My Music Ed App List for iOS Devices - 2013 edition

Many of my students have mobile devices. It's what drove me to buying a Android smartphone and most recently, an iPod Touch. Now that I've had a bit of time to play with some of these apps that either my esteemed colleagues Alessandra diCenzo and David Story told me about or that I've stumbled upon, I can put a decent list together of music education apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Recording and Backing Track Apps for iOS

Garage Band for iPhone ($4.99) turns your iPad, iPhone and/or iPod touch into a collection of "touch instruments" and a full-featured recording studio. Want piano? Guitar? Drums? You can do it. You can even plug an electric guitar into you iThing to play through amps. Someone will have to let me know how well it works as I don't have an iPhone.

iReal b Music Book & Play Along ($7.99) is currently on my Android smartphone. However, I believe it was available for iOS devices first. What can I say about it? You get a mobile band with iReal b. Download the chord charts for over 1,200 songs available in the forums. Or, enter in the chord progression for any song, choose your instruments, tempo and style and play away. Instead of using a metronome, why not try practicing with a virtual band?

Note Reading, Theory and Ear Training Drills

Master in a Minute (FREE) is a fun music app for kids. It helps students develop their note reading skills. I like how it teaches intervallic reading. It has certainly been helping some of my students who are struggling with note reading. There used to be a full version, but it is no longer available in the App Store.

Music Reading Essentials ($2.99) has four sets of flash cards to choose from: notes, rhythms, intervals and symbols. Students can focus on one area or combine decks. The timer sure adds a bit of pressure. My students have been playing a round of this while waiting for their lesson.

Music Theory Pro ($4.99) has note naming games, key signatures and interval ear training. So far, I've noticed that it's better suited to my older beginners, intermediate and advanced students. Very slick design. I'll have to try the pro levels. I like how this app includes jazz chords and scales, altered dominants and extended chords. MTP is also available for Apple computers in the App store.

My Note Games! (FREE) was featured on BBC Click! and was nominated for a "Learning without Frontiers Innovation Award" in 2012. It has six games: Hear it, Play It; Play that Note, Play-a-Day!, Play-a-Carol!, Toonr the Tuner and Hear it, Note It. My beginner students enjoy it, although they don't get very far with the free version. I just bought the $6.99 upgrade to unlock all 18 levels..

Note Works Free (FREE) is for iPad. I was quite sad to see that I couldn't get it on my iPod Touch. It looked like pure fun when Alessandra showed it to a bunch of us at the 2013 CFMTA Convention. This game is designed to teach note recognition and improve sight reading skills. Your mission is to help Hungry Munchy catch each note as quickly as possible before it skitters off-screen. The full version has more bells and whistles (Note Works Full) for $4.99.

Rhythm Lab ($2.99) allows users to copy, save, or share any rhythm pattern as an image. You can send tapping results in an e-mail, create and print worksheets. My students and I haven't tried this app out yet

I have long recommended Musictheory.net to students and am glad that the creators have made a mobile version. Tenuto ($3.99) offers  fifteen customizable exercises to help you with chord recogniation, intervals and ear training. There are also musical calculators and twelve-tone matrices. They also have a Theory Lesson app for $2.99.

Metronome and Tempo Related Apps 

Metronome Ϟ (FREE) is what I have installed on my iPod Touch. It's simple and gets the job done. The "tap tempo" feature is greatly appreciated. Also, the practice timer is a neat. You can actually set it to hammer out the beats while you drill a trouble spot for one, two, three, four or five minutes.

I've just installed Tempo - Metronome with Setlists ($1.99). It has made the Top 100 List in the Music category.  There are five modes: Basic, Preset, Setlist, Practice and Gig. Each mode presents a different combination of functionalities optimized for the task at hand. I look forward to exploring this app.

Tempo SloMo (FREE) allows you to practice at your own pace. This is great not just for music students, but language and dancing students as well. Take a whatever you are working on and slow it down or speed up the audio track without affecting the pitch. I think this will become a popular app with my students, especially with their pop songs.

There are countless apps for music education. I'll update the list as I discover new apps. Feel free to suggest some of your favourite iOS apps for learning and playing music.

Next, I'll take a look at some Android apps for music education.

How to Publish Your App A Must for New App Creators

If you have a mobile device, chances are, you have said, "I wish there was an app for that." Perhaps you're thinking, "How hard can it be?" and have started to create said app. Making an app is one thing, but how to you get it on the App Store? Author Grant Spink walks you through the whole process of publishing your iOS app in his first book, entitled How to Publish Your App. The subtitle says it all: "No code! Just a step-by-step guide, helping you through the tricky parts of publishing an app."

A quick search on Amazon reveals that this is the only book of its kind currently in the marketplace. So young author, Grant Spink (he's 14) saw an opportunity to share the lessons he learned in publishing his own app.

The first thing to take note of is that Spink says outright that this guide is to help you publish your app, not create it. You will have to look elsewhere for help in that area.

When Grant gave me a copy of How to Publish Your App, I was attracted to the layout. Flipping through the book, I could see that the design is very clean, with just the right amount of text and plenty of screen shots. Both copy and images are spaced out to give an uncluttered feel.

The guide is laid out into 13 chapters which outlines the publishing process in clear and concise steps. The first five chapters show you how to get set up as an Apple Developer: the obligatory introduction, Becoming a Developer, iOS Provisional Portal Outline, Requesting Your Certificates and Uploading Your Certificates.

Spink explains what is happening at each step and why it is important that you complete it. He provides links to the URLs to all the forms you need to complete. No hunting, no digging required.

The next two chapters prepare you to test and subsequently distribute your app: App IDs and Provisioning Profiles. He explains why these steps are important and walks the reader through the steps of creating profile.

Chapters 9 and 10 are critical for any new App Developer to go through. These chapters alone make the book worth its weight in gold: Getting Access to Contracts and Filling out Your Information. They walk you through all the legal, payment and tax forms that Apple makes all developers and sellers complete.

The final three chapters take you through the last stages of publishing your app: Adding a New App, Preparing an App for Archiving and Submit to the App Store. True to form, these final steps are described step by step with the requisite screen caps.

In an interview, Spink told me that he wanted to make the step-by-step guide simple enough that people without coding experience and complete newbies to developing apps can understand. I say that he succeeded in doing so. I have absolutely no experience in this area and after reading his book, I feel that I can publish my own app.

This young author has my brain going, trying to think of a couple of apps that I could create. However, I should probably just get to know my new iPod Touch first.

How to Publish Your App is available on Amazon in softcover ($21.08 CAD) and eBook format in the iBooks Store. At 122 pages, it's a very easy read.

Grant Spink is an actor, writer and student in Calgary, Alberta. He is the owner of Grantworks Media. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Playing a Game of Patience with WordPress Multisite

Last week, I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress framework to version 3.6. I dutifully disabled my plug-ins, backed up my main site and all seven blogs and then clicked on the "Upgrade Now" link. That's when ALL sites broke. For a while, I couldn't even get in to the administrative panel. All I got was a 500 internal server error message. The support team at Tera-Byte (my webhost provider) finagled it so I could get back in. They also informed me that my WordPress theme was broken. Great.

I thought I had kept up with updating all my WP themes. I thought it would be as simple as all the previous WP framework upgrades. I thought that I was doing all right with managing all my sites on WordPress Multisite.

How wrong I was.

My first instinct was to drop everything that I was doing to rectify this - pull an all-nighter or two if need be. Rewind to a few years ago, and I would have.

However, one look at the calendar that fateful day (September 5), told me that I only had three days remaining to prepare for the teaching year. Writing, designing and printing handouts, shopping, planning and cleaning took precedence.

I had to put ALL sites into Maintenance Mode for one week. In a world where articles are shared, reviews are searched and tweets are sent by the second, every minute that you're offline is costly. Google kept sending me messages to say that the Googlebots couldn't access my site. Page rank probably dropped a bit. Unless you had my affiliate links bookmarked, you couldn't shop for sheet music or geeky cool items.

Maintenance Mode was necessary though. I needed the time to research and troubleshoot. Believe me, I needed that time. I couldn't dedicate the time to repairing my websites until I was done teaching for the night.  However, because of all the research and digging I had to do - on an already fatigued brain - I could only do so much each night.

I had to exercise patience. I had to continually remind myself that so long as the social networks were all working, Musespeak™ was still busy online through my YouTube, Soundcloud, LinkedIn, Flickr, Google+ and FB business Pages.

There were some design issues I wanted to improve upon on the main site. That meant playing around with those hex colour codes. Then, I had to research a calendar plugin use. That's been on my To Do List for months.

That went fairly well. Then, WordPress told me that it was time to upgrade to version 3.6.1. That went smoothly, until I realized that my media files on all blogs contained broken links after the upgrade. It wasn't until last last night (or early this morning), that I found the solution (if in doubt, replace the .htaccess file).

I also wanted to explore other premium WordPress themes and plug-ins that would perhaps be more compatible with WP MU. All of that takes time. As a result, I was lurking on ThemeForest and WordPress.org's Support Forums quite a bit.

In the end, I went back to my original themes - after upgrading the primary one - Pendulum. I will get around to tweaking each of my sites in turn. However, the important task is done: everything is functional. Everything is searchable. I can leave things be for now and focus on what I should be doing now: teaching, writing and practicing my music instruments.

Using Waveforms in Music Lessons

Summer lessons give me a chance to try out new ideas with students. One of my students doesn't pay attention to the rhythm and tempo as carefully as he should. I wanted to find a different way to show him that "steady" and "unsteady" are two different things. Last week, I decided to show him what "steady playing" and "unsteady playing" looks like. Not with the webcams but with the waveforms.

Using Audacity, I recorded both of us playing the same passage. I synchronized them and first asked him to study how well our waveforms lined up. Then, I hit Play.

When I asked him to repeat the passage, he was much steadier!

On Music and Technology, Teaching Awards and Future Collaborations

Last month, I was named the Tech Teacher of the Year. Last week, I got to pick up the hardware on the other side of the country:

The Tech Teacher of the Year Award is the brainchild of Roland Canada, Music for Young Children and Conservatory Canada. It is the first time that this award has been given out. The representatives involved decided to present the award at the Canadian Federation of Music Teachers' Associations (CFMTA) national convention in Halfiax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

The magnitude of the award didn't hit me until I stepped into the ballroom at the World Trade and Convention Centre. The mere thought of standing in front of music teachers from all over North America, many of whom have been teaching for far longer than I, was overwhelming. The realization that I had to come up with a decent acceptance speech was frightening.

Thanks to my previous "lives" - arts marketing and fund development, special events and communications - experience and Divine inspiration kicked in. Ergo, I am familiar with the "lead sheet" of an acceptance speech. All that was left was to decide upon a few salient points while my shaking hands tried to direct my meal into my mouth.

Now I can't remember everything I said. I do remember thanking the sponsors for coming up with the idea and for paying my transportation and accommodation to the convention. I vaguely remember mentioning how difficult it was to put the submission together (my first take was over 10 minutes long!). As well, I mentioned how my students are equally fascinated with old technology, tasking me with finding an old magnetic tape recorder.

My last point is one that I've made several times here: technology doesn't have to be scary. It took me years to get my studio to where it is today. Even then, it wasn't until my involvement with Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir last year that I upped my game on the music and technology front.

Roland Canada hosted a dinner for the participants who were in attendance at the convention. It was inspirational to just meet and chat with this bright individuals and to express the desire to work together.

When I was able to tell the world that I had won the award, I shared my news on Eric Whitacre's Facebook Wall. I know I shouldn't be surprised that he replied. After all, Eric has nurtured a great relationship with his fans and members of Virtual Choir - to the point that he drops into the odd Virtual Choir Google Hangout and has dinner with 10 VC members who decide to go to Vancouver to catch him in concert:

However, knowing how busy he must be, it's still a bit shocking to get a reply from him.

What's next on the horizon? Who knows? I just know that now that I'm back from Halifax, I have to fight the urge to incorporate all the neat ideas I picked up - all at once.