How I Manage My Private Teaching Studio

Dr. Frank Buck returns to the show for the kick-off of my mini-series, Productivity Boot Camp! Dr. Frank Buck is a productivity master with a background in band directing and administration. I share my knowledge of Apple products and native third-party apps, and he shares his experience with web-based, cross-platform apps. We bounce back and forth about good digital task and note management and share our favorite apps!

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Sticky Widgets
Frank Buck – Feedly

Album of the Week:
Robby – The Lost Art of Longing | BT
Frank Buck – Handel Flute Sonata V – Recording of Dr. Frank Buck Performing

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Frank Buck – Twitter | Website

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Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Flat for Education:

Flat for Education offers music educators and their students the most affordable cloud-based music notation software on the market. Empowering teachers to create playful and engaging music activities, creations, assessments on any device at any time.

The platform integrates with every well-known learning management system available: Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, Canvas, Schoology, and MusicFirst to name a few. Everything will be synchronized with your existing setup to avoid any time loss.

Flat for Education offers an advanced system of assignments allowing you to create playful and stunning music activities with your students.

Create a template for all your students to start working from, or simplify the toolbar to have them only working with eighth and quarter notes. The only limit is your imagination.

Save a lot of time by generating worksheets and quizzes in just a few clicks for your students to practice music theory.

Finally, Bands directors and choirs conductors can have their students directly recording their performance from home for review.

Whether you are teaching remotely or in-person, Flat for Education will support you in creating playful and engaging music activities in no time. Try it free for 90 days on flat.io/edu

Flat for Education (Sponsor)

I am thrilled that Flat for Education is sponsoring Music Ed Tech Talk this month. Their product is a breath of fresh air in a landscape of frustrating education software. More on that in a moment, but first, their own words:

Flat for Education offers music educators and their students the most affordable cloud-based music notation software on the market. Empowering teachers to create playful and engaging music activities, creations, assessments on any device at any time.

The platform integrates with every well-known learning management system available: Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, Canvas, Schoology, and MusicFirst to name a few. Everything will be synchronized with your existing setup to avoid any time loss.

Flat for Education offers an advanced system of assignments allowing you to create playful and stunning music activities with your students.

Create a template for all your students to start working from, or simplify the toolbar to have them only working with eighth and quarter notes. The only limit is your imagination.

Save a lot of time by generating worksheets and quizzes in just a few clicks for your students to practice music theory.

Finally, band directors and choirs conductors can have their students directly recording their performance from home for review.

Whether you are teaching remotely or in-person, Flat for Education will support you in creating playful and engaging music activities in no time. Try it free for 90 days on flat.io/edu.

Since my school district moved to online teaching in March, I have had the opportunity to test a greater variety of web-based music teaching software. Much of this I have been able to use practically, with kids using the tools on the other end, and in combination with our district’s learning management software.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1602702830462-33ZD2IZ7BO95J6TPM917/CleanShot+2020-10-14+at+15.10.04.png" alt="The user interface of Flat for Education is really simple and clean. It is immediately easy for a teacher or student to find the features they are looking for and every click feels responsive and fast!" width="1268" height="562" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The user interface of Flat for Education is really simple and clean. It is immediately easy for a teacher or student to find the features they are looking for and every click feels responsive and fast!</p></div>
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I will put this simply: a lot of education technology is buggy, unintuitive, and difficult to decipher. Music technology is no exception. One thing I really appreciate about Flat for Education is the design. It is simple, beautiful, and straightforward.

I am not just referring to the graphical design of Flat for Education. I am referring to the experience of using it. The onboarding could not be more straightforward or direct. Menus in the score editor are simply laid out, buttons respond quickly, note heads drag smoothly, and nothing takes too many clicks to accomplish. I did a lot of testing before writing this post and found that every feature I tried was easy and reliable. Even something niche like batch uploading numerous XML files from Dorico into my Flat for Education library was quick and rock-solid.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1602702896122-8VX3O6IBP5UJG8Z4ZIWS/CleanShot+2020-10-14+at+15.09.36.png" alt="Another example of how clean and easy to understand the Flat for Education experience is. Batch uploading numerous files I created in Dorico into my Flat Score Library happened in a flash before my eyes!" width="1273" height="548" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Another example of how clean and easy to understand the Flat for Education experience is. Batch uploading numerous files I created in Dorico into my Flat Score Library happened in a flash before my eyes!</p></div>
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As frustrating as education tech often is for the teacher, we know that it is infinitely harder for our students. If you are teaching in person, online, or hybrid, technology can engage and empower students or frustrate them so much they want to give up. But when the technology is as easy as Flat for Education, the software gets out of the way, and the learning content comes to the center.

I think it is important also to highlight that these scores are collaborative and cross-platform. You might be thinking this is obvious considering it runs in a web browser, but I point it out here because so much of the growth in web-first teaching tools is happening at the expense of our students who are depending on mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. Flat is built not only to run on any browser, but any computing platform. Students can easily work on the same documents together if they are running Chrome on a Chromebook, iOS, or whatever platform is available to them. And it’s easy too!

It is so impressive to me that Flat for Education has prioritized the user experience to this level of detail on top of building an excellent score editor and learning environment. Be sure to check out the 90-day free trial if you are looking for a teaching platform built on top of a great score editor, or simply for a tool that empowers your students to interact with musical notation in a freeing way. Again, my thanks to Flat for Education for sponsoring this month of Music Ed Tech Talk.

Making Just Intonation Play-alongs with Trap Beats for Band Rehearsal (Using the Yamaha Harmony Director and Logic Pro)

My band classes meet online using Google Meet once a day for 45 minutes. I am trying to keep them playing as much of this time as possible while slowly introducing the tech tools we will be using to submit work this semester.

Using the Yamaha Harmony Director, plugged in through Logic (along with some trap beats and 808 bass lines I recorded in with software instruments), I have started to make some play-along tracks to route through the Google Meet via Loopback.

This is kind of like a hardwired version of my Tonal Energy/Garageband workflow I have written about here before, only the keyboard hardware and pro editing software allow for much more precision.

They sound like this:

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See below for the Logic Pro setup. I am using a drummer track for the trap beat, an 808 bass instrument as a software instrument to record the bass line, and the Harmony Director is being recorded live as an audio track. The HD is plugged directly into my audio interface to do this.

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I decided to keep the bass part droning in the key area of the scale because that software instrument plays in equal temperament by default. It also sounds more like an authentic trap beat this way, where the bass line functions similar to a bass drum.

I already used this method in my first period class this morning and the band loved it. This is just the beginning. I whipped this together in a hot minute and anticipate making a variety of scale patterns in different musical styles.

In the hustle of our school semester starting, I forgot to post about possibly the most exciting app news I have heard this summer.

After writing about it and talking about it on the podcast for well over a year, I am pleased to say that forScore has announced they are making a native Mac app. It will be coming this fall, alongside their version 12 update. Read all about version 12 here…

forScore | forScore 12:

forScore comes to the Mac in a big way with a brand new, fully native experience built for some of the most advanced and powerful devices out there. forScore runs on macOS Big Sur, both on Intel and Apple Silicon-powered Macs, and it’s included with forScore for iOS and iPadOS as a universal purchase.
That’s right—it’s absolutely free for everyone who has ever bought forScore.

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From the looks of it, forScore is using Apple's Catalyst technology, which allows iPad apps to be ported to the Mac.

While I have not seen the Mac version of forScore, I have been testing the iOS version of forScore 12. It's great! My favorite small (but significant) feature is that you can now annotate while viewing two pages at a time without the app jolting into annotation mode. You just write directly on the screen with the Apple Pencil and your markings appear immediately.

I store my score backups on my hard drive's file system, which is how I access them on the Mac. But I store my most frequently read scores in forScore on the iPad. I am glad the experience of interacting with my sheet music will now be consistent across both devices.

Something I have felt would need to happen for this to be useful is iCloud syncing. forScore says that is coming too…

Bringing forScore to the Mac is just the beginning—a whole new platform means a whole new set of opportunities. From subtle refinements to major new features already in development like iCloud Syncing, we’re building the future one step at a time.

We’re just getting started. Again.

Using a Mac version of the app with the need to maintain two separate score libraries would have been a nonstarter for me. As an added side benefit, I can see this getting me to use forScore on the iPhone. Its not the best screen size for sheet music, but every now and then, I'd like to be able to take it out of my pocket and reference a score real quick. The problem is that it is never real quick because none of my scores are there!

I could not be more excited about this announcement!