I was just scrolling through TikTok, as I tend to do, and stumbled upon some posts of Suno AI. So I decided to put in some terms based on something close to my heart…our school rules and getting students to follow them. So I put in this text prompt: A ukulele based song about following school expectations of being safe, kind, respectful, responsible, and making good choices. Here’s the generated result (link): https://suno.com/song/2e4156a2-217b-4f86-849e-825ee56e6dca The lyrics? [Verse 1] Monday morning, we’re all in a line Got our backpacks on, ready to shine (ooh yeah) Principal says it’s ..read more

When I taught high school choir, I would often create rehearsal tracks for my students using music notation software. These tracks would not have words, but would be an instrumental sound–usually a piano, as I could not stand the choral “oo” sound that is designated to many notation programs. One year, when presenting at ACDA in Salt Lake City, another choir director came up and told me about how he used PDF to Music Pro to create rehearsal tracks for his students with words. He would even create MusicXML and PDF files to import to the program! PDF to Music Pro is wonderful in that it takes an ..read more

Through my ukulele sites, I have released an interview with David Gray, a music educator in the United Kingdom who has been releasing many materials for music education on his YouTube Channel, Music with Mr Gray. https://www.youtube.com/@MusicwithMrGray The content ranges from recorder to ukulele to pitched percussion to brass resources. If you teach recorder in any way, you’ll want to use the resources on the channel. The podcast can be found at on YouTube.com/ukestuff, or on the UkeStuff Podcast on most podcast streaming software ..read more

I haven’t mentioned this on the blog or social media, but I am in Ames, Iowa (Campus of Iowa State University) presenting a couple of presentations for the IMEA Fall Music Education Conference. Today (Friday) I am presenting on the iPad in Music Education (looking at the device in 2023). Tomorrow (Saturday), I will be presenting a session about ukulele. PDFs of the presentations will be posted later; the iPad Session will be available on this page (on the “Past Presentations” page), and the notes from the ukulele session will be on my ukulele blog. (Update 11/17 4:38pm the iPad Presentation is ..read more

I am now in my fifth year of teaching at the elementary level, having survived the transition from secondary teaching…as well as a global pandemic. I teach recorder to my students over two years (Grades 3 & 4), with several guiding thoughts: Students are learning how to read notation and make music on a wind instrument from written notation. It is a pre-band experience, allowing students to experience playing a wind instrument. It is an affordable instrument, where every student can buy their own—or we can provide one for them. It backs up all of the foundation we have laid in previous ye ..read more

While I have been a beta tester of Notion for years, the very kind folks at PreSonus have been asking me to review Notion Mobile for some time, and I have been avoiding writing that review. It is the summer, I am not teaching (though I do have several part-time jobs), so I no longer have the excuse that I’m too busy. “Busy” is true, combined with teaching (elementary for the past four years), creating ukulele content (going on seven years), and being a husband/parent. In truth, my use of technology in music education changed the moment I left secondary teaching. As many readers know, I had a f ..read more

Notion Mobile has been out for some time, and I have avoided writing about it until now. With my “new” (year four already!) elementary music position, my need for traditional notation software is extremely limited to those rare occasions that I am preparing music for my 4th & 5th grade extra-curricular choir, arranging string parts for our high school combined concert in the fall (something I still do, years after leaving my high school position), or when I am arranging things for ukulele (I currently have a collection of Christmas Carol Chord Melody arrangements for Ukulele available on ..read more

Hello! It has been quite a while since I have written a blog post. There are a number of reasons for that, and I will have a few posts coming in the near future. But I did want to give some insight into where I’ve been lately. Ultimately, I haven’t blogged very much. This hasn’t stopped companies from sending PR materials to the address on this blog (there are only a few active music technology blogs these days…and this one has not been very active); and I occasionally get a request for guest posts (people looking to be paid to write content). As I have to explain to both companies and aspirin ..read more

Dorico has announced version 2.0 of their iPad app, which brings some feature parity to the latest desktop release of Dorico. You can read their full release here: https://blog.dorico.com/2022/02/dorico-for-ipad-2-0-now-available-from-the-app-store/ I haven’t used Dorico for iPad very much, nor have I worked with the latest version of the PC/Mac version. Life has been busy with work (it has been a stressful year, more than most, but not a bad year) and the ukulele work (videos require hours and hours of work), and I need time to really absorb what Dorico can do; some of the concepts are still ..read more

I just received notice from PlayScore that they have released a big update to their music scanning app, PlayScore 2. It is said to be much faster, offering a count-in (for people that play scores through the app), with MusicXML export of lyrics and chord symbols (I’m not sure how it will handle ukulele diagrams) along with some new sounds (recorder and harpsichord) and of course, improved accuracy. While I still love the simplicity and cost of Sheet Music Scanner, I have paid for the annual subscription to PlayScore 2 for the last few years, as there are times it is worth having and saves me t ..read more