A Genesis weekend

Anybody who knows me (or who has had the misfortune to be in one of my classes) is totally aware of my obsession with Genesis and Peter Gabriel. So, it's been a great week for me. My dear friend Chris sent me the DVD remasters of the early Genesis albums, and they sound absolutely stunning. Plus the extras on the DVDs with interviews and early concert footage are worth the price of admission alone. Then I also received a copy of "Rewiring Genesis" in the mail. I was dubious about this at first - Nick d'Virgilio and Mark Hornsby performing The Lamb in its entirety, but the performance is stunning, and the reorchestrations really lend a fresh read to ony of my favourite albums. Any Genesis fan should check it out - it's available at Amazon if you can't find it at your local CD store.

A whirlwind few months

Wow. What a crazy first few months at my new job. I kind of expected things to be busy, but the pace is just incredible ... incredible in a good way. The students I am now teaching are so motivated and so capable that I find myself running to catch up with them most of the time. We have done so much composition in the last few weeks it's staggering. I checked my syllabus last night and found out we've already covered three quarters of it since September. When I give the students something to do, they accomplish it in half the time I expect, and twice as well as I expect. One student just knocked off a 10-minute horn concerto in his spare time, and it's a quite remarkable piece of music. This gives me lots of opportunity to explore new ventures - time to drift into uncharted waters. After all, there's still about two thirds of the school year left.

Carnival Time

It's Carnival Time! My friend Amy Burns is hosting the 3rd edition of the Music Education Blog Carnival on her blog. Amy is an outstanding teacher, and there are a boatload of lucky kids in New Jersey who get to be creative and make music all the time thanks to Amy's enthusiasm and commitment. The new edition of the Carnival is packed with inspiring articles for educating young 'uns in the music classroom, and some great ideas for using technology to teach music. Well done, Amy, and kudos to everyone that contributed - I'm proud to have one of my posts selected to be represented amongst this body of progressive, positive work. Please click on the link in this article and check out the Carnival.

ADHD kid listens to music - shocker!

School begins again this week, and as I get ready preparing curricula and lessons, one thought keeps coming back to me. Look at the picture on the left. If you'd been asleep for the last seven days you might not know who that man is, but chances are you do. Here's a young man who was labeled/diagnosed as ADHD at school, and given little chance of success. And what does he do to focus his mind each time he gets ready to jump in the water? The answer's in the picture. And the answer's even bigger when you really think about it. It's not the content of what he's listening to that matters. Hundreds of bloggers have speculated about what's on his iPod and what those lyrics mean to him as he prepares to swim. Yet he himself told the NBC commentators that it's nothing more than some hip-hop - just the things he likes to listen to. No analysis needed. It's simple. Music's power is part of what helps an academically-discarded kid become the greatest athlete in Olympic history. Congratulations, Michael Phelps, you have helped millions realize the power of single-minded determination and devotion to your skill, and yet you accepted the World's praise with true humility. You are a role model in many more ways than just being a truly outstanding swimmer.

Is there a Garage Band for PC?

If I had a penny for every time a student or parent had asked me that...

Apple made a great choice with including Garage Band in iLife. It's a very fun program and there's a lot to it beyond just the loop browser, though I do have my beefs with it which are some of my usual beefs with the way Apple does things (that's a rant for another day, though). Above all, Garage Band is making music creativity available big time and that has to be applauded.

Whenever students or parents see how much fun can be had making music on Garage Band in school, they always want to ask if they can do this at home on their PC. I usually steer them towards buying Sony's Acid, or one of its light versions (Acid Express, Super Dooper Music Looper, Jam Trax, American Idol Extreme Music Creator, etc.) After all, Sony's program is the pioneer - Acid was originally made by the clever guys at Sonic Foundry who pretty much created the beat-matching algorithm that makes Garage Band possible.

Now I have found a great free alternative to Acid or to Garage Band. TrakAx is absolutely worth a look-at. It's a fun program, it's a visual delight, it's intuitive and easy to use, the website is outstanding, and the tutorial videos are terrific. Best of all, it's free. You can use it to create great music for music's sake, or you can use it to add music to a slide show or video. You can get packs of loops for next to nothing at the site ($2 for 10 professionally-produced loops is a great price - better than buying a pack of gum). You can also use loops (in wav, mp3, ogg, or wma) that you already have on your computer - access them through the loop browser. If you're totally strapped for cash you could always Google "free loops" and see if you could get some for nothing, but you usually have to subscribe to something to get them, and you have no guarantee that they're virus-free nor professionally-produced - better to save on your next pack of gum and buy some really good loops from TrakAx.

To download, go to www.trakax.com and cancel all appointments for the rest of the day so you can play - this is one of the best music education downloads out there.

To compress or not to compress

There's been quite a lot of talk this week about data compression of digital files. Good old Neil Young has weighed in pretty heavily on how compression spoils the fidelity of music...and Yahoo has pulled the plug on its digital music market, leaving everybody who downloaded music from them high and dry if they didn't back up copies of the songs they "bought".

I was never a big fan of digital downloading to begin with. The convenience factor has spawned a market where quality is sacrificed. I am glad that people are listening to music on their portable music devices, but I cringe at the thought of how much quality has been sacrificed to make that happen. If you compress the music using a codec such as mp3, you lose the upper harmonics which are so important to the sound - you destroy the deep complexity of what the audio engineers and producers have crafted through their art. The more you compress, the more you lose.

Compression was initially a convenient way to reduce file size when this was necessary - to store or to email large amounts of data. Now we have the storage capacity to take larger files, but people still compress to squeeze more into their available space. I would guess many people do not have a clue about what data compression does to the sound, and they are listening to something that has had much of the life sucked out of it. Do you know how much music you can get on a 160GB iPod in uncompressed format? The answer is way more than you're ever going to need to go on your jog round the park, anyway. Squeezing to save space is ludicrous - the next generation of portable music devices will have 10 or 100 times that storage capacity, and people will rush out to buy them on the day they're released, just like they did with the original iPod and now the iPhone. Apple's desire to sell, sell, sell, has left us with an uneducated consumer market, and a greed to pack in as much as we can without regard to quality.

When you download music from the internet you don't "own" it. You have purchased the rights to listen to it at your own convenience. You haven't got the right to duplicate it for your friends or to publish it on your web page. You can't kick up a fuss if the company who made it available to you pulls the plug. In this digital age, you should have learned to back up your files. The architecture of data storage is still more brittle than the demands we put on it - it is an inevitability that your hard drive will crash.

Go buy music on CD or even Blu-Ray- it's way better quality than a download. Don't compress your files unless it's necessary, and only if you have an uncompressed copy to go back to. Always record to CD quality (16 bit, 44.1 kHz) or higher if you can. And go check out Neil Young's "Living With War" website - http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/index.html

Toys for grown-ups

Music technology is so much fun. I've used technology to compose since I was very young. My first attempts were with two tape recorders and one microphone. I would sing Christmas carols by singing the tune into one tape recorder and then play that back and record myself singing a harmony vocal with the tune. Then I would add four or five more harmonies, but by the time I had the fifth or sixth part in, I would have to record the melody again as it had degraded so much in transfer between the tapes! Above all, though, I remember the experience and the thrill of doing that, and I really believe that's what music technology education is all about. We must give our students the experience of composing and recording and allow them to enjoy that process. Today's music tech toys are far more sophisticated than the tape recorders I started with, and the options are limitless. I feel very lucky that I love teaching this so much, and I have the opportunity to do it in a truly great school and county.