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Preparing for a whole school year

My main gig right now is that I teach Kindergarten through 8th grade music. It’s general music and we don’t have a whole lot of instruments, but I’ve been preparing my plan for the whole school year.

I like to put some thought and detail into it to both make it more enjoyable for me and more enjoyable for my classes.

One thing I’ve learned from all of this is that it gets so much easier the more you do it. This is going to be my 4th year teaching and I’ve gotten so much faster with planning everything. I have a larger amount of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t and what I enjoy and what my students enjoy. I’ve also known these specific students for the past two years.

But preparing the plan at the beginning of the year is my favorite part of teaching. Creating a curriculum to follow and figuring out a good order to teach certain concepts in. Choosing all of the musical material that will be used throughout the whole school year is the fun part for me.

But when I first did it I didn’t really think of a plan at all. I kind of just winged it and it went about as well as that sounds like it would go. It was horrible.

So I started planning and it helped a lot.

Now I’m much better at seeing the whole year as one year and figuring out what I can get done in that time and how to go about doing it. I’ve tried a number of different ideas and teaching methods and seen what’s worked and what hasn’t and gotten different ideas for the next years.

ISJ

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Bd + Sn out next week!

I’ve got a new song coming out next week on September 1st. It’s titled “Bd + Sn” and it’ll be available everywhere you can listen to music.

ISJ

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Formulas for music

Here’s the formula I’m using for the stock music I’m working on.

Length: 2:30

Tempo: 100 – 140

Form: Intro – AABA – Outro

Tonality: Major or minor. Maybe Lydian and Dorian.

Change something every 8 bars.

Keep the chord progressions simple and repetitive.

Limit yourself to 5 to 6 layers of instruments.

ISJ

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Writing stock music

I’ve been working on some stock music for a few non-exclusive music libraries. It’s not super innovative music. It’s not groundbreaking musical ideas that’ll change the musical vocabulary of the future. But the ideas work and they’ll definitely work for some specific contexts.

I’m currently working on a group of solo piano songs as well as a group of “emotional strings” songs and soon a group of solo guitar songs.

It’s super enjoyable because I’m working on writing a specific form of music and I’m working on keeping the songs as simple as possible, while still keeping them interesting. Doing those two things is surprisingly difficult.

It’s also a great way to keep myself creating and being creative, but in a lighter way than writing my own personal music. My music on Spotify and iTunes and Bandcamp and TIDAL is much more involved because those are songs that are more personal and less mechanical.

It’s almost a mechanical process for me to write stock music because I’m re-using old musical ideas that I’ve heard a bunch of times before. I’m placing specific pieces into specific places and using formulas almost.

If you’re ever feeling stuck writing some music I highly recommend writing some music to be used as stock music. It doesn’t have to be highly creative, but it does still have to be high quality. You’ll be able to practice your music production skills and mixing and mastering skills, but the actual process of coming up with ideas will be simplified.

It can be great practice.

ISJ

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Re-use ideas

AABA works well as a musical form. I – IV – V works well as a chord progression. The pentatonic scale works as a scale.

Re-using ideas can still generate plenty of new and interesting musical ideas.

Just because it’s an idea that’s been used many times doesn’t mean that all of the ideas have been extracted from it.

It might sound cliche to use specific ideas in specific ways, especially if they are ideas that have been used many many times, but those ideas in different contexts and used in different ways might make for some interesting music.

For example, if we take the “four chord song” I – V – vi – IV might sound a little cliche played with swung 16th notes and in 4/4. What if we play it in 5/4 with swing 8th notes and use slash chords. Instead of D – A – Bm – G we could play D/G – A/D – Bm/E – G/A.

That might make for a more interesting use of that chord progression.

Re-using ideas and putting them in a new context might make for new and interesting ideas.

ISJ

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Being creative

I’ve started working on some production music to upload to some non-exclusive music libraries and many of the ideas that I’ve been using aren’t that new to me.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not being creative.

I’m thinking of what will work given the context of what I’m writing. I’m being creative in a different way than thinking of a new idea or an interesting musical idea for me to play with. There’s a specific context that the music needs to fit into and whatever music I write needs to fit into that context.

The chord progressions are fairly simple. The arrangements are fairly simple. The form is consistent.

But within those constraints I need to be creative.

Even if you have constraints, whether they are artificial (in my case) or because you’re working on a specific project, be creative within those constraints.

ISJ

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Make it relatable

When deciding what music to teach and what musical examples to use in a classroom or private instruction setting I often try to make the examples relatable to the students in some way.

Some teachers may choose examples that students haven’t experienced or won’t be familiar with. That’s useful too, but some part of the education process needs to be relatable to the students.

If the students can’t relate to it, then they won’t be interested in learning about it.

On the other hand though, if students can relate to the material then they’ll likely be more excited to learn about it.

So choose some examples that are relatable.

Ask your students what they’d want to learn. Most musical topics can be taught through many different musical genres. Very few musical ideas require a specific genre to be taught through them.

Unless of course you’re teaching the history of a genre or the techniques used in one genre.

But the majority of ideas in music and music appreciation can be taught through many different styles of music.

Choose a style of music that’s relatable to the students.

It’ll likely keep their attention for longer than some random genre they don’t know about.

ISJ

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Practice that thing that you enjoy

Practicing an instrument can sometimes feel like work. When that happens take a step back from the “serious” work of practicing and improving your instrumental skills and mess around.

Play around.

Find whatever it is that you will enjoy in that moment and do that thing.

Do the thing you enjoy that might not improve your playing at all.

I’d argue that it’ll improve your playing by keeping the interest there.

You’ll be excited to play your instrument, which will keep you picking it up and playing it.

That’ll eventually result in you improving your playing.

ISJ

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Learn some basic maintenance

One of my biggest recommendations for guitar players specifically is to learn some basic maintenance. Learn to change your strings. Learn to adjust your action and your intonation. Learn to clean your fretboard.

Those things aren’t very complicated and are fairly simple to learn. Here’s a fantastic playlist of YouTube videos created by Gibson and the guitar tech Jim DeCola that has a number of videos on basic guitar maintenance. I highly recommend my fellow guitar players watch some of those videos to learn how to keep their instruments in good playing condition.

ISJ

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Speed comes with time

One thing many people think about when learning an instrument, especially guitar, is how to play faster.

And it’s not a fun answer, but it’s also not a complicated answer that I have to that question.

Speed comes with time.

The more time you spend playing and the more things that you learn to play, the faster you’ll be able to play. Playing quickly just means that you’ve played something slowly enough to get the coordination under your fingers enough to be able to speed it up.

But the start to playing quickly is playing slowly.

One of the things that I’ve been able to play fastest on guitar is a warm up exercise that I play every time I pick up my guitar.

It’s probably the thing that I’ve played most.

Hence, I can play it fastest.

ISJ

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