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Make music with UJAM

December 23, 2010 in lesson ideas, music, raves, Resources in the classroom, tools

UJAM

I found out about UJAM yesterday so I’ve been playing around with it this morning and I’m quite impressed. It’s a cloud based music creation platform which lets you use your own voice as the instrument. You can hum or sing a tune which UJAM records and can play back as a grand piano, electric guitar along with a backing track. It’s very powerful and easy to use, if you have ever used music creation software before. If not, it doesn’t take too long to create a relatively plausible track in a few minutes. Here’s my own example which I made in about 15 minutes.

UJAM will never take the place of learning a real instrument but it does give you the ability to capture a tune quickly, auto tune it, convert it into another instrument, edit it and add arrangements. Very clever indeed.

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iNudge – music creation made easy

February 6, 2010 in lesson ideas, music, Resources in the classroom, tools

Thanks to a blog post by Vanessa Cassie I have just discovered this gem – iNudge. It is a rather interesting sound creation tool with which you can create a looped pattern of melodies, beeps and percussion sounds. There are 8 sound patterns to choose from (small matrix icons on the right of the iNudge tool) and with a bit of trial and error you can create a rather pleasing or annoying musical loop. It’s very easy to use and I can imagine a class of children composing quick and interesting sound patterns to be used in Podcasts or short class films.

Tags: activities, music, resource, sounds
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Making music together

July 31, 2009 in lesson ideas, music

I love music. I love playing music too and I have been in a few bands over the years as either a drummer or singer/guitarist. I have even dabbled in writing my own songs. So earlier today, when I came across inbflat (a collaborative music/spoken word project), I was not only impressed at how simple an idea it was but inspired at the potential it could have for classroom use.

What to do

Teach my class a pentatonic scale C D E G A C
Give the children xylophones with only these notes so they can experiment on musical arrangements
Video these performances for review and discussion
Provide further instruments such as a keyboard marked with the scale for the children to explore arrangements further
Children record these on PC and on video
Upload separate performances onto a blog post for the grand performance

This is only an idea brewing but one which I intend to explore with my new class of Y3/4′s sometime this coming school year providing them a wonderfully creative musical experience.

Darren Solomon is the musician behind inbflat. You can find out more here.

edit

Earlier today @mrslwalker posted a link to the following video. It shows Bobby McFerrin demonstrating the power of the Pentatonic scale. Amazing stuff.