Every once in a while we need a reminder (at least I do) of why we went into music education. It’s a tough gig and we don’t always see the bigger picture when we are focused on the finer details of music making - especially with ensembles and concerts. Between administration, parents, colleagues and the students themselves, it can be easily become overwhelming, and it might even block out our original reason for why we went into the profession in the first place. Every once in a while, a reminder comes along and feeds our musician and educator souls. This past weekend at the Academy Awards ceremony, one of those reminders appeared - a 12-year-old young lady named Porsche Brinker walked up on to the stage to receive an Oscar, along with two gentlemen, Ben Proudfoot (filmmaker) and Kris Bowers (composer) for Best Documentary Short. It was for a movie titled The Last Repair Shop. I will admit that I hadn’t heard of the film before they were announced, but after the incredible speech that was delivered by the film’s composer, Kris Bowers. Here is his inspiring speech:

A few weeks ago, I was teaching my music technology class at Montclair State University and the topic of the class session was AI in Music Production. One of my amazing students brought a very cool tool to my attention. It’s called Cassette and it is VERY cool. The free version allows you to create music based on text prompts, as well as a bunch of other options. While the free account doesn’t allow you to export your finished musical creations, it is still a very powerful tool for students who are looking for inspiration for their compositions. The affordably priced upgrade option ($3.99/month) allows you to export your music as well as some other powerful features. Let’s take a closer look.

Yesterday, I spent the morning with the amazing music teachers of the DeKalb County School District in suburban Atlanta, Georgia training them alongside Jaye Mateyko, Director of Training & Support for MusicFirst. MusicFirst was recently awarded a districtwide adoption of the MusicFirst Classroom for their Instrumental, Vocal and General Music programs, along with some of our most popular software titles, including: PracticeFirst, Soundtrap, Musition First, Sight Reading Factory, Flat for Education, Focus On Sound, and OGenPlus. This adoption, which was the largest in our history, will bring this set of powerful tools, content and resources to over 17,000 students for the next six years. I am SO proud that we not only won the adoption, but that the teachers are so excited about bringing our solutions into their teaching.

One of my favorite events and organizations in the music industry is the Conn Selmer Institute which happens every June in Mishawaka, Indiana. Instrumental teachers and music administrators from around the country gather to get some of the finest PD available. I’ve been a part of CSI for many years, and I always look forward to spending time with my good friend Dr. Tim Lautzenheiser, as well as the entire CSI Faculty. This year, CSI is putting on a bunch of satellite events for those unable to travel to Indiana. These events are in Phoenix, Atlanta, Ithaca, and Kansas City. I am very proud to have been included on the program, and look forward to meeting music educators and administrators in these great cities.

I was up in New Haven, CT yesterday training all of the music teachers from the school district and it reminded me of two things: 1) that on Saturday, March 16th, MusicFirst is hosting the 2nd Annual Connecticut Music Technology Day at the Hartt School of Music, and 2) I needed to pick up some pizza from the one and only Frank Pepe’s to bring home for dinner! This was SUCH an amazing event last year that we have decided to do it again, and I will be joined by some of my dearest friends - including Wayne Splettstoeser, Dr. Lee Whitmore, Amy Burns and Barbara Freedman. The best part? Registration is FREE and it includes a full of high quality PD and LUNCH! Here is the agenda for the day:

Did you know that OpenAI - the creator of ChatGPT - has SO many additional tools and and custom versions built around ChatGPT? These tools include things like DALL-E (which I have mentioned in a previous post), writing tools, productivity tools, creative tools and education tools. The list is growing all the time and if you have enough programming skills of your own, you can even make your own custom GPT. I’ve picked out a selection of some of my favorite GPTs, and I strongly recommend checking out the entire list on your own. So in no particular order - here they are!

March is Women’s History Month so I thought I would provide a bunch of terrific online resources, specifically focused on women in music, to help you celebrate this month with your students. I hope you find all of these resources useful!

I know that some of you will read the title of this post and either laugh or get annoyed. I KNOW that there aren’t enough hours in the day. I KNOW that the last thing you will want to do either on your free period or at home is do more school work. I KNOW that most music teachers skip this step entirely for a wide variety of reasons. I also KNOW that if you do any of the projects that you assign your students - ESPECIALLY music technology projects - either alongside them or before they even get started, the results that the students produce will likely be vastly better than if you don’t. Here’s what I mean…

For the past two months, I have been on the road at music educator conferences around the US and UK. I have had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of music teachers, as well as present and attend numerous sessions on the various offerings that we have at MusicFirst for K-20 music educators. A few products have stood out from the crowd this season, and none more so than MusicFirst Elementary. We are so incredibly fortunate to have Amy Burns on our team as our ambassador for the product, and I have had the chance to sit in on quite a few of her sessions where she demonstrates the many reasons for K-5 music teachers to consider adopting MusicFirst Elementary for their classrooms. Amy provides countless examples of exactly why and how she uses this unique curriculum with her students, and over the past two months, five distinct reasons have risen to the top. Here are 5 of the top reasons that you should consider making MusicFirst Elementary your K-5 music curriculum this Fall.

I am on my way back home from London this morning after spending two exciting days at the Music & Drama Education Expo - one of my favorite events of the year. This is the largest conference for music educators in the UK and MusicFirst UK has been exhibiting and presenting sessions since the very beginning. This year was a very exciting one on the stand at the show. We had our full UK staff in attendance, including Richard Payne, Naomi Cook, and Matt Allen, as well as one of our UK Ambassador, James Manwaring, and my dear friend Marcel Pusey from OGenPlus - the completed updated and improved version of O-Generator - launching this April. I always enjoy spending time with my UK staff as well as meeting with our amazing customers.

In preparation for my music tech class at Montclair State University, I was researching tools for audio editing. Specifically, I was looking for other options than Audacity (which is an amazing, locally installed application), and even more specifically, FREE online options. After some searching, I found an amazing option called AudioMass. I absolutely LOVE this one, and I can’t believe it took me this long to find it. If you are looking for a powerful audio editing tool from Chromebooks (or any device), THIS IS IT! Here is a closer look at its features.

Here’s another very cool AI-powered music tool: NSynth Sound Maker. It’s a Google Experiment with help from NSynth which is very different than other types of synthesizers. Rather than replying on things like oscillators, filters, envelopes and amplifiers, NSynth uses machine learning to create sounds from a dataset that includes over 300,000 individual notes from over 1,000 different instruments. You can check out the dataset here. NSynth Sound Maker is a very simple instrument that allows users to combine two different sounds, with a mixer that allows you to crossfade between the two sounds to get more or less of one in the mix. You can trigger the sounds using your QWERTY keyboard, or a MIDI keyboard if you have one.

In this lesson, students will:

• Learn about J.S. Bach.

• Watch video and respond to a performance by Yo Yo Ma.

• Create a melody using Google doodle, then allow Google's A.I. feature to harmonize it.

• Download the MIDI file of the harmonization.

• Open the MIDI file in Flat and edit/add to it.

If you use Soundtrap for Education with your students, there is an AMAZING resource that was created by the folks at Soundtrap called the Soundtrap Student Course. This collection of 23 engaging videos will get your students up to speed on every aspect of this incredible online digital audio workstation. You might also enjoy it yourself - especially if you are new to the software. That said, there is a Soundtrap for Education Certified Educator Course that consists of 76 videos that you can get certified from upon successfully passing the test at the end of the series. You can use this series of videos as a self-paced, learner led exploration, or you can incorporate it into your teaching. However you are using Soundtrap for Education with your students, this course is MUST SEE TV.

I was speaking with my new friend Sean Longstreet this morning, and he told me about an incredible AI tool called MelodyStudio - an amazing platform for songwriters and creators that uses a powerful AI-tool to help you create melodies for lyrics that you’ve written, as well as many other pretty cool functions. I decided to give it a try, signed up for a free preview account, and types in lyrics to a song that I wrote in college to see what would happen. I am pretty impressed. Before diving in, check out this video that provides a comprehensive overview of the product.

Last night I had the pleasure of co-hosting a webinar with Mason Hilligoss from Flat for Education where we highlighted five different ways to integrate Flat for Education into any K-12 music program. The webinar was streamed on a variety of different platforms and was attended by hundreds of music educators. To watch the webinar, click the video below.

This week I was in San Antonio, Texas for the annual TMEA Conference. I have coming here since 1997 and it is probably the highlight of the annual conference season. Pretty much ALL of my music technology family is here, as well as 25,000 other music educators and their students from around the state. This year, the MusicFirst booth was VERY busy - bustling with energy around our elementary offering, MusicFirst Elementary, our TIA Assessment solution, and the many amazing software programs that are available for performance ensembles, music theory, general music, composition, mariachi, and more. It was a GREAT show for us.

I know that this is a music technology blog and that I don’t usually do reviews, but I recently had the pleasure of watching an amazing documentary on Netflix titled The Greatest Night in Pop and I LOVED it. The documentary captures one incredible night in January of 1985 when dozens of the 80’s biggest music stars gathered late at night in Los Angeles after the AMA Awards Show to record We Are The World - a song that benefited people in Ethiopia who were experiencing a terrible famine at the time. What I loved most about the documentary, and the reason I felt that I needed to share the review here on this blog, is that the focus of the film is the process of writing and recording one song. It is simply wonderful and as someone who was 15 years old at the time, I vividly remember when it was released. Here is the official trailer:

PracticeFirst, powered by the amazing assessment algorithm created by MatchMySound, is a music learning application that gives teachers and students the tools that they need to improve their performance skills. It is perfect for ANY performance ensemble: band, chorus, orchestra, modern band, jazz ensemble, Mariachi, and more. PracticeFirst uses AI to provide immediate and intuitive practice feedback, assessing rhythm, pitch, intonation, and duration. The assessment rigor can be easily adjusted from "Easy" to "Hard," so that you're challenged but never frustrated.  At MusicFirst we are often asked how PracticeFirst compares to another performance assessment product. The following 5 reasons should provide you with all you need to consider adopting PracticeFirst into your music program:

In preparation for my Music Tech class at Montclair State University on microphones, mixers and live sound, I came across an absolutely INCREDIBLE website called Audio Test Kitchen that allows you to hear how hundreds of microphones sound when used in a recording. WOW. This free website is a MUST for anyone thinking of purchasing a microphone and for anyone who teaches the basics of recording and microphones. Almost every brand and model of microphone is represented and the ability to hear them all side by side is a HUGE advantage when you’re thinking of purchasing a microphone for a specific situation. Here’s how it works…