The Musical Futures International resource platform has been deliberately designed to amplify your expertise and give you ultimate flexibility as you plan your lessons.
There are 7 Key Units in the platform for you to navigate between. Learn more about the units here if you are not familiar with them yet.
Where you start is completely dependent on your lesson/unit goals, but here are a few scenarios based on questions we get all the time. Use the arrows to expand each scenario to learn more:
If you have a class set (enough instruments for one per student) of any of these instruments, you've got a bunch of options! We would suggest looking at Everyone Can Play to help your students develop foundational instrumental skills. Learn more about Everyone Can Play here.
A perfect unit for this scenario is Just Play. Just Play is one of our most popular units, which allows you to create a class band with whatever you have available! Start with the Funky Jam with a few students on each instrument and then progress to learning some chords, two chord jams, medleys and full songs.
We have many schools in the community who have built incredibly successful programs with Just Play as the foundation!
Our resources are designed with BYOD schools in mind! We have developed music technology 'Recreate' resources for the following DAWs:
- Chrome Music Lab Song Maker
- BandLab
- Soundtrap
- GarageBand iOS (iPad)
- GarageBand MacOS (Computer)
- Ableton Live (Intro)
These resources can be freely shared with students via the URLs at the top of each page once you have subscribed. They are designed so that students can self-direct their learning and even choose their DAW if need be.
Perfect! We have a whole suite of 'Recreate' resources designed specifically to help students get comfortable with GarageBand iOS.
The Musical Futures approach to learning a DAW is based in Electronic Music Pedagogy. This suggests that artists learn a DAW by recreating a song, beat or synth sound that they are familiar with. They rarely learn in a classroom setting with a formal "teacher". The approach suggests that we don't need to stand at the front and walk students step-by-step through every element of a DAW. It's about letting students following our highly curated tutorials to learn how to use the DAW by recreating a familiar song. You (the teacher) can then follow up by deconstructing the video and exploring musical and technical concepts with your students.
Join hundreds of teachers using this approach to engage their students in DAW-based music-making!
Nice! The great thing about a Chrome Book is that most web-based DAWs run quite well in the Chrome browser. So, jump in to the 'Recreate' resources for Chrome Music Lab Song Maker, BandLab or Soundtrap!
Ok cool. We've got you!
The first thing we suggest is that you treat a device/computer like you would any instrument.
That means that you need to allocate time to learn this new instrument and not expect your students to be the experts. Some students will have experience with this type of music-making, but many won't.
Luckily, we have LOADS of resources for you to get started. The Musical Futures approach to learning a DAW is based in Electronic Music Pedagogy. This suggests that artists learn a DAW by recreating a song, beat or synth sound that they are familiar with. They rarely learn in a classroom setting with a formal "teacher". The approach suggests that we don't need to stand at the front and walk students step-by-step through every element of a DAW. It's about letting students following our highly curated tutorials to learn how to use the DAW by recreating a familiar song. You (the teacher) can then follow up by deconstructing the video and exploring musical and technical concepts with your students.
So, the obvious first step would be for YOU to go through as many recreate videos as possible to learn the DAW that you'd like to introduce to your students. If this is how artists actually learn DAWs, then why not give it a go yourself!
While you're at it, read this article from a music teacher, Sam, who has seen how powerful the recreates can be.
That's great! This means you can get students working in small groups/bands with lots of our resources. Before you get started, don't forget to re-visit the foundations of informal learning and remind yourself of the 5 informal learning principles. This will make sure you remember your role as 'facilitator' in the practice room setting.
In terms of resources, most teachers tend to allocate either 'Playalongs' or 'Play Now' resources for students to use in practice rooms.
Remember, most of our resources can be shared directly with students by sharing the URL at the top of the page once you have a subscription.
A great starting point for jamming is use the 'Just Play' resource.
This video walk through how to use Just Play:
Click to play
It starts with Funky Jam, a simple playalong using an Am, which is super easy to play on ukulele, piano, guitar and bass.
It then progresses to one chord jams, where your whole class can play along with a single chord.
You guessed it, it then moves to two chord jams, which helps everyone start to move between two chords in time. The great thing about all of these resources is that you (or a student leader) can jump in and suggest ways to change up the rhythm in the videos or add improvisations. You can also speed up/slow down the videos to suit your class.
We then move to three or four chord jams, before getting stuck into real songs and medleys using the chords learnt as a class.
As well as 'Just Play', there are some great resources in the 'Beats' section to support jamming in different styles, including Groove Your Classroom and Styles
Great! We've got a whole bunch of playalongs using different Styles and a whole unit exploring global styles in Groove Your Classroom. Check out the 'Beats' unit to learn more!
One of our most popular resources is Chair Drumming!
Get a class set of drum sticks (or similar!) and dive into this super engaging way of having students embody rhythms by playing with popular songs following grid-style notation. We intentionally do not include standard Western notation in this format, but teachers can choose to explore this as an extension if they like.
The goal, as always, is to get students playing ASAP! Chair Drumming is fun, relevant and super engaging!
Our platform is designed to amplify your teaching. The resources are intentionally made to be flexible so that you can use them to suit your context.
As part of this philosophy, we don't create assessment tasks or rubrics for schools to use. Any time we have done this in the past we have been met with hundreds of requests to modify things slightly to suit a school context. Soooooooo, we've developed something epic that you can use to map ANY resources in our platform to your curriculum and build a unit. It maps to curriculum outcomes and objectives automatically so you can build out formative and summative assessment tasks that suit you.
Go to the Curriculum Mapping Tool here and get started! It's completely free for everyone to use, regardless of whether you're a subscriber or not.
Got a question about where to get started with the resources that's not covered above?