Magazine

Wow! Check out past student of mine, Evan Chapman, in this interview with Modern Drummer Magazine.

The interview celebrates Evan's band, Square Peg Round Hole, their new (and fantastic) album, Juniper, and the world premiere of their "Name Not One Man" music video.

Square Peg Round Hole combines the best of electronic, post rock, and contemporary percussion idioms. I can tell Evan is totally nerding out explaining some of the grooves on the record (which are just as inspired by the band's classical/contemporary percussion background as they are modern rock and electronic):

MD: In “A-frame” off of Juniper, there’s a groove around the three-minute mark with single hi-hat hits that first occur a 16th note after the backbeat, and then during the second half of the phrase they sound like they come before it. It almost creates this push-pull motion, or feels like the groove is swirling. Do you have any specific approach to writing patterns like this?

Evan: This kind of writing draws from my love for process music. I’ll admit that I’m a total nerd when it comes to math in music, and I’m fascinated with permutations and serialism. On a larger scale, the group will often throw in compositional processes like addition, diminution, and phasing. But on a smaller scale, I’ll occasionally throw permutations into my drum parts. The “A-Frame” groove that you’re referring to is a subtle example of that. A more obvious example is the ending of “Unraveling,” where the bell of my ride cymbal cycles between every fourth 16th, then every third, then every second, then every downbeat, and then back again through the cycle in reverse. Like I said, I’m a nerd.

The SPRH sound has the rich expanse of a modern rock ensemble, all coming from just three percussionists. Rock music can be straightforward and often improvised. Likewise, a lot of SPRH ideas don't strike the ear as very complex at first, but the sound is very intently composed.

MD: At certain points it feels like standard drum grooves are dropped in favor of creating more of a percussive approach. For instance, using floor toms almost as a melody instrument. Is there any concept behind this approach?

Evan: I’m generally drawn to drummers who think more like composers and percussionists. Glenn Kotche is a perfect example of this. He’s expanded his drumset to be more like a multi-percussion setup, which causes him to think about his parts differently. I think along those same lines, using different drums and cymbals as different parts of the melody. I use a non-traditional setup with SPRH, which also inspires me to come up with more unique parts.

Our floor toms are a very large part of our sound and the drum patterns that develop between Sean [M. Gill] and me. Sean plays a floor tom in his setup as well, and we’re often coming up with patterns that work together to create something that no single player could achieve. During the section beginning at 6:07 in “Unraveling,” the two of us build a hocketing drum part in an additive way. With every repetition, Sean builds his part note-by-note from the back to the front, and I build mine from the front to the back. The result is a section that gradually evolves from seemingly chaos to a powerful groove.

Not to mention, it is very gracious for Evan to list me as an influence during his musical education, of which I am honored to have had any part in.

After John Gleason retired from teaching drums, I went on to study with several other wonderful private instructors—Grant Menefee, Scott Tiemann, and Robert Burns—who each taught me a unique set of skills including orchestral, Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban percussion, four-mallet marimba, chart reading, sight reading, and more. All of this prepared me for a degree in music.

Check out Square Peg Round Hole. Congratulations Evan!

Apple improves iCloud Music Library matching, ditches copy-protected matched files for Apple Music users

Apple improves iCloud Music Library matching, ditches copy-protected matched files for Apple Music users:

When Apple Music was released just over a year ago, Apple also debuted iCloud Music Library, a way of storing your iTunes library in the cloud. There were two ways to seed the cloud, either with iTunes Match or Apple Music. If you were an iTunes Match subscriber, matching your songs in your local library to your cloud library was done one way, and if you were just an Apple Music subscriber, matching was done differently.

This created some confusion about the way tracks were matched and stored in iCloud Music Library. Now, Apple is changing this, and will use the same matching method for both services. The company said in a briefing that Apple Music now uses acoustic fingerprinting and provides matched files without digital rights management (DRM), or copy protection, just like iTunes Match.

It seriously blows my mind that this isn't the way it worked from the start. Even after reading this article, I am still unsure if it is safe to cancel my iTunes Match subscription or not.

Subscribing to Apple Music is a huge risk on my part. For the record, I keep two local back ups and one cloud back up of music files in addition to my iTunes Match/Apple Music subscriptions. I of all people want Apple Music to succeed but things like this make me wonder why Apple isn't doing more to secure their footing as a musically relevant tech company.

For the times that Apple Music works as I want it to, it is still worth the experiment. More often than not, it syncs my iTunes Library across all of my Macs and iOS devices. But there are still frequent syncing bugs, in particular, the accuracy of metadata like album art and song titles. And don't get me started on how my MacBook frequently logs me out of my account. At the end of the day though, Apple Music shows potential to be much more than other streaming services..

If you are looking for a music subscription service like Spotify or Google Music, I think Apple Music is getting close enough to complete. But if you are more like me, and you keep a vast library of rare and live albums, personally created and uploaded mp3s, and rely on iTunes to get your job done, it might not be worth the headache.

Plex for Sonos

​Plex has announced that their service can be linked to your Sonos speakers.

Plex for Sonos | Media Server | Media Streaming Server:

Plex can connect to any Sonos system wirelessly, no matter where it is. You always have access to every one of your songs, playlists, and music libraries with Plex.

​ I use Plex to host and stream my video and music library. I also just bought my second Sonos speaker for the living room in my house. I must say that I am thrilled that I will now be able to stream anything from my Plex library to my Sonos speakers.

If you are curious about setting up a free Plex account, it is easy to learn about from their website. Did I mention that you can read about how I use Plex in my forthcoming book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers? You can preorder that here. ​

My book is now available on Amazon!

You can now preorder Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers on Amazon. Do it!

Excellent writing tool, Scrivener, is available on iOS

Earlier this week, Literature & Latte announced that their writing tool Scrivener is now available on iOS.

I wrote my entire book on the Mac version of Scrivener and oh man do I wish I had this on my iPad throughout the process.

Scrivener is a non-linear word processor that allows you to write and organize lengthy projects. I only scratched the surface while writing my book but you can do all sorts of neat things with it including: clipping urls, images, and other research into your project file all within the same interface that you organize the various written sections of your work.

If you are writing a book, thesis, dissertation, or even just need to organize larger writing projects in a flexible way, you should give this app a try.

Interesting tidbit: Scrivener uses Dropbox instead of iCloud to sync projects across devices. The developers wrote about that decision here. It is interesting that Apple's own syncing solution is not flexible enough for pro software developers to build their apps on. I continue to be worried about Apple's ability to stay relevant with both cloud services and the professional market. This is not a promising story but I am glad that the developers of Scrivener made a decision that ensures security and reliability for their users, even if it does come with some compromises.

Master Plan, Part Deux | Tesla Motors

Elon Musk has posted part two in his master plan for Tesla

Master Plan, Part Deux | Tesla Motors:

So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:

Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet >learning Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it

Bring it on!

Announcing My First Book ---> Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers!

I am excited to announce that I am writing a book!

Actually, I already wrote it. Oxford University Press will publish the book, "Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers," this Fall. It will be the first title in the series, "Essential Music Technology: The Prestissimo Series" with series editor, Richard McCready.

The book will focus on how technology can help rather than stifle productivity in the music teaching profession. It will address such topics as: minimizing paper, managing tasks, taking good notes, organizing iTunes playlists, understanding music streaming services, working in the cloud, and managing scores. The book will provide an overview of the apps and services I have found most useful in my teaching experience. It will include sample workflows for using these technologies in music teaching contexts.

Stay tuned to this site for more information. The blog has been quiet this year as I have spent more time writing the book. Upon release, I plan to write posts of a supplementary nature. I also plan to do a miniseries on my podcast that offers commentary on the book. I will be inviting many insightful guests on the show to discuss a different chapter each episode.

I also have a really fun video trailer in the works featuring some brilliant acting talent from my colleagues in the Howard County Public School System and some awesome editing work from the guys over at Four/Ten Media.

I hope you will pick up a copy when it is released.

Steinberg announces Dorico

Steinberg has finally given a name and release date to their much anticipated score editing application.

Dorico will be available Q4 2016. I have been looking for a modern replacement for Sibelius for years and this software really looks like it might deliver. You can read all about it on their blog, here.

The Sibelius blog has a dense (in the best sense of the word) overview of the features of the app here.