Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the Museum of Music Making at the NAMM Headquarters in Carlsbad, CA. The exhibits are really well designed and take visitors on a tour of the music making experience in the United States over the last century. You walk into the first of five exhibits and see late 19th century instruments, photos, and audio recordings and then gradually make your way through four additional exhibits with historic instruments, amplifiers from the 1930’s, organs, brass and wind instruments and more.

Of course my absolute favorite room was the synthesizer room, filled with a really wide variety of instruments from the 1970’s through the 90’s. There is also a hands-on room where you can play some great instruments, including a Theremin. The current temporary exhibit is titled “ON! The Beginnings of the Electric Sound Generation” which “focuses on the period between 1900 and 1965 when innovative thinkers such as Thaddeus Cahill, Leon Theremin, Lloyd Loar, Adolph Rickenbacker, George Beauchamp, Laurens Hammond, Alvino Rey, Leo Fender, Les Paul, and Paul Bigsby, worked to harness electrical energy to produce sounds and tones in a variety of electric and electro-acoustic musical instruments.”

I look forward to returning to the museum in September when they will bring a new exhibit focusing on the work of one of my idols, Bob Moog. If you are on the west coast it is well worth a visit - especially if you are a teacher bringing a school group.

Of all the software out there for musicians and educators, perhaps none has had the pure staying power as Band-In-A-Box. The well-known auto accompaniment generation has been a wonderful teaching tool for educators for decades. For those of you have never seen BIAB, you simply enter in chord changes and BIAB turns the lead sheet into a fully orchestrated accompaniment file. Recent upgrades over the years have added features such as notation, the ability to record audio, real-time MIDI input, and more. The one thing that some musicians might not have appreciated as much as the functionality of the software was the quality of the sound generated by the accompaniment. Basically, you were limited to General MIDI sounds that, let’s face it, sound cheesy. Not anymore. Introducing Band In A Box 2009 for Mac. While the PC version has been out for a few months, I haven’t checked it out until this latest announcement.

The most significant upgrade in years, the folks at PG Music have done the seemingly impossible - now the accompaniment files play back with REAL INSTRUMENTS which they call RealTracks and RealDrums. That’s right - actual audio recordings of real musicians playing thousands of examples that the software somehow strings together to create the most amazing sounding accompaniments yet. Band In A Box is now on a whole other level of sophistication. There are two movies posted on the PG Music site that introduce BIAB 2009 and the new features that are included. Those new features include: Audio Chord Wizard - this feature analyzes the chords played from any standard MP3, M4A, and more; and Direct Render to Disk which allows you to burn your files directly to an audio file or CD. I urge you to check them out. If you haven’t seen BIAB in a while, you’ll be impressed. At a price of $129 for first time users or as little as $49 to upgrade from BIAB 12.

To purchase BIAB 2009, visit the SoundTree Online Store.

Today and tomorrow I am in Gorham, ME on the campus of the University of Southern Maine to present three sessions on behalf of SoundTree at the Maine Music Educators 2009 Conference. The ride up was beautiful and I am very much looking forward to meeting the music educators of this terrific state. I am presenting the following sessions: The Educators Guide to Music, Media & Copyright Law; Podcasting in the Music Classroom; and my personal favorite, New Trends in Music Technology. As always, I have created a special landing page for the event, and I will be posting podcasts of all of my sessions by Sunday. If you’re here at the conference, I look forward to meeting you tomorrow. Til then, I’ll be heading to Portland for some lobster!

I welcome your comments, questions and suggestions about any of the information I am presenting at this conference.

As you may know I am a huge fan of Sibelius notation software and have been using it ever since I saw it demonstrated by the incredible Robin Hodson at the MENC Conference in Washington DC back in 2000. I taught all of my music classes in Franklin Lakes, NJ with it and will always be a Sibelius user. One of the many reasons that I love the software so much, aside from the ease of use, is that they always come up with some incredible new features when a new version comes along. I have bought every upgrade and have always been impressed with what the Sibelius team comes up with. When I heard recently about the new features in Sibelius 6 (shipping sometime next week) I was completely blown away. In a nutshell, here they are direct from the Sibelius website:

Magnetic Layout takes care of almost every detail of score layout for you - so effortlessly, you’ll hardly notice. As you write, it gives everything just the right amount of space and avoids collisions – producing beautiful results. This one feature saves you up to half your writing time.

Versions keeps track of revisions to your score, lets you look back at earlier versions of it, and see what changes were made since. Collaboration becomes a joy, and you can even add sticky Comments to leave notes for yourself, or others. Using Versions, students can save a commentary, or Creative Diary, along with their score which details their week-to-week progress. Teacher can instantly access this Creative Diary, spot any plagiarism, and generate a detailed report in Word format.

Live Tempo lets you conduct the playback of your score to produce a nuanced, musical performance. Simply tap a key on your computer keyboard, MIDI keyboard or foot pedal, and Sibelius follows your beat.

A new classroom control panel enables teachers to instantly send scores to every classroom computer, freeze computers, and gather in all student’s files at the end of a class.

High-quality playback now needs no set-up at all – just hit the space bar, and Sibelius plays back using amazing sampled sounds. High-quality playback is more seamlessly integrated than ever, thanks to the latest technology from Digidesign’s AIR team.

Add a live performance to an audio recording, or sync a recording with your score playback. You can do all of this and more thanks to ReWire support, which lets you sync Sibelius playback with products like Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, GarageBand and more.

Beautiful Keyboard & Fretboard windows - If you prefer using a keyboard or guitar to notation, these beautiful new windows are ideal. Simply click on the keys or frets to input notes and chords – or ‘play’ your computer’s QWERTY keys just like a piano! They’re great for teaching, too.

The brand new SibeliusMusic.com makes it even easier for you to earn an income from electronic sales of your scores around the world. Or you can just share and exchange scores with fellow musicians and Sibelius users.

People have been asking for years about inputting music from a microphone – and AudioScore lets you do just that! Developed by Neuratron, creators of PhotoScore, AudioScore lets you input music into Sibelius simply by singing or playing an instrument, then hit a button to put the results into Sibelius.

I am really looking forward to getting Sibelius 6 on my computer the minute it comes out. The new features listed above provide more than enough reason to spring for the upgrade. My favorite features for teaching music include the amazing Classroom Control feature that gives you a fantastic computer lab management tool; Versions which allows you to track your students creative process; and magnetic layers that goof-proofs your scores making them look pristine while freeing up more time for you and your students to be creative.

Well done Sibelius. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from you.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Les Lovoy, an independent producer for the NPR station in Birmingham, AL (WBHM) about teacher attitudes toward the popular music games GuitarHero and RockBand. The full interview can be heard by clicking HERE. Although I was interviewed for about 20 minutes, only a few sentences of the interview were extracted and included. I just want to go on record that I personally believe that there are incredible opportunities for music educators to harness the interest shown towards these games and focus that enthusiasm on music making in the classroom environment. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.