Tales From The Podium

The personal weblog of Chad Criswell, MusicEdMagic Webmaster.

JamStudio Makes Practicing More Fun

Guitar Fretboard Thanks to a Twitter post from @SmartMusic I have found a neat little online rhythm generator that can easily be used to provide background accompaniments when having students practice scales and other exercises. Having the background beat going really does help younger students keep focused and steady, plus it makes even simple sounding exercises a lot more impressive to the ear. Best of all it's free and fairly easy to use.

Teachers You Should Meet- Steve Park- French Horn

One of the great things about being a writer for Teaching Music is that I get a chance to talk to some great teachers that normally I would never meet or probably even hear of. This month in preparation for a piece coming out in the April issue I got to meet Steve Park, an Adjunct Horn Professor at Utah State University. The topic was on trumpet stuff (you'll just have to read the piece in the magazine if you are curious) but along the way he gave me some great tips for helping a few of my floundering trumpet and horn students. Sometimes it just takes a different point of view to help you see a new way to teach something and teaching it in that new way can make all the difference.

Woodwind/Brasswind Big Clearance Sale

Acoustic Bass Looks like the Woodwind and Brasswind is holding a big year end clearance sale on a lot of their accessories and intermediate/pro line instruments. Pretty nice deals from what I saw there, espeically on mouthpieces and used instruments.

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Tales From The Podium

Chad Criswell

Top Four Portable Digital Audio Recorders of 2012

Sound Wave It’s been well over a year since I last did a real round up of the current crop of digital audio recorders and there have been a lot of changes. One of the recorders that many of my collegues swore by (The M-Audio MicroTrak 2) got discontinued, and the company got out of the portable digital audio recording business completely. At the same time Olympus, a long time maker of digital voice recorders has come out with a model that (at least in my tests) seemed to do very well as a music/field recording device. The old list was kind of long and complicated so this year I am scaling back to focus on the best of the best in the world of portable digital audio recorders. Read on to find out who made the cut.

New Method Book From Focus On Music

Scale and Rhythm Chunks Book Cover The guys over at Focus On Music have just released a new set of method books called Scale and Rhythm Chunks that are designed to provide a systematic approach to improving fingerings and other skills. From the Chunks press release:

Each "Chunk" exercise is short enough that directors can easily evaluate each student quickly and effectively and students can easily "digest" new information. This affords students the opportunity to have frequent assessments to help them develop good habits for performance during the earlier stages of development.

Scale and Rhythm Chunks is the perfect tool for every developing player. The books are designed so that students will be motivated to take home their books and learn new notes, rhythms, dynamics and articulations on their own in a simple and straight-forward way. It can provide remedial help for learners who need more time to develop and provide extremely high goals for your advanced learners in need of a challenge.

For more information visit them over at the Focus On Music web site.

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Tales From The Podium

Chad Criswell