Best products from r/MusicEd

Ok, everything here is to be taken with a grain of salt. Not because any of it will be wrong, just because there's no "The One Right Way" to do things.

Rhythm Section:

How to manage it?

Listen to as much big band music as you can. Listen to what the rhythm section is doing and how it fits with the rest of the band. I'll get into some specifics in a bit.

What is the usual set up?

Piano, Guitar, Bass and Keys. Actual positioning? Ideally I would put it with the drums to the right of the 2nd Bone, at about a 45 degree angle. Bass close behind the drums, more in line with the trumpets. Piano in front of the drums facing 90 degrees from the rest of the band and guitar wedged in front between keys and drums. You may not be in an ideal space for this set up. Adapt. With the rhythm section the most important thing is that the drummer and bass player can hear each other. Make sure the bass player's amp is behind the drummer (nobody has trouble hearing the drums).

With a second drummer put them on vibes*. Your students (if they play latin perc.) aren't mature enough to create an interesting and appropriate part that challenges them and sounds good. Most kids playing latin percussion are just playing repetitive rhythms to keep them occupied. Help them learn something. They can double the piano part at least.

Some considerations for each instrument individually:

Piano

• Provides harmony for the group.
  
  
• Usually has a terrible part written for it, especially middle school. Consider writing your own, or doing it with the student. Voicings for Jazz Keyboard by Frank Mantooth is a great resource for how to get the right sound.
  
  
• When comping should alternate and mix up being on the beat, eighth behind the beat, and eighth ahead of the beat.
  
  Bass:
  
  
• Responsible for time. People think the drummer is in charge but he aint.
  
  
• In public schools they'll usually be playing electric. Try to get an upright sound. Turn the instrument down and the amp up. Play with the settings yourself, don't let your student fiddle with them.
  
  
• Sometimes parts are crap, most times they're an ok walking bass line. Even if the part is written perfectly, you'll be doing the greatest service to your student by teaching them to improvise a walking bass line. Here are some handy rules for what a bass line should be.
  
  

1. Play the root on beat 1.
   
   
2. Play a leading tone on beat 4.
   
   
3. Beats 2 and 3 can be scale or chord tones but they need to be right for the chord.
   
   
4. Play notes as long as possible and perfectly in time.
   
   
5. Alternate going up and down and occasionally leap up or down.
   
   Drums:
   
   

• Ride on every beat, Hi hat on 2 and 4. I've been told by different people that feathering the bass drum on each beat is both super important and completely unnecessary. It's probably too much for a middle school student to concentrate on stomping the hi hat and playing bass drum super light on the same beat. *"Extra" ride parts should be improvised and not that constant ting ting ta-ting repeated forever.**
  
  
• Fills should be improvised. Have students practicing filling toward a specific beat. Have a fill ready for every one (On 1, and of 1, on 2, and of 2 ect.)
  
  
• Control dynamics for the band. If they don't get loud and soft, the horns won't either, and even if they did, nobody would notice.
  
  Guitar:
  
  Doesn't really matter in big bands unless playing funk tunes. Serves mostly as a soloist. Guitarists should try to add in some voices not already in the piano. They shouldn't play more than 4 notes at a time and they should play on every beat. Freddie Green.
  
  Ok, onto improvisation:
  
  There are a million and one ways to teach present improvisation, but everyone learns to do it on their own. I wouldn't use the blues scale but I can see the appeal. It does give students some success and confidence, but it doesn't really teach you how to play changes. People use it because it limits the choice of notes and lets the student concentrate on rhythm and style. I'd get simple changes and give the students a couple notes for each chord. 7, 1, 9, 3 would be fairly easy to apply, to have the whole group play together and still be limiting. The only way to get good at it is to practice.
  
  Additional thoughts:
  
  Please find quality charts and don't play fucking Mission Impossible and Don't Stop Believing.
  
  denotes opinion, not fact.

>Even when the days are good and everything goes well, I don't feel like there was anything I learned from it.

Is this more a problem with the fact that the director you're working with has a heavy hand on the program and you're working his/her program and not your own? Imagine running your own program and the creative opportunities that will provide you with. Have a heart to heart with the director to see if they have any ideas on how to improve the learning experience.

Also, don't be afraid to connect with the students as fellow humans. I wonder if some of your stress is related to fears about revealing who you are to the students? Let down your own emotional barriers, relax, have fun and don't be afraid of making mistakes, the students will ultimately be very forgiving and understanding. They may be off-standish in reaction to your own coolness to the topic. But mostly, be certain to share your life, your moments of personal learning to show them who you really are and to show them you concern for them and that you care about their learning experience. They will respond in kind. So make it all about 'getting to know you' at first. There's no drive around for this-you'll end up learning a lot from that one effort.

I'm a firm believer in the curriculum of life long learning and work it every day. Let me share my experience and perhaps that will help.

Right now I'm working my way through Developmental Psychology (at age 69!) by reading Development through Life which is the textbook for something like PSY 330. I'd highly recommend it as it may serve to inspire you like it did me. This is not your average boring textbook, it is chock full of inspirational insights into human development which has really come into a science of its own in the past 15 years. The authors point out the importance of education in our society -I'm sure you already know that. But further to that, formal schooling aids children by giving them opportunities to work on social skills needed to acquire technical skills needed to play an instrument. So would it help to look at your future career through the lens of human development? You're helping youngsters find their way in the world and they face many challenges that are similar to what you are now facing. Look at teaching as a team effort.

I was a gifted child but the school system ended up stifling me as I could not learn at my own pace; at one point I was actually six grade levels ahead of the class in 2nd grade. I looked forward to being old enough (fifth grade) when I could join the music program. Eventually, the music program was 80% of the motivation for keeping up with my formal schooling; it was that part that pulled me forward. I grew to dislike math and science classes-I had so lost interest by 10th grade that I was nearly failing Biology and Algebra. It was a weird experience.

After floundering in college I went back to the love of my life which was music and majored in Instrumental Music Ed. But, like yourself, I got flustered at the prospect of facing the classroom drudgery and dropped out of that program and never finished. I regret making that decision. At that time though I was going through a divorce and all of a sudden, I needed space away from the overly burdensome demands of college classes, endless practicing and learning sight singing, that part was not going well at all. Now, I believe I could have overcome those hurdles if I had spent more time looking for assistance.

So let me encourage you to stay the course-switching majors at this point will be time consuming. Finish what you've started but leave yourself the option to change courses later on if after giving it your all you still can't find your way.

If this helps:

Imagine the opportunities to teach students those aspects of music that turned into a life long love for yourself. Share your excitement about the topic with them. Again, teach outside the box, teach solfeggio (not sure why that's not done in music education), teach music history, get the students to share what they love about music. I'm a firm believe in teaching to the fundamentals; remembering my own music experience we too often spent endless hours rehearsing but I wonder if we really learned about *Music*. Sometimes the technicalities merely impeded the understanding of the topic. Playing Music for me is always part of a religious experience or if you will a spiritual experience. See if you can impart that to the students you encounter.

I'm working my way back through some of my saxophone and clarinet method books; expecting that I can soon pull my skills back up to where they were in college.

​

PS

I overcame my math fears by taking courses at the local community college. I passed them all (through 2nd semester calculus) with flying colors.

Not an actual choir teacher but an instrumentalist who has benefited immensely from learning solfege.

-Make sure you learn the curwen hand signs in conjunction with the syllables!

• I recommend movable 'Do' not fixed
  
  
  
• When singing in the minor mode, use 'La'
  
  
  
• buy a tuning key in A=440 and every day hold it, sing A as best you can and then check your tuning with the key. Always try to pull your pitch reference from your own head and THEN check to see how close you were.
  
  
  
• Start by picking some of Kodaly's group sight-singing books. They're designed specifically for use with solfege/hand signs.
  
  https://www.amazon.ca/333-Elementary-Exercises-Sight-Singing/dp/B003AGJK6G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1523271184&sr=8-2&keywords=333+exercises
  
  Also, get 'Let Us Sing Correctly'
  
  https://www.amazon.ca/Let-Us-Sing-Correctly/dp/B000ZGCLN8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523271216&sr=1-1&keywords=let+us+sing+correctly
  
  The first book is just the pentatonic scale. No 'Fa' and no 'Ti'. That is to say, no half-steps (which are the hardest to tune). I promise you, if you have a good foundation of sight-singing the major/minor pentatonic scale, you'll be well on your way to reading any tonal music. Adding in those half-steps later will be easy.
  
  
  
• It's not about total time practiced, but how frequently you do it. The more the better.
  
  
  
• Remember, your only real goal here is to memorize the sound of intervals and be able to reproduce them easily - everything else is secondary.
  
  Hope that helps!
  
  The second book is to help with tuning and harmonizing. I practice it with my right hand playing one part on the piano and singing the other part.

This is a great book for teaching middle school general music: http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-General-Music-Grades-4-8/dp/0195137787

The trick is to make the music learning relevant to them. If they're never going to use quarter and eighth notes, there's no need to introduce it to them.. and if your goal is to teach notation, then have them learn to play something, like keyboard or drums.

The most important part of teaching general music to MS kids is to remember that they themselves are not empty inside, music wise. They probably all own ipods or smartphones with music on them, and so you could ask them to share their favorite music with the class (wit prior approval, of course.) Then you could link their music with music that you would like to teach them (for example, classical music or classic rock.) The nice thing about GM is that it's so flexible....

Another advice would be to get them to move! Maybe they don't understand what a contour of a melody is but they can definitely feel it when you have them do "interpretative dance" or other kinesthetic activities. Dalcroze Eurhythmics is a great tool to use in these situations because movement comes pretty naturally to most people (i.e. moving along to the beat, learning a dance to enhance cultural understanding)

And also have them compose. Garageband is easy enough for 8th graders to understand, and if you use loops, that could be incentive for them to even continue writing/producing music after they leave your class.

I would advise you to place a focus on lifetime learning and enduring understanding - so that everything they learn can be used later in life. If you want them to appreciate music by bach, beethoven, and mozart, show them the beauty behind it in a concrete way that will stick with them. Incorporate any and all stops that you have - have fun!

Teaching Kids To Sing by Kenneth Phillips is a great vocal pedagogy curriculum. I use it all the way through high school as part of the warm-up every day. Find or create a sight-singing curriculum. When you're far away from concerts, spend up to about 20 minutes or 35-40% of the rehearsal learning to sight read. I'm doing my own this year, and I'd love to share more details if you're interested. Running the rehearsal depends on what you're preparing. Unison music is great because it gets everybody singing, but it's also tricky because some boys are reluctant to sing in the treble clef if they aren't used to it. Two part music is great, but it's usually written in the wrong key if you've got mixed choirs. It's okay to transpose a whole song to make it fit your choir better. SAB music is alright if you've got confident singers, but definitely don't start there if you don't think the kids can handle it.

The two-part arrangement of Bring Us Peace by Spevacek is a great place to start because it is a two-part round that echoes a fourth below, so it fits high voices and low voices well.

I'm in a bit of a rush so I don't have time to expand, but here are a few thoughts:

Buy this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Starting-Out-Right-Beginning-Pedagogy/dp/0810883015 It helped me a LOT.

Sound before sight, rote before note. Don't be in a rush to get to the book.

Take it slow - one thing at a time.

Spend lots of time on small pieces - mouthpiece, headjoint, mpc/barrel for clarinets.

I like Tradition of Excellence over Essential Elements, and I just switched over to having the kids buy their own book. Method books don't really last beyond a year. If you're worried then subsidize it by half (they pay $5, you pay $5 and get a bulk discount from your local music store) and they keep it at the end. Having a nice new book is a good motivator for kids.

Your pull-out system sounds good for the first 2 weeks. 1 week on small pieces or 2-3x, and then full instrument by themself for another week, then full band.

​

Good luck!

As an upcoming student teacher, I have been looking for resources on choir rehearsal techniques, warmups, etc.. As a band guy, I challenged myself to take on a choir class as my "main" class for student teaching. This video and Dr. Robinson's I Know Sousa, Not Sopranos! has been helpful in learning how...in a small way I'm sure...to run an effective and useful choir rehearsal. [Hint: many instrumental techniques transfer over to choir.] I highly recommend his book and this supplemental video to anyone in my situation; it's helped calm some of the nerves I have been having about directing choir.

I do have some questions for you all, if you don't mind.

• How often do students sit vs. stand in rehearsal? When should they stand?
  
• What vertical vowel shapes do you tell your students to use? (I have heard Ahh = Oval, Eh = Square).
  
• I am most likely going to be directing a two-part HS Women's Choir; could you point me towards some good literature?
  
• What other sources (books, DVD's) do you recommend for someone in my situation?
  
  Thanks!
  
  edit:
  Other Useful Books
  Teaching Band and Orchestra by Lynn G. Cooper
  Teaching Music Through Performance Series - Various
  A Field Guide to Student Teaching in Music by Ann C. Clements & Rita Klinger
  Confessions of a First-Year Maestro: A Guide for Your First Year of Teaching by Ann C. Clements

This book is a life saver for K and 1! You could probably even stretch these activities up to 2nd grade and make it fun for them (especially early 2nd grade). It is a bunch of circle games that use simple songs that you could play on the piano and the students can move to. You can tie in many different music concepts really easily to them as well. Really any book by Feierabend is full of great activities for the little ones! Hope this helps at least a little! Good luck!

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Circle-Games-First-Steps/dp/1579992668

You will have to reapply on occasion, but I would recommend buying the blue painter tape. It comes in both 1 inch wide and wider versions. It won’t leave sticky residue on the floors - linoleum or carpet. Your custodians will be much happier.

I use this tape on school floors all the time for use with robots when we need mazes and such. Easy to apply, easy to tear, and easy to remove.

This stuff: https://www.amazon.com/STIKK-Painters-Release-Finishing-Masking/dp/B01MYP8R5B/

These are three that have my highest recommendation! I’ve read these books with other performing arts teachers in book study groups, and believe that they should be required reading for all teachers!

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

You Win in the Locker Room First: The 7 C's to Build a Winning Team in Business, Sports, and Life.

Expression, the hardest thing to get them to do. I use a hoberman sphere for helping them sing louder. It’s a great way to demonstrate that their size increases as well as volume.

It sounds crazy, but when they feel that sensation of bigger sound they always smile. I then say, keep that expression on your face.

If they get nervous in their concert, I make silly faces at them before/during the songs. It helps them relax and increase expression.

These are more about practice techniques than lesson plans, but really good and aimed at young student: Practiceopedia: The Big Book of Practice Help


And from memory this one is more aimed at the teacher: The Practice Revolution: Getting great results from the six days between lessons

Roger Emerson: Pop Warm-Ups & Work-Outs for Guys https://www.amazon.com/dp/1423470885/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_07OlybJRY0W5D
I like these. There are ten songs in this book and another ten titled Pop warmups for guys! I like them both. I use them with my K-5 kiddos and all of those ages love them.
I also likeA-Z Singing tongue twisters by Brian Kane.