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Robby Burns
David MacDonald unboxes the Odla music notation ...
David MacDonald unboxes the Odla music notation controller

New Software Updates from Apple: Exploring Widgets!

iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and tvOS 14 came out a few weeks ago. I have a lot to say about these updates, but today I wanted to write about widgets for a moment.

Widgets are catching on as a significant feature amongst the masses. As someone who plays around with the way apps are organized on the home screen at least twice a week, I can tell that widgets are going to add a lot of excitement (and anxiety) into my life. I have been toying with them since July when this software entered the public beta, and I am far from resolved.

Here is where I have landed for now…

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Page one (middle image) contains my most tapped app icons. This will be a hard habit to break, but I find lots of value in having upcoming calendar tasks and weather permanently on my most visited screen. Weather Line and Fantastical have the best small-sized widgets, in my opinion. Even this smallest widget size takes up four app icons, so they need to be beautiful and information-dense for it to be worth me sacrificing four apps.

I didn’t think I would want weather on this first screen, but now that it is always visible to me, I don’t see how I could live without it. The Weather Line widget is awesome because its user interface depicts the weather on a line, almost like a chart. It even manages to fit an hourly rain graph into its small space when it is raining out. Not even my second favorite weather widget, Carrot Weather, does that.

The Today View (left image) is where I keep Siri Shortcuts and the older, legacy style widgets from iOS 13. As much as I like the newer widgets’ look, the older style widgets are interactive. I keep OmniFocus, Timery (for time tracking), Streaks (for tracking daily habits), and Waterminder (for quickly logging water) all on this screen because I can tap right on the buttons to act on these apps without the widget needing to launch into the app.

I am continually playing with page 2 (right picture). I like it to be mostly another grid of tappable apps, but I am experimenting with various widgets here. I think what I have settled on is to have the Maps and Notes app widgets stacked on top of each other at the top, and then to use the Siri Suggestion widget, which shows me two rows of apps that swap in and out throughout the day based on my phone’s predictions of which apps I want to use in which contexts. The image above shows some other widgets I am experimenting with, but I think I prefer having more app icons there.

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On the iPad, I keep: calendar, weather, notes, Apollo (a Reddit app I use to keep up on the latest news about my interests), Siri Shortcuts, and the Files app for launching into recently modified files. 

On both my phone and iPad, I am waiting for an OmniFocus widget to track my tasks. Even though I like the one in the Today view where you can mark the tasks as done right from the widget, I think I might want to have my next few upcoming tasks permanently visible on page one.

9to5Mac.com and MacStories.net have been two great websites to follow if you want to stay up on which apps offer widgets.

METT Episode #17 - Talking About the Weather, with Chris Cicconi

Dr. Christopher Cicconi, Assistant Professor of Music Education, and Director of Bands and Orchestra at Towson University, joins the show to talk about selecting meaningful repertoire for your ensemble. We also talk about score study with iPad Pro apps, involving yourself in your music teaching community, and yes, I go on a tangent about my favorite new weather app.

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Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby - Weather Line and Carrot Weather
Chris - Fidelity

Album of the Week:
Robby - Trust in the Life-force of the Deep Mystery - The Comet Is Coming
Chris - Game of Thrones Highlights - Spotify Playlist | Mad Max: Fury Road Soundtrack

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Chris - Towson University Profile Page

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Subscribe to the Blog

Subscribe to the Podcast in... Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Thanks to my sponsor this month, MusicFirst.

Introducing My "Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks With Trap Beats" - Available Now on My New Online Store!

I am announcing a new section of this website. A STORE! Starting today, I will be selling digital products and services I have created for musicians and music teachers. Check it out here!

First up is a collection of Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks with Trap Beats underneath them.

You bet there's a promotional video.

Here is the product description from the sale page:

This collection contains over 70 major scale play-along tracks for your ensemble.

Each track includes a tuning drone playing the tonic with a scale overtop in just intonation so that you can reinforce flawless intonation, tone production, and blend amongst your students. Every exercise includes a count-off and a trap beat underneath to engage your students while reinforcing slower playing and subdividing!

The audio-only version of this package includes mp3 files of the following recordings in all twelve major keys, at 70bpm.

  • Whole note scale

  • Half note scale

  • Quarter note scale

  • Eighth note scale

  • Scale Exercise in Thirds

  • Mini-Scale with Arpeggio

Also included:

  • Remington at three different speeds! Perfect for playing underneath many of the exercises that come from popular band methods.

The premium version of this product includes the audio tracks above in addition to the Logic Pro and GarageBand stems so you can edit every element of the tracks, including speed, pitch, and instrumentation.

These are perfect for running through your Zoom/Google Meet/Virtual Classroom to keep kids playing as much as possible.

I have been using tracks like these with my band students for years now and they LOVE them. The trap beat resonates with them. Its popularity in hip hop music aside, there is something compelling about them, musically. The backbeat on three, combined with the busy hi-hat activity, helps kids subdivide slower tempos and keeps them motivated to practice stuff like long tones and scales. The strong 808 baseline asserts the beat while adding fun syncopation.

It was essential to me that the drones were in just intonation because I teach my students to hear and adjust to the beats that result when unison pitches and diatonic intervals are in/out of tune. The Yamaha Harmony Director was definitely the tool for the job. Here's a really brief blog post I shared earlier this month about the process if you want to take a stab at making something like this.

You can alternatively do this process using the (excellent) Tonal Energy Tuner App, a MIDI keyboard, and GarageBand on iOS. I wrote about that here. I prefer the Tonal Energy experience, but the Yamaha's hardware keys made it easier to "perform" the drones and allowed me to create in Logic Pro, which I am more proficient in.

The original concept for this was very ambitious initially, and I simplified the vision a ton to help myself "ship it." I have seen music teachers asking for something like this on social media a lot lately, and it seemed like time to do the work. I am happy with how they turned out and I hope to create more of these down the road in varying style, tempo, and exercise patterns.

A few notes:

  1. Due to file upload limitations on Squarespace, buying the stems directs you to download a text file instead of the audio files. The text file contains a link to a third-party hosting source. A little inelegant, I know, but setting up a Squarespace store was otherwise the most comfortable choice.
  2. These are incredibly effective for engaging synchronous ensemble rehearsals. No, we still can't play at once, but running rehearsal tracks through your Google Meet or Zoom call while students are muted is a great way to keep them playing. These tracks are slow enough that I have had success having groups of 3-6 unmute while playing along, and it is not total chaos. Between these, my Solfege Bingo tracks, and The Breathing Gym DVD, we can be synchronously active for more than 80 percent of each class. I get the audio to route directly through to the call using Loopback.
  3. Many of these tracks, particularly the scale exercise in thirds, mini-scale, and Remington tracks, pair perfectly with a multitude of examples in the Foundation for Superior Performance band method books series. I did not title them as such because the book and my project are in no way connected. I bring it up here because I know those exercises are ubiquitous in band rehearsals, and it's for this reason, many directors have their students purchase those books.
  4. I made the arrangements of these tracks simple to keep the appeal as wide-reaching and flexible as possible. My hope is that people who really want to change the style, edit the beat, change the speed, or any other kind of alternation, will buy the version that comes with the GarageBand and Logic stems. Tip: If you want to use software instruments to create your own accompaniment, and want them to be justly in tune with my tracks, Logic Pro has support for tuning systems. That means that if you mute my trap beat and add your own samba tracks, you can have the instruments play in the key area you select instead of their usual equal tempered tuning.

Attendance for Google Meet | A Chrome Extension That Automatically Takes Your Attendance for You and Saves It to a Google Sheet

Attendance for Google Meet (download here) is an exceptional extension for Google Chrome that automatically takes attendance for you and saves it to a Google Sheet document in your Google Drive.

There are other extensions like this but most of them are poorly designed, buggy, and unreliable. 

Attendance for Google Meet has an elegant and straightforward design and user experience, down to the icon even matching Google's 'Material Design' language. I am especially proud of this extension because it is made by a student at Centennial High School, which is one of the schools that my band program sends students to when they graduate.

Watch the video below to get an idea of what the features look like in action.

The process is simple. Once installed, you are prompted to create a class list the next time you start a Google Meet. Creating a list is as simple as entering the students names and pressing enter after each one. Once a class is created, you can select it from the same menu every time you launch a Meet. 

The app logs when kids enter, when they leave, and the total number of minutes they spent in class, so you can catch it if they dip in for the first minute and then leave immediately. Even the Google Sheet is designed to be easy to read.

There are some bugs, notably that the chat window closes frequently during the session. I also have to manually export the list before closing the Meet because the option you check in settings to make this happen automatically keeps turning itself off.

I strongly recommend this extension if you are teaching with Google Meet this year. Congratulations to this awesome student developer on making such a useful tool for teachers!

🔗 Google Meet starts rolling out 49-person grid view, background blur

Click below to read 9to5Google's article about 49-person grid view and background blur, coming to Google Meet on the web.

Google Meet starts rolling out 49-person grid view, background blur:

As previewed last month, Google is starting to launch a handful of pre-announced features for Meet. Background blur and being able to see up to 49 people simultaneously is coming to Google Meet in the coming weeks.

This is going to be huge for teachers. Read the entire article. They explain how to set everything up once this feature rolls out to you.

Apple's Apple Watch and iPad Event

Apple had an event yesterday where they announced some new stuff. Here are some very quick thoughts I have on the announcements...

  • The new blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch Series 6 looks great. I love my Apple Watch for health tracking. The more health sensors, the better.

  • Apple Fitness+ looks awesome. I am a dedicated Peloton subscriber, but it will still be interesting to see Apple's take on this. One issue with Peloton (and other third party app workout class content) is that watching on Apple TV or iPad doesn't track any data from the Apple Watch. This seems to be a big benefit of Apple Fitness+. But as with most services, whether people like it or not will be determined largely by the quality of the content. Apple can engineer great tech features into their products to give them an edge, but fitness content is also very dependent on the engagement of the instructor.

  • Apple One seems like a great way to save money if you subscribe to a bunch of Apple's services. It's kind of like their version of Amazon Prime. It's looking like I will be able to keep paying what I already pay for Apple Music, iCloud Drive, and Apple Arcade, and get the Fitness+ and News+ services bundled in for a similar cost.

  • New iPad Air: this is a really nice update. If I didn't depend on the larger size iPad for reading sheet music, I would strongly consider this device over the iPad Pro now that they share the same design, Apple Pencil, and Magic Keyboard Case.

Here are some links to great posts about the event:

Click the headline to read more.

Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE - The MacsStories Overview

The New iPad Air and 8th Generation iPad - The MacStories Overview

Apple One The Long-Awaited Services Bundle Is Coming Soon in Three Tiers

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Today's 'Time Flies' Apple Event | Daring Fireball.net

What was new at the Apple Sept. 15 event | Sixcolors.com

Making Just Intonation Play-alongs with Trap Beats for Band Rehearsal (Using the Yamaha Harmony Director and Logic Pro)

My band classes meet online using Google Meet once a day for 45 minutes. I am trying to keep them playing as much of this time as possible while slowly introducing the tech tools we will be using to submit work this semester.

Using the Yamaha Harmony Director, plugged in through Logic (along with some trap beats and 808 bass lines I recorded in with software instruments), I have started to make some play-along tracks to route through the Google Meet via Loopback.

This is kind of like a hardwired version of my Tonal Energy/Garageband workflow I have written about here before, only the keyboard hardware and pro editing software allow for much more precision.

They sound like this:


See below for the Logic Pro setup. I am using a drummer track for the trap beat, an 808 bass instrument as a software instrument to record the bass line, and the Harmony Director is being recorded live as an audio track. The HD is plugged directly into my audio interface to do this.

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I decided to keep the bass part droning in the key area of the scale because that software instrument plays in equal temperament by default. It also sounds more like an authentic trap beat this way, where the bass line functions similar to a bass drum.

I already used this method in my first period class this morning and the band loved it. This is just the beginning. I whipped this together in a hot minute and anticipate making a variety of scale patterns in different musical styles.

🔗 Electronic Music School, with Will Kuhn and Ethan Hein

Will Kuhn and Ethan Hein have a new Twitch channel called Electronic Music School. Every Sunday at 5 pm, they go over lesson plans for teaching music technology, using Ableton Live.

Even though the technology part of my general music curriculum is limited, I have really enjoyed the few of these live streams I have caught little bits of. The visual presentation is very engaging, the guests are diverse, and the discussions are very relevant to the curricular challenges of teaching popular music.

Check it out here.

METT Podcast #16 - Master Your Virtual Teaching Tech, with David MacDonald

Thanks to my sponsor this month, MusicFirst

David MacDonald returns to the show to talk about the hardware and software in our virtual teaching setups. Then we speculate about touchscreen Macs and consider how Apple's recent App Store policies might impact the future of creative professional software on iOS.

Topics include:

  • New Zoom features for musicians and teachers
  • David and Philip Rothman's new podcast, Scoring Notes
  • Using Open Broadcaster Software to level up your virtual teaching
  • Routing audio from your apps into Zoom and Google Meet calls
  • Teaching with Auralia
  • LMS integration with third-party music education apps
  • Using MainStage and Logic for performing instruments into virtual classrooms
  • Touchscreen Macs
  • Apple's App Store Policy

Show Notes:

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
David MacDonald - Twitter | Website | Blog

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Subscribe to the Blog

Subscribe to the Podcast in... Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Today's episode is sponsored by MusicFirst:

MusicFirst offers music educators and their students easy-to-use, affordable, cloud-based software that enables music learning, creation, assessment, sharing, and exploration on any device, anywhere, at any time.

MusicFirst Classroom is the only learning management system designed specifically for K-12 music education. It combines the flexibility of an LMS with engaging content and powerful software integrations to help manage your students’ progress, make lesson plans, and create assignments.

And for younger students, MusicFirst Junior is the perfect online system for teaching elementary general music. It includes a comprehensive K-5 curriculum, hundreds of lessons & songs, and kid-friendly graphics to making learning and creating music fun!

Whether you’re teaching remotely, in-person, or in a blended learning environment, MusicFirst will work with you to find a solution that fits your program’s unique needs. Try it free for 30 days at musicfirst.com.

David’s teaching setup.

David’s teaching setup.

My teaching setup.

My teaching setup.

…From far away.

…From far away.

Optimize Your Zoom Settings for Music Teaching and Performing!

Zoom came out with a recent update that allows users to optimize the sound quality of calls for music, amongst other features specifically geared towards music performers and teachers.

Here is a roundup of some great resources for making the most of these new audio options. Click each headline to read more.

Zoom: online rehearsals (instrumental) | Making Music:

This resource covers how to use the online meeting platform Zoom for online instrumental rehearsals. To find out more about Zoom and how to set it up, read our Zoom: how it works resource.

Complete Guide to Zoom Audio Settings for Music Teachers | Midnight Music:

When using Zoom to run music classes, there are a few settings you can adjust to enhance the experience for you and your students.

Here is a summary of the settings you should consider.

Better Music Experiences Come to Zoom with High Fidelity Audio | Scoring Notes:

A recent release of Zoom has brought, among other things, “High Fidelity Audio Mode” (High fidelity music mode in the application settings) to the Windows and Mac clients. The feature was announced in August and rolled out publicly on September 1, 2020 with the 5.2.2 update.

Find Robby elsewhere on the web