Student Post: Music iApps Review

My students occasionally do extra projects to earn more Maestro Bucks to spend at Maestro's Market. One such method is to write a review, be it a concert review or in this case, an app review. This is from one of my senior level students - Dylan: Pocket Drums I thought this was a very fun app, letting you play along to songs in your library or on your own. It is a 6-piece drum set. You can record your own drum loops, and then play along with them to make a very full sound. In conclusion: 5/5 stars Rhythm Pad When I played the pads, no sound came out. 0/5 stars Shazam This is a very fun app to play with, just hold it up to your speaker while it's playing a song (like from the iTunes store) and, if everyone's quiet, after a few seconds, it will show you what song it is. It's perfect for when you hear a song you want but don't know the name of it.  It's also linked with the iTunes store, so when it finds the song name, there is a little iTunes store button so you can buy the song. In conclusion: 4/5 stars Author's Note: For five stars, make it work for live piano performances. (-:

Using Multiple Cameras in a Music Lesson Demonstration

After reading "On Teaching Piano with Multiple Cameras", one of my readers had mused how wonderful it would be to see a demonstration of using multiple cameras in a music lesson. My student Dylan and I were happy to oblige.

Here we are working on a short chord progression from U2's "Stuck in a Moment". I used the three claps at the beginning to synchronize the videos (à la Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir).

We used the following cameras for this demonstration:

1. POV Camera on Dylan's head (Top Left): GoPro Hero 2

2. Profile Camera on the Studio Desk (Top Right): Microsoft HD LifeCam 3000

3. Pedal Camera (Bottom Right): Canon PowerShot 5S IS (I can't bring myself to retire it completely because it's still a good camera)

4. Overhead Camera (Bottom Left): Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910

I took a photographer friend's advice and turned off the auto-focus on the two webcams. Another thing I do is try to minimize the number of background programs running on the computer when recording video.

The profile view is essential for checking posture and hand position. The overhead view gives you the musician's peripheral of the keyboard geography. The pedal view is essential with students who are having issues with timing their pedal changes. As for the POV camera - isn't is just fun to see how another musician sees when they play? It's also good for checking where they are focusing.

I will probably swap the positions for the pedal and profile camera.

Now, when a student working on something new, I can show them various perspectives that they can review at their leisure at home. Or perhaps they'd like to show off a newly polished piece to their relatives across the country.

Students, "Record & Review" has never been so easy to do at home. Use any of your portable devices, such as a smart phone, iPod, tablet, netbook, laptop, camera. You can place them at various positions as we have here.

Find out more about how to incorporate webcams into your studio here.

* Special thanks to my student Dylan and his family for granting permission to record Dylan for this demo. *

On Teaching Piano with Multiple Cameras

This week's lessons feature a fun bonus for my students - the addition of the POV camera. My last student of the evening and I had a ball working with the POV camera. By using trakAxPC, I am able to create a split-screen lesson clip. All it took was a little Virtual Choir genius ("Clap 3 times") to sync the two video clips:

Virtual Choir 3 Conductor Video (Soprano) - Water Night from Eric Whitacre on Vimeo.

Here's what a split screen lesson clip looks like:

This way, my students get the exact same perspectives they get when they are sitting at the bench (the straight-ahead view of the score and an HD shot of the peripheral view of their hands. trakAxPC is so easy to use. I haven't even gone through the tutorials!

Music and technology is a wonderful thing.

Website Migration and Cross-Posting

Maintaining and updating your music studio website is one thing that should be done regularly. After all, search engines, love dynamic pages. However, how many music teachers have a lot of time to spend on their website? Not I, and although I learned Dreamweaver at my last "regular" job, I feel that website design technology has advanced far beyond what I was taught at my basic "Introduction to Dreamweaver" class. Although, I do know some HTML code, I cannot, for the life of me, get my brain around CSS. I'm sure, with time, I'd get it, but back to my original question, "How many music teachers have a lot of time to spend on their website?" That's when I started blogging. At least, that way, some pages on my site would get updated. However, I am challenged to update even my blogs regularly. My latest experiment is to ask several fellow word-savvy music teachers to contribute to my Musings at Musespeak and Busted Piano String blogs. We'll do some cross-posting on each other's blogs, thereby injecting new life to each other's sites, and share new ideas with a larger audience. Stay tuned for some guest posts. Back to my website. I will be migrating my website to Wordpress with the hopes that simplicity with lead to website optimization. Well I will be, once I'm done watching all Wordpress tutorials published by fellow music teacher and web guru Robert Vimer.

Metronome Android Apps

I recently moved into the 21st century as far as cellphone technology. Yes, you're right. I finally got onto the smartphone wagon.

I've been experimenting with a couple of free metronome apps for Android to help when I'm practicing music away from my piano (or sometimes, when I just want to hear something different at home). The first is Mobile Metronome. It's a nice basic metronome. You can adjust the instrument used to bang out the beats. I wound up uninstalling it because I wanted to find something that could handle hybrid meter.

I'm currently playing around with Metronome Beats. I was able to set it to play 6/8 time. It works nicely. You can also customize what sounds you hear. You can also customize the following features: emphasize the first beat of the bar, adjust the normal beat, the pitch of the beat subdivisions and the length of the sound. You can even create custom sounds to use for keeping time.Both Android apps have a "Tap Tempo" feature.I'm still on the lookout for an app that can handle beat subdivision for hybrid meter well. Stay tuned!