Drum Sequencers and Music First
Week 12A of Technology in Music Education was something of an exploratory week. We spent a significant amount of time during the lecture doing our own research on different kinds of music software, and then we discussed it as a class. There were two main areas of exploration in this lecture.
Step Sequencers
The first main area that our class explored was the world of step sequencers. A step sequencer is another name for a particular kind of drum programming, where you can turn sounds on and off in boxes (like the picture above). You could think of each of those boxes as little steps (hence the name). Our class spent some time in drumbit, a step sequencer that can be used to create drum kit replication sounds.
Personally, although drumbit would probably be easier to use for beginners, I found it less versatile, and the sounds were of lower quality than those found in a similar program, the drumbot sequencer. I will not be starting to use drumbit any time soon in my own personal music making, but I could definitely see how it could be useful in a classroom setting.
After we'd had some time to play around with step sequencers, James Humberstone made the point that drum programming is a unit you could do with any high school music class. There are a lot of really important musical skills and ideas that you could begin to introduce through working in drum programming. For example, the tempo button in step sequencers can help students see how tempo relates to musical style, the kick drum can act as an important step into understanding the role of high and low, and effect of placing the kick drum in different places, and timbre can be introduced through different drum sounds. Another benefit of doing a unit on drum programming is that students immediately start getting into making music, and they get feedback straight away depending on how they change the sounds.
Music First
The other music technology software that we spent time experimenting with is Music First. Music First has been designed as a suite of apps that can be used to assist teaching a huge variety of music skills to students. When you click on the software link up the top left of the page, you can see all of these apps:
Now the text might be a little small to read, but some of the key apps include Auralia, Musition, Noteflight, O-Generator, PracticeFirst, Sight Reading Factory, and Soundation. This is a huge range of resources, that help with ear training, music notation, loop-based composition, music theory, sight reading, and DAW composition. On this basis alone, I would heartily recommend Music First for teachers who will make use of all this software in the classroom. One of the great things about using Music First is that students have personalised learning experiences, rather than needing to move at the pace of the rest of the class. This could be especially useful with ear training and music theory.
Software Spotlight: Music Delta
One of the apps that I'd never used before was Music Delta, and so I decided to check it out. Partly the name caught my eye because I wondered if it was playing off the myth of the blues originating solely in the Mississippi Delta, so I investigated a little further.
Now, as you may know from other parts of my blog, at this time I'm working on my major technology project, which is all about creating resources for the blues. So, I was hoping that if this website did include resources about the blues, that they would be helpful and accurate.
I reached the home page, and there were little cartoons of Beethoven, Mozart, Elvis and John Lennon. So they are definitely pitching themselves as teachers of music of all kinds, which is great.
On the bottom half of the page, one of the primary links was to learn music history. I clicked on the blues section because of my own interests. I was really hoping for a well-researched introduction, but I was a bit disappointed.
Actually I was quite disappointed. The short history basically relied upon many of the myths and Anglo histories that have obscured real knowledge of the blues for a long time. I wrote some annotations over the top, and while some of my issues are a bit picky, in the end it was a pretty stereotyped history.
I wasn't done though. I wanted to see if there were other useful features on the software (which is vast in its scope). Another feature of the software was that it had its own apps! There were an enormous number and variety, but they were almost all loop-based, and aimed to teach jazz of many kinds, pop, rock from various periods, as well as some music from other cultures like China and South America (not that I'd ever buy the notion that these countries, continents or cultures are monolithic).
The Jimi Hendrix app caught my eye, so I thought I'd give it a go. It was basically a collection of drum, bass and guitar loops from his song Foxy Lady. I was quite impressed with the sound quality, though it took me a little while to work out how to access different loops, and there was only one option for the bass. Here's what I came up with after a few minutes: