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Collaborative Composition in Music – Project Based Learning

| learningideasnz

Over the last five weeks I’ve been trying a new way of running collaborative composition in my year 10 Option Music class.

This year I’ve been blessed to have a large class of highly motivated and talented students, so they were the perfect class to take a risk and jump into what is for me a new way of teaching composition.

The basic summary of what we did is that I divided the class into five groups.  In the first week each group had to start writing and recording a song (in a rough demo format).  In the 2nd week the groups swapped songs and continued on with what another group had started the previous week.  We did this for five weeks so that in the end, every group had been involved in the composition process on each of the five songs.

Initially the students were very nervous about this process as I’d done very little in terms of how to actually write songs.  However, that didn’t worry me as within each group of five members I knew that there were people with various strengths that when combined would make the process go smoothly.

Prior to this we had done a little work on what makes a good chord progression (mainly analysing four chord songs) and an effective melody but within the context of their own personal compositions, which they recorded/sequenced in either Garageband (Mac users) or Studio One Free (Windows users).  It wasn’t much, but it proved to be enough to get the students on the way with the process.  What was critical to the process though (which I didn’t realise until we got a few weeks into the process) was that a strong knowledge of how to use technology and specifically MIDI keyboards/guitars with software sequencers made all the difference to the success of students being able to pass on their work to the next group (only a few students in the class had strong notation/theory skills so technology bridged the gap very effectively).

Here is a little video where I show one of the songs and how each group contributed towards it week by week:

And here some of the songs created by the students (please keep in mind that these are only supposed to be at ‘demo’ quality… we still intend to record them properly at a later date):

This whole process has been an incredibly empowering experience for the students and is a great demonstration of the high end of the SAMR model:

SAMR

Software like Garageband and Studio One has enabled students to achieved a huge amount in a very short time and made it possible for this separate group collaborative thing to happen.  Students that recorded audio onto iPhones or wrote down music with traditional notation were no where near as effective in the sharing of their music with others.  By far the best way for this process to succeed was for students to compose using MIDI for the instruments and microphones/audio for the vocals… all along with a click so the music could be easily edited and rearranged by different groups.

Here are a couple of short videos watching students in action as they were creating their songs:

For other teachers who are wanting to run this sort of unit I’ve found that the following will make the process go very well:

  • Ensure that each group has at least one person who plays the following instruments: piano, guitar, drums, voice.  Often drummers don’t have a huge amount to do in the first week or two but as the weeks went by I discovered they were increasingly taking charge of the projects… running the technology (i.e. the computer DAW/sequencer)… which was critical when it came to restructuring ideas previous groups had come up with into coherent song structure of intros, verses, choruses, etc
  • Try and have a computer with a MIDI keyboard and a microphone setup in each room.  If you are using student laptops instead make sure you have a dedicated USB drive that holds the files that they work off… minimise copying of files between computers.  We ended up a losing a complete work from one room that students were working in as they mistakingly copied the wrong files then deleted the proper one.  The most successful songs were those that came out of rooms that had dedicated computers that students used each week.
  • Use the note pad facilities of your DAW (like Garageband or Logic) for writing down chord progressions, lyrics, ideas, etc  Don’t have things on scraps of paper as they may get lost.  Keeping everything with the DAW file is an elegant solution for keeping everything in the same place.
  • Don’t record piano/guitar ideas as audio… try to record them as MIDI.  This will enable successive groups to edit what was recorded.  If it’s audio, they’re stuck with it and are unable to improve upon it.

For me this process has been such an eye opener.  The students surprised themselves with what they could come up with.  The loved the process (they always arrived early from lunch so they could start as quickly as they could) and they grew so much as the weeks went by.

I will be making sure that this way of composing will be incorporated to NCEA composition at our school.  It will grow the numbers of students taking music and will help to break down the perception that you must be an orchestral musician who has been learning since you’re seven years old to be able to succeed in NCEA (even after five years at my school I’m still trying to destroy this myth!).

But overall… it was a heck of a lot of fun.  And that is what teaching and learning should be… shouldn’t it?

What is the best DAW for schools? Continued…

| learningideasnz

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post saying why I think Presonus Studio One Free is the best DAW (recording software) for high school teachers and students to use.

Well… such is the ever-changing nature of technology that I’m having to possibly change my mind.

In the last few hours at NAMM Avid has announced a new piece of software as part of their Pro Tools range, Pro Tools First.

Pro Tools is the industry standard DAW – everyone uses it.  But I advised against using it in schools as it was always too expensive, even the ‘student’ version.  What is different about Pro Tools First though is that it is FREE!  It will have limitations (such as only being able to have 16 audio tracks and can only record up to four at once, which may make it difficult recording drums in some circumstances) but it will do pretty much everything students will need of it.

It has software instruments for using MIDI, plugins such as EQ, Compression, Reverb, Delay, etc and many of the same recording, editing and mixing features as the pro version of Pro Tools.

It has not been released yet but as soon as it has I’ll do a full review of it and how useful it will be to high school teachers and students.

For my New Zealand customers it is likely I’ll produce new tutorial videos and documents for my MUSTEC 27656 and 27658 Unit Standard resources based on this new software (these will be available as a free update).

If you’re a teacher who has been using Studio One Free don’t feel you have to change to anything else.  If it works for you and it helps your students to learn how to record and mix keep using it.  Just because a new piece of software has been released doesn’t mean Studio One has become any less capable.

Probably the main reason I’m excited about this is that it brings back memories of using PT Free back in the early 2000’s on a class set of Windows 98 computers.  That was a great solution for teaching but as Digidesign never updated it for Windows XP or OSX I’ve always been looking for other solutions.

So… I’ll keep you posted on this potentially exciting development for teaching recording and mixing in schools.

Duncan

How to mix… a guide for high school teachers – part two

| learningideasnz

In my last blog post I demonstrated a good starting point for teaching students how to mix.

After six weeks or so of having my students mixing using only faders, panning and EQ (on a few projects) I then start to discuss the overall picture of the mix process.  Advanced students would be required to purchase the excellent Mike Senior book on mixing on Kindle in addition to reading other articles online and visiting blog posts like soundscoop (and a multitude of others).

Many recording equipment manufacturers like Universal Audio, AVID, Presonus and many others also offer excellent mixing tutorials and students are encouraged to complete as many of these as possible.  However, while we all have some motivated and diligent students, we’re always going to have several that need a little more ‘spoon-feeding’ (which of course we always try to ‘wean’ them off as good parents/teachers should!).  It would be great if all students went to these websites and started teaching themselves (which undoubtedly some students will) but for others I’ve done a few guides that may help.

NZ Music Technology teachers will be familiar with my resources from http://www.learningideas.co.nz and these are excellent guides specifically tailored to the NZQA assessment system.  A resource I wrote several years ago (which was hugely influenced by the excellent book The Mixing Engineers Handbook by Bobby Owsinski from Mix Books) which I gave away free to NZ teachers can be downloaded here. It basically goes through the stages of mixing and can be summed up like this (but keep in mind there is no one way to mix as every mix and mixing engineer is different – but this is good for newbies):

  1. Balance the faders
  2. Pan the tracks to create a stereo image (although some engineers, particularly if mixing for a live PA system will choose to mix in mono for various reasons)
  3. Use EQ to give each instrument it’s own space in the overall frequency range of the track.  You can think of it like this:
    Screen Shot 2015-01-10 at 9.32.40 am
    (I got this image off the http://www.harmonycentral.com website many years ago and have not been able to find the page for it again so sorry I’m unable to give proper credit to the person that created it).
  4. Use compression on some instruments to reduce the dynamic range to create a more stable volume balance between the instruments (but in many instances it’s more appropriate to use compression before EQ, or before and after, or use multiple compressors… it gets quite complicated really!)
  5. Add ambience with reverb and/or delay.  Note, it’s best to try and get this naturally by recording in a very nice room with good acoustics.  But if this isn’t possible then record the tracks as ‘dry’ as possible and add ambience in your DAW.
  6. Add interest.  All of the above just serves the purpose of making sure you can achieve a stable balance and hear everything.  But it may not make the mix very interesting.  So here you do whatever you need to make the mix dynamic, exciting, original – this is where you attempt to create a piece of great art!  I’ll try to do a blog post dedicated to this point in future weeks.

I’ve done a video for my students and NZ teachers who are teaching the level 2 27703  unit standard, showing how to do a basic mix in a live setting.  Here I’m using a Presonus Studio Live mixing desk and have the audio tracks streaming from my laptop to the mixing desk (rather than having a live band in the room).  I find this mixing desk a great tool for teaching live mixing to my students but all the concepts I discuss in the video are equally applicable to mixing in a studio/DAW environment.

This video has worked well for my students who may not have followed my in-class demos and may be too nervous to ask questions in front of others as they’re able to replay parts they don’t quite understand.  It serves a good way of filling in the gaps for them.

Please note, the tracks from this video were downloaded from the excellent Sound on Sound magazine website.

In another blog post I’ll go into detail about my assessment processes for mixing with my senior students.  Students can’t just do a mix – they have to be able to articulate all their mix decisions and why they made them.

Thanks,

Duncan