METT Episode #17 – Talking About the Weather, with Chris Cicconi

Dr. Christopher Cicconi, Assistant Professor of Music Education, and Director of Bands and Orchestra at Towson University, joins the show to talk about selecting meaningful repertoire for your ensemble. We also talk about score study with iPad Pro apps, involving yourself in your music teaching community, and yes, I go on a tangent about my favorite new weather app.

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Show Notes:

My Favorite Tech page
forScore
LumaFusion
Tonal Energy Tuner
GoodNotes
Alex Shapiro
Putting the E- in E-nsemble
Composer Diversity Database
Kaitlin Bove – Dr. Bove’s Virtual Courses

App of the Week:
Robby – Weather Line and Carrot Weather
Chris – Fidelity

Album of the Week:
Robby – Trust in the Life-force of the Deep Mystery – The Comet Is Coming
Chris – Game of Thrones Highlights – Spotify Playlist | Mad Max: Fury Road Soundtrack

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Chris – Towson University Profile Page

Please don’t forget to rate the show and share it with others!

Subscribe to the Blog

Subscribe to the Podcast in…
Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Thanks to my sponsor this month, MusicFirst.

🎙 #14 – Empowering Performing Ensembles at a Distance, with Theresa Hoover Ducassoux

Theresa Hoover Ducassoux joins the show to talk about technology for teaching band at a distance, productivity methodologies, Google apps for personal and school use, Flipgrid, empowering students, and more…

Show Notes:

Everything Band: Episode 170 – Theresa Hoover Ducassoux
Lori Schwartz Reichl
Music Ed Tech Talk #8 – Diversifying Your Career and Your Programing, with Lori Schwartz Reichl
Getting Things Done Methodology
OmniFocus
Inbox Zero
MusicFirst
SmartMusic
Noteflight Learn
Soundtrap
Flipgrid
Kahoot
Google Teacher Certification
Google: The Anywhere School 2020
Kathryn Finch: Website | Twitter
Scrivener
TextExpander
Jamboard
Getting Started with Google Jamboard | Off the Beaten Path – Theresa Ducassoux
Using Jamboard in the Music Classroom | Music Ed Tech Talk – Robby Burns
Flat.io
Routing Audio From Your Apps Directly Into Your Zoom or Google Meet (Or Other Digital Meeting Platform) | Music Ed Tech Talk – Robby Burns
Rogue Amoeba
Audio Hijack
Rhiannon Giddens to Lead Silkroad’s Musical Explorations | NYT
Microsoft Teams
New Google Meet features
Google Calendar
Google Slides
Google Keep
Evernote
OneNote
Google Duo, Google Meet, Google Hangouts (?)
Omnifocus Project Templates
Never Miss a Task, With Project Templates | Music Ed Tech Talk – Robby Burns
Music Ed Tech Talk #10 – Designing Curriculum and Assessing Students with FileMaker, with Ben Denne
Making Just Intonation Play Along Tracks for Your Performing Ensemble (Using Tonal Energy and Garageband) | Music Ed Tech Talk – Robby Burns

App of the Week:
Robby – Loopback by Rogue Ameoba (They have educator discounts)
Theresa – Flat for Docs

Album of the Week:
Robby – Jennifer Higdon Harp Concerto
Theresa – Dustin O’Halloran, piano solos

Please don’t forget to rate the show and share it with others!

Subscribe to the Blog

Subscribe to the Podcast in…
Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Making Just Intonation Play Along Tracks for Your Performing Ensemble (Using Tonal Energy and GarageBand)

There are a few things that would be helpful to know about my music teaching philosophy before reading this post.

1. I believe that tone production, intonation, balance and blend are central to teaching performing musicians. I prioritize them much higher than fingering technique, rhythmic precision, and even reading comprehension.

2. The way I structure my band classes starts with, is focused on, and always revisits those core ideas.

3. I have accumulated a vast variety of tools and teaching strategies to meet my goals of having superior tone quality, intonation, balance and blend. One of the most essential tools I use is the Tonal Energy Tuning app.

Tonal Energy Tuner

What is Tonal Energy? A hyper charged, power-user app for musicians that has many advanced features, including…

– Tuning drones that can be triggered polyphonically

– Feedback as to how in tune a performer is, which includes a delightful happy face to depict good or questionable intonation

– Drones and feedback can be adjusted to different temperaments

– A metronome (with more features than nearly any alternative on the App Store) that can be used separately or at the same time as the tuning drones

– Analysis tools that depict amplitude and intonation on an easy to read visual graph

– Recording and play back practice tools for musicians to listen back to their performance

– Automated metronome pre-sets that can be sequenced

See the video below. I will first depict the tuner playing a Bb drone, then I will show how it can model a Bb major triad all at once. Then I will turn the tuner to just intonation mode, and you will hear that the third and fifth of the chord are appropriately adjusted so that they are in tune with the Bb root. Next, the video will demonstrate how the metronome can be used in combination with these drones.

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Imagine now that a student is playing a scale along with Tonal Energy. By leaving the tuner in just intonation, and centering around the key area of Bb major, every note of the scale that I touch will resonate accurately with the Bb, giving the student an accurate reference to blend into.

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These posts will never happen if I don’t make it fuss free. So here is it! With little introduction or fanfare, the ‘stuff’ that made up my year. My favorite albums, live shows, apps, and ‘things’ of 2018.

Next up, apps!

Apps

Things and OmniFocus

Task management software makes up about 50 percent my time on computing devices so it’s natural that I include what I consider to be the best two apps in this field. After seven years of using OmniFocus, I am experimenting with Things again. I plan to write about this switch in more detail but for now I leave you with this: if you are looking for a powerful way to stay on top of your tasks and don’t mind paying for a premium design, check these apps out.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1546325791101-G0VU0OLQV62YPQSTYZRI/iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAABaMAAAszCAYAAACIWkB7AAABgmlDQ1BzUkdCIElFQzYxOTY2LTIu-2+3.png" alt="The Today view in Things displays all of my tasks for the day alongside my calendar." width="1443" height="2867" 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 Today view in Things displays all of my tasks for the day alongside my calendar.</p></div>
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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1546325817690-ETXWCFQ1IZ3BL0WFZSVS/iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAABaMAAAszCAYAAACIWkB7AAABgmlDQ1BzUkdCIElFQzYxOTY2LTIu-2+4.png" alt="The Forecast view in OmniFocus is similar to the Today view in Things. Though I have it turned off in this screenshot, it actually displays your tasks inline with your calendar events so you can see where ‘due’ tasks fit into your day." width="1443" height="2867" 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 Forecast view in OmniFocus is similar to the Today view in Things. Though I have it turned off in this screenshot, it actually displays your tasks inline with your calendar events so you can see where ‘due’ tasks fit into your day.</p></div>
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Health

The Health app by Apple is my hub for collecting all sorts of data about myself from various devices, apps and clinics. It houses data from devices like my Apple Watch, Spire respiratory monitor, Fitbit WiFi scale, and Spark Smart Water Bottle. It tracks data in third party apps like: work outs, active calories burned, steps, heart rate, sleep, water intake, nutrition, meditation minutes, caffeine intake, and blood pressure. It can now even aggregate health data from participating clinics and practices so I don’t have to log into a million web portals. My Quest and LabCorp results are a tap away. The beauty of the app is that it allows me to organize these data points and see them alongside one another so I can draw meaningful conclusions about them. Like for example, I eat better on days when I get more sleep.

Home

Apple’s Home app is the hub for controlling my smart home. I can control all of my smart things in the same user interface rather than by punching into lots of different apps. I can also use it to automate different actions. For example, my Good Morning scene automatically runs at 6:30 am every day which turns on my lights, changes the temperature, and lately, turns on the Christmas tree.

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">My Today view in Apple Health aggregates all of my health data regardless of which app is responsible for tracking it.</p></div>
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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The My Home view in Apple Home shows my most used home automation devices and ‘scenes.’</p></div>
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Tonal Energy Tuner

Absolute must for an instrumental music teacher. Using the new Screen Time feature on iOS reveals that I spend too much time on Reddit. But also that I spend more time than any other app in Tonal Energy. It’s literally running in the foreground all day long while I’m at school, helping students to match pitch, blend, and keep steady time.

Trello

This may be my productivity discovery of the year. Trello is the team project app you have been waiting for. It’s vibrant, Kanbab board style interface will have your team, family, or Dungeons and Dragons group enjoying every minute of collaboration. Bonus points for how well this app integrates with Slack which is my preferred team communication tool.

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Planning concerts in Trello allows my team to share todos, check lists, files, and more. We can give items due dates and even assign tasks to other members.</p></div>
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GoodNotes

GoodNotes has become my go-to handwritten note application. It acts like a bookshelf of notebooks so to speak. I take a lot of the work I create in iWork, Ulysses, and OmniGraffle, export them as PDFs, organize them into notebooks in GoodNotes, then annotate them on the go using my iPad. My favorite thing to do with it is keep a notebook of seating charts that have my rehearsal annotations on top of the names of my students. I love how you do not need to trigger an annotation mode to start scribbling on a document with the Apple Pencil. It just feels like paper.

Streaks

There are a lot of great habit building apps out there but Streaks has stuck with me because it encourages you to focus on just six habits at a time. When I am building too many habits at once, they start to feel like a todo list. The Streaks method of choosing six, along with its addictive user interface, keep me launching the app, which keeps me working towards my goals.

AutoSleep and AutoWake

Of the ten or so sleep trackers I have tried for the iPhone and Apple Watch, AutoSleep has stuck with me the most. There are numerous things I like about it, but most of all is how it figures out the most accurate number of hours I have been asleep whether I wear my watch to sleep or not. The companion app, AutoWake, wakes me up silently with haptic feedback on the watch. It does this when I am in my least deep sleep within a half hour before my alarm is set to go off. This eases me awake rather than jolting me awake. I plan to blog later this month about how I am automating some cool stuff in my house when I wake up using this app.

WaterMinder

WaterMinder is my favorite app for tracking water intake, mostly because of its well designed and space efficient widget.

Shortcuts

I did not get as much out of the Siri Shortcuts app this year as I wanted to. In fact, I had a lot of bad luck with it. But it is still an app that is working really well for me in a couple of small areas. In one tap, it generates a clean copy of my band’s seating chart in GoodNotes for annotations and opens my lesson plan for the day in OmniOutliner.

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The Waterminder Widget.</p></div>
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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Some of my Shortcuts.</p></div>
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CARROT⁵ Weather

This is my favorite weather app due to its clean and appealing design. It gets my pick this year because of how they continue to innovate the Apple Watch app. My favorite feature of the watch is the customizable complications. Carrot makes the best weather complication for the Apple Watch, maybe the best complication, period. Carrot allows infinite customization for how it looks on the watch, depending on which watch face you like to view it, and even in which corner of the watch face you prefer to keep it installed.

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">The Carrot Weather app complication can be seen in the lower left corner.</p></div>
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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Streaks. Guess I can check off that one in the lower right corner now.</p></div>
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Tag: tonal energy tuner

METT Episode #17 – Talking About the Weather, with Chris Cicconi

Show Notes:

🎙 #14 – Empowering Performing Ensembles at a Distance, with Theresa Hoover Ducassoux

Other topics:

Show Notes:

Making Just Intonation Play Along Tracks for Your Performing Ensemble (Using Tonal Energy and GarageBand)

Tonal Energy Tuner

Developing An Inner Ear for Diatonic Intervals

Making Play Along Tracks in GarageBand

Inter-App Audio Apps and Audio Extensions in GarageBand

Recording an Inter-App Audio App Directly Into A GarageBand Project

Accurate Note Input with MIDI Controllers

Embellishing The Track with Other Instruments

Conclusion

iOS apps I would love to see come to the Mac, a musician’s perspective

🗒 Off to the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference

Favorites of 2018 – Apps!

Apps

Things and OmniFocus

Health

Home

Tonal Energy Tuner

Trello

GoodNotes

Streaks

AutoSleep and AutoWake

WaterMinder

Shortcuts

CARROT⁵ Weather

Show Notes:

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Other topics:

Show Notes:

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Tonal Energy Tuner

Developing An Inner Ear for Diatonic Intervals

Making Play Along Tracks in GarageBand

Inter-App Audio Apps and Audio Extensions in GarageBand

Recording an Inter-App Audio App Directly Into A GarageBand Project

Accurate Note Input with MIDI Controllers

Embellishing The Track with Other Instruments

Conclusion

Apps

Things and OmniFocus

Health

Home

Tonal Energy Tuner

Trello

GoodNotes

Streaks

AutoSleep and AutoWake

WaterMinder

Shortcuts

CARROT⁵ Weather