Beyond School

That last post was supposed to report this:

1. Since those first two fragments I composed on GarageBand, I spent a couple or three hours watching Atomic Learning’s GarageBand screencast tutorials (paid subscription required), and they taught me a few things. Most importantly, they taught me how to change the key of different loops and parts of the song so you’re not stuck on one chord the whole time. (You can only go so far on the tonic.) Hint: “Tracks > Master Track.” That’s where you can take that C major tonic chord to the F sub-dominant (the “IV”) and the G dominant (”V”), and voila, instant blues or rock songs. You can do more than that, of course.

2. Wes Fryer showed us his midi keyboard, an M-Audio Axiom 29 model, in Shanghai. I found a dealer here in Seoul, chose to get the 5-octave Axiom 49 plus an Axiom SP-2 sustain pedal (total cost: USD $380 or so), and my soon-to-be better half helped me order it on the phone, and it’s going to be delivered tomorrow. That’s a picture of it, above. See those square black pads on the upper right? They can each be programmed as a different percussion instrument (probably other things too), and are touch-sensitive.

I can’t wait to play with this baby. If any of you are fans of Leonard Cohen’s later works - say, I’m Your Man and on - you know that he has done some beautiful stuff setting voice and lyrics to very simple music tracks. I’d bet money that he didn’t use much more than GarageBand (or something as simple) and a keyboard like mine to make his Ten New Songs cd in 2001.

OMG. I hope the manual isn’t in Korean.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Not to beat this GarageBand horse too hard, but Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop last week really did lift my creative skullcap. This GarageBand composing is fascinating to me, because it has implications for revolutionizing musical creativity in the same way that blogging has revolutionized writing for me (and so many of you).

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: blogging did revolutionize my own relationship to writing, and radically so. I’m my own datum: before blogging, I surely wrote no more than a handful of reflective pieces per year from my first year of college in 1981 until the end of 2006. Do the math: 25 “I want to be a writer” years of, say 5 pieces per year (and that’s a generous estimate), and we get a total of 125 pieces over two and a half decades. (Interestingly, I did write a lot of lengthy, essayistic emails over some of those years, but they were always to an audience of one, obviously. I note this because emails share with blogs that real audience.)

Then, on Jan 1 of this year, I begin blogging about something I care about, and nine months later, how much have I written? About 325 posts.

Similarly, I always wanted to write music. I did not learn an instrument as a child, and tried to catch up as a college student in my early 20s. I took piano, guitar, the fundamentals of music and, due to an obsession with Plato as a starry-eyed freshman, I even took a year of music theory (voice leading and counterpoint). I’m sure I’m one of very few people in the world to take music theory without the musicianship to go along with it.

But I’m glad I took those theory classes. They did teach me structural, textural and what I want to call architectural things about music that make me “hear” music, and “see” its structure, better.

And with GarageBand (and Wes Fryer’s simple demonstration of his own composing workflow, which just made things click for me), I can finally put that old, inert, theoretical knowledge to use - 25 years later. In the past two days, I’ve composed more music than in the past 25 years.

And here’s something more interesting along these lines. Jason, my favorite teacher in the high school - I’ve blogged about him several times here, because he collaborated in a two-teacher/four-classroom history wiki with me last year, and then took off into his own wiki projects after that - heard that funk song I made yesterday. He listened to me explain Wes’ workflow.

A day later (today), he comes into my room with his MacBook agape like a clam holding a pearl, and indeed it held just that. He said, “I took your challenge, dude….and this is what I made today.”

It’s the first tune in the Ning music player I’m embedding below. It is Jason’s FIRST composition. Please, please, please give it a listen. There’s something of value in the fact that a teacher discovers his or her own creativity, perhaps even an untapped “intelligence” (in Gardner’s sense), as Jason surely did with this. He blew me away. (And yes, that’s him singing on the minimalistic vocal tracks.)

My point - and forgive the braindump here, where it’s my bedtime but I want to catch this - is this: maybe teaching teachers to think of computers and tech as tools for their profession should come later; maybe encouraging them to discover their own empowerment and pleasure, their own inner do-er and creator of whatever sort - writer, artists, composer, photographer, radio host, filmmaker, cartoonist, on and on and on - maybe that’s the key to converting the Old Dogs.

Because listen to what Jason made. After his are my two “first drafts.”

(And that Ning? My principal made that for our High School staff! Things are happening fast these days.)

My last shot: if you don’t know me, you should know that my school just went 1:1, and the laptops we decided to force students and teachers to use was a MacBook. iLife (of which GarageBand is a component) was a big reason for that. Look at what iLife is letting teachers discover about themselves.

We’re in month two of “the switch” to Apple. I’m hearing more and more of the early complainers already acknowledging that they don’t even want Windows on their Macs anymore.

So if you need evidence for your own 1:1 planning and persuasion, get in touch. I’ll offer all the anecdotals you want.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)