OnSong for iOS is an iPhone and iPad application that turns your phone into a neat little chord sheet tool. From the app's description:
With OnSong, you can manage huge collections of chord sheets for your band or worship team on a simple, lightweight device. Quickly pull and reorder lists and flip from one song to the next with ease. Transpose and highlight chords or change font size with a brush of your finger! Playing music has never been more simple. This software is built for live performance musicians.
Read more: OnSong for iOS Makes Chord Sheets Easy - And Free
Read more: HTML 5 Lays Groundwork Easier Online Music Publishing
I subscribe to a lot of news feeds and newsletters trying to find new and interesting stuff to use and pass on to others in the music education community. Well, this time I have to give props out to a source outside the norm of our little genre. Today's Kim Komando Cool Site of the Day was a web site called Thetamusic that has some very interesting ear training games that I have to admit are pretty awesome as well.
Read more: ThetaMusic- Imaginative and Fun Online Ear Training Game Web Site
Read more: Music Teachers- Share Your iTunes Library Between Multiple Computers
So much fun this morning! I had a trumpet student that got a tube of slide grease stuck in their bell so hard that I could not get it out by any normal means. So I went down to the custodian and asked to use the slop sink and a hose to blow it out with water. It was then that I saw her air compressor with the air gun on it...
We took it out in the hallway and yelled Fire In The Hole! The tube shot all the way down the hallway and nearly took out another teacher. So much fun! Makes me hope he gets it stuck again sometime. :)
Here is an interesting document to share with any potential music majors that you may be teaching. Berklee has just released a really interesting PDF titled "Salary Ranges For US Music Positions", that explores just how much musicians make on average in a given year. It is separated out by dozens of different positions and skill levels.
Among other things the document points out that the median salary range for US public school teachers is between $43,000 and $48,000. The real money to be made in music appears to be in the media industries (go figure) where music is mixed with high tech computer programming skills in jobs such as video game music designer (up to $140,000 a year). Of course at the top of the list are movie composers making up to $500,000 per film (probably more if your name ends in Williams).
For those of us that are fans of the WiiMote Whiteboard (a DIY interactive whiteboard that consists of a $40 WiiMote, a Bluetooth dongle, and a piece of special software) a new accessory due to premiere in November 2010 may make low cost IWB's even more commonplace. Called the uDraw and made by the folks at THQ the device is a drawing tablet that has a holster on the left side for a standard WiiMote from a Nintendo Wii video game system. The uDraw is intended to be used by three different video games, including Pictionary, but it is almost certain to be only a matter of time before Johnny Chung Lee or one of the hundreds of other WiiMote Whiteboard enthusiasts get their hands on the device and mold it into serving classroom needs as well.
For several years now I have been a big fan of Ricci Adam's web site, musictheory.net. I have used his training exercises with my beginning band students to teach beginning concepts while also helping them practice things like naming notes, key signatures, and aural intervals. When I returned to the site at the beginning of this school year I was met with quite a surprise, Ricci has updated almost every tutorial and exercise on the site as well as adding some new material.
Read more: Ricci Adams Updates MusicTheory.net Exercises and Lessons
This month I was tasked with writing a column for MENC Teaching Music Magazine on the topic of how to incorporate electronic instruments into the marching band. Some ensembles like the Western Carolina University Marching Band have also been doing incredible things with electronics for the decade (go read the article in the Oct. 2010 issue to get all the cool details). But it seems like Drum Corps International really began to bring the idea to mainstream marching when it first began to allow amplification back in 2004. Today electronic instruments and amplification are the norm at DCI performances, and if you saw any of this years top twelve then you know that some of them had really been pulling out all the electronic stops.
Read more: Smart Technologies Clarifies Smartboard Notebook License
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