Music Game: Bandle
I was out in Madison, Wisconsin this week for the Wisconsin State Music Conference, and I had the pleasure of meeting one of our amazing customers, Guy Gregg - a high school band director at Oak Creek High School in suburban Milwaukee - who helped present a session on behalf of MusicFirst. Afterwards, we went to dinner and shared stories of teaching and music technology. Guy told me about an app that he uses with his music theory students called Bandle. I had never heard of it. When he described what it is and how he uses it I told him that I would be writing a blog post about it. Here it is!
SPOILER ALERT: don’t look below if you want to play the game today (10/25/24).
Essentially Bandle is a riff of the ever popular word game Wordle, but in this case you have to guess a song in 6 guesses or less. What I LOVE about it is that instead of playing the full tune in short snippets, it plays one isolated instrument track at a time. You start with the drum track for guess #1. If you can’t figure it out, you can then add one instrumental track at a time on top of the drum track.
For me (as a tuba player), once I add the bass track it becomes pretty clear what the name of the song is. They also give you some pretty basic clues, including the year that the song was released and in today’s game, it follows the theme of Halloween.
When you start the type your guess in, the app will populate the full name of the song and artist. If you think that your guess is correct, you click Guess. If you need more clues, you click Skip. Today’s puzzle was very easy because of the iconic bass line of the song Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. If your guess is correct, you get a congratulations and links to the actual song on a variety of platforms.
Guy told me that he uses this pretty frequently with his music theory students and that they love it. Once they guess the song, they go to the actual track (Bandle plays sound-alike tracks rather than the actual ones so that they can play the individual stems) and analyze each instrumental part, focusing on various music theory concepts employed by the song. VERY cool idea. I love bringing in meaningful games into the music classroom and I am certain that your students will too.
Bandle is also available as an app for iOS and Android. Big thanks to Guy for showing me this app. I’m pretty sure it will become a regular part of my morning puzzle routine!