I figured it out! I’m so excited. Students can now post their music on this website and their parents and friends can subscribe to their category and automatically download their new songs as they are created. How cool is that!

Here’s how to subscribe to a student’s podcast:

1. Install iTunes on your computer (mac or pc - it works on both)

2. Open iTunes and go to Advance>subscribe to podcast

3. Put the following url in there:

http://musictech4u.com/category/subcategory/?feed=podcast

where category is the main category for your child (class) and subcategory is the child’s last name.

Is this too complex? Well, no, not if I can show everyone at back to school night!

Now I have to figure out other ways for people to subscribe other than iTunes. Some people wont’ be comfortable with that.

Well this is just so exciting! Too bad schoolfusion doesn’t allow for student podcasting.

Yay!

-Shannon Gunn

ps this is actually called Category Casting since you’re only subscribing to a certain category.

This is a test of a podcasting nature.

 

 My God [5:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Well MixCraft is an awesome program. I will have to post that MixCraft is much easier to use than Sonar. My students picked it up so quickly at the music tech camp! Everything about MixCraft is easy to use - the virtual instruments, the loops, and I’m really impressed with the beat matching/pitch matching function. We tried to do that with AudioSnap in Sonar and it just didn’t even come close to comparing to MixCraft. I love how you can right click on anything and go to “Make into Loop” and it just works! In Sonar, if you do that with a midi track, it adds time to the end of the loop if the loop ends before or after a measure, and then it’s impossible to get rid of the extra silence. Besides, “Groove Clip Looping” is a lot more difficult to remember than “Make Into Loop” - works well for my kids. I will say that I hear a lot of distortion on the upper frequencies with Mixcraft that I never noticed before with Sonar, but I think that may be because we’re using lower quality audio loops and turning everything into an MP3. The kids can’t tell the difference. The “Save As>MP3″ feature is also very nice! In Sonar, you have to export to audio, then we open it in iTunes, and go thru a bunch of hoops to conver to MP3. It’s great they have the mp3 encoder with MixCraft - makes everything so much easier! Everyone either listens to their music on an mp3 player or the computer these days - .wav is so old-fashioned! lol Hopefully we can get it approved and on our student computers asap.

I would also like to thank David Raimono for sending us 10 free copies of Acoustica’s MixCraft to hand out to the kids. Each kid got one and now they’re going to be able to continue to compose after camp is over!

Well it’s time to give credit where credit is due. I have to say that I am thankful for the ease of use of Sibelius cause I think it really helped my students create their first band piece. The first day of camp, I had them copy a piano piece into the computer and then use the “explode” feature of the Arrange function to arrange it for concert band. That really gave them a sense of accomplishment at the end of the first day of camp! Then I used that to teach them how to write percussion parts. The only problem is, when you use woodblocks or some other pitched percussion, and you try to convert your score to a Scorch file, the woodblock sound turnes into a flute sound when you listen to it on the web. I’ve got to figure that out. Anyway, the third day of camp they started their own composition, and we did a lot of cutting and pasting to make it work. I will say that the nice thing about Sibelius is that you can highlight a section and move it up or down by steps using the arrow keys. The kids learned that if they moved it up 3 steps it sounded pretty. They didn’t have to understand the concept of intervals, theory, thirds, etc… just use the computer to make it sound good. I was really impressed with some of the harmonizations - see Megan Westcott or Jake Goodridge’s pieces to see an example. That was very helpful in avoiding the theory and allowing them to just write harmony. There are still things that make Sibelius difficult to teach with - namely, deleting multiple measures (which is way too complex), adding measures (you never know if it’s going to come before or after the measure you’ve selected, and if you want to add multiple measures to the end of the piece it adds it to the second to last measure), and the fact that it freezes sometimes. It was really helpful to have the software in general, though, cause I was able to bring them pretty far in a week. I don’t think they could have written a full band piece with pencil and paper in 2.5 days. Thanks!

This is a begining band piece for 6th graders.

Mini Adventure

I really was practically “mindless” on this one, hope you like it

Mindless Mix

Listen to the blob taking shape and becoming a fully operational figure by the end >.<

Blob Attack

This is very punkish and cool.

Punk Song

This is more of a classical piece than anything else.

Drama Song

the-untitled-song

i cold not think of a title so i named it this hope you like….