The original Musical Futures documents. Free.
The early pamphlets, the first teacher pack and the second edition. Everything that got written down while the approach was being worked out in real classrooms.
The documents teachers keep asking us for
Musical Futures started as a question about how popular musicians actually learn, and these are the papers that turned the answer into something a teacher could use on a Monday morning.
They were written for teachers who had never run a lesson this way and needed to know what to say in the first ten minutes. That is still what makes them useful. You can read the reasoning, the classroom set-up and the exact questions to ask a group who have been handed instruments and a song to work out by ear.
These are archive documents, and we have left them exactly as they were.
Some of the kit is out of date and a few of the song choices will make your students laugh. None of that touches the pedagogy, which is the reason people still cite the second edition twenty years on.
What teachers do with them:
Making the case at school
Put the second edition in front of a head of department who wants to know what informal learning actually involves before signing anything off.
Study and research
Cite the source rather than a summary of it. These come up constantly in masters and doctoral work on classroom music.
Running your own PL
The teacher packs were built to be worked through by a faculty. They still hold up as reading for a staff session.
Starting from scratch
New to any of this? Read the pamphlets first. They are short, and they explain the why before the how.
Want the research the whole thing was built on? See the studies behind Musical Futures.
The 1st Edition Teacher Pack is a 77MB zip. It will not download well on school wifi at 8:50am.
Pick the one you want
Tell us where to send it and the file is waiting on the next page. One form per resource, so you only hear from us about the one you asked for.
Musical Futures Pamphlets
Eight short papers from October 2005, the Shaping Music Education series. The case for the whole approach, written before any of it was a lesson plan.
Start here if you want the thinking before the lesson plans.
1st Edition Teacher Pack
Five documents and 36 audio tracks. The Cameo Word Up multitracks are in here, with classical stems for informal learning from Bach to Brahms.
The big one. It is a 77MB zip, so grab it on wifi.
2nd Edition Teacher Pack
216 pages on informal learning and classroom workshopping. This is the one most people quote from.
One PDF. The most used document of the three.
Where should we send it?
Tell us where to send it. Free, and yours to keep. Tick the box if you want the occasional email from us as well.
The same approach, rebuilt as units you can teach
Everything in the archive has been rebuilt as sequenced units with video, backing tracks and student-facing lesson pages you can share by link. Just Play, Playalongs, Everyone Can Play, Songwriting and the DAW courses all sit inside one subscription, and one subscription covers five teachers at your school.
See the subscription options