There is NOTHING in the world more enjoyable to me than live music. Over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of attending 10 concerts - 9 Dead & Company shows and 1 Goose show. I’ve got 7 more shows this summer - 5 Phish shows, 1 Dave Matthews Band, and the Outlaw Festival. It’s why I’ve been absent from the blog for a few weeks. I live for live music. But why?

MusicFirst is extremely excited to announce, in partnership with GIA Publications, the release of Habits of a Successful Beginner Mariachi Músico, written by the amazing duo of John Nieto and Scott Rush - available as INCLUDED content in PracticeFirst and the MusicFirst Classroom for all current sibscribers as of July 1, 2023. This method book, developed over many years by expert mariachi educator John Nieto, includes 164 sequenced exercises to build fundamentals in a beginner mariachi program. As a teacher, you can easily access, assign, and automatically assess exercises from this method. 

It’s true! Incredibox - a longtime favorite of thousands of music educators and their students - has recently released Incredibox for Schools - built specifically for teachers to use with their students. This education version has a few BIG differences, including the ability to create classes, add students for a secure and private login, have students save their work for teachers to review, access to all 9 of the arrangements, they no longer have exposed nipples, and most importantly - it is NOT free. 100 students will cost you $345.60. Is it worth it? Let’s see…

Earlier today, MusicFirst UK ran their second online Masterclass event, this time celebrating all different types of student compositions from around the UK. The event was hosted by YolanDa Brown OBE - a very well-known, award-winning saxophonist, broadcaster and author from the UK and the student work that was featured was simply outstanding.

I’m up at Berklee College of Music in Boston today to speak with graduate students about technology in music education, focusing on AI and online music software. I’ll be guest lecturing in Stefani Langol’s class - one of my favorite people on Earth.

This summer I am teaching a week-long course for the UArts Summer Music Studies program at Villanova University titled Utilizing Web Based Tools in the Music Classroom. Here is the course description:

With so many ideas, options, and tools, deciding what technology to incorporate into your music classroom can be a challenge. "Utilizing Web-Based Tools in the Music Classroom" will be a survey course covering a range of web-based tools that are specific for music education or can be used by music teachers to make their teaching more effective and efficient. Participants will walk away with usable lesson plans that incorporate the tools discussed as well as ideas and strategies for incorporating technology into a music classroom more broadly.

When I was teaching, I used to spend my summer reading all of the books that I put on hold due to my graduate studies and teaching responsibilities. My books were a mix of music education books as well as fun and engaging fiction. On this first day of summer, I thought it would be a good idea to give you 5 books that I highly recommend reading this summer. They will all give you great teaching ideas and strategies for incorporating technology and creativity into your music instruction. Here they are in no particular order…

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Where can you find a wonderful set of resources to help you teach music? The Carnegie Hall Music Educators Toolbox. The education division of Carnegie Hall has created a set of free online resources for K-5 music teachers that includes lesson plans, activities, assessments, videos, and suggested best practices. These resources are divided up by grade level and various musical concepts.

Juneteenth is a Federal holiday that was signed into law in 2021 that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War, and has been celebrated by African Americans since the late 1800s. It is celebrated each June 19th because it was on June 19th 1865 that Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in the city of Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended. The Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued on Jan. 1, 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln, freed the slaves, which is why the holiday is also called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.”

The following is a list of music-focused online resources that will help you celebrate Juneteenth with your music students. I hope you find them useful!

Today I will be presenting an early morning session on behalf of MusicFirst at the 2023 Conn Selmer Institute, held at Bethel College in Mishawaka, IN. I have been coming to this event for over 10 years now. It brings instrumental directors and administrators from across the country to a 3-day intensive event, that also gathers some of the best minds in music education to serve as the faculty.

Coming this Fall, the MusicFirst Classroom will include ALL of the amazing Level One videos from MusicProfessor.com at no additional charge. MusicProfessor is an online library that contains hundreds of short videos that provide lessons so that students learn how to play an instrument at home at your own pace on any device. The videos are excellent and professionally produced, and I personally believe that it is a perfect resource for any band or orchestra director who may not have the time to provide individualized instruction to EVERY student.

The most common way that people interface with computers and mobile devices is clicking. It’s such a simple way to select something. But did you know that there are MANY different ways to use this simple but powerful tool? You may think that it’s silly for me to point this out, but over the past 35 years I have taught tens of thousands of music teachers how to use technology, and I can tell you first hand, LOTS of people are unaware of the various types of clicking available, and how understanding and using those options can make your workflow with technology much more efficient. It’s all about the Power of the Click.

Flat for Education, an amazing web-based notation program sold by MusicFirst, recently announced a powerful new and updated feature - the Resource Library. This collection of sample resources includes 3 categories - worksheets, composition assignments, and performance assignments. The folks at Flat have really created something useful here, and anyone who uses Flat should check out these assignments to see whether they might be useful to use with their students.

This past Monday evening, MusicFirst hosted a one-hour webinar that provided an overview of our new product for the elementary music market, MusicFirst Elementary. The webinar was presented by the amazing Amy Burns, who is now the Elementary Educational Consultant for MusicFirst.

Tonight (Monday, June 5, 2023), MusicFirst is hosting a webinar with the one and only Amy Burns who will be providing an overview of MusicFirst Elementary - a product that I are VERY excited about. The webinar runs from 7pm - 8pm ET and will be recorded for anyone who is unable to attend.

One of the most important parts of creating a podcast, especially with students, is writing a script. Red light fever is a real thing and often invokes filler words such as like, um, and ah. The recording and production process is SO much faster when you’re reading from a script, and the organization of an episode is so much clearer when you take students through the process. The Draft>Edit>Revise aspect of script writing can be a lengthy but in the long run, it is worth it. This lesson plan appears in my Podcasting Across the Curriculum publication, and is available exclusively through MusicFirst. Sign up HERE to get free access to the curriculum for 30 days.

Tonight I will be presenting two sessions at DAYTiME 2023, sponsored by MusicEDNet, in Adelaide, Australia - albeit virtually - and I’m really looking forward to it. Along with some of the best presenters in the industry, I will be filling in for James Humberstone for the Plenary Session, and presenting a session on podcasting. I posted about this event a few weeks ago, but it’s finally here and I’m excited.

Today I am up in beautiful Burlington, VT for the University of Vermont Music Education Mini Summit, hosted by Dr. Andrea Maas. Andrea has put together a wonderful schedule of events, and I am thrilled to be joined by both Dr. Cara Bernard from UCONN and Stefanie Weigand from Music-COMP. I will be giving the Keynote Address and a session on podcasting today, and I’m really looking forward to meeting many VT music educators, UVM music education majors, and even some high school students who are thinking of becoming music educators.

If you’re interested in the genealogy of popular music and LOVE infographics, then Musicmap is the site for you! Created by Kwinten Crauwels, this incredibly detailed and well-researched site provides users with a detailed map of the many connections between all styles of popular music. Simply by zooming in on any area of the initial map (see above) you can see the many sub-genres associated with each style of music and if you zoom in even further, you can click on the sub-genre and get a YouTube playlist that illustrates the style of music and includes representative bands and musicians from that style. It’s amazing.

Don’t let the name of this tool fool you. The Online Metronome site has an amazing collection of free tools for music educators, and it is definitely something that you should bookmark right now. Created by musician and educator Andrew Swinney, this site is a wonderful resource for music teachers and their students, specifically in terms of getting students to practice. This post includes a detailed description of each of the tools, and how they can be used.