This class is for high school students at Winnebago Lutheran Academy who want to learn how to make music on computers. We use Audacity and Garageband as our main tools, and we have fun almost every single day figuring out how to make music using audio and MIDI, but we also learn how to record vocals and instruments and even play guitar and drums if we need to.
We keep personal blogs (look on the right column of this page and click on our names) to help us remember what we've been working on, keep track of the all the decisions that we've made on our projects, and to share with our family and friends the music that we've created.
Beat SlicingToday I turned the kids loose on their own hip-hop sampling projects. They have to come up with an original old song to sample and use as the basis for a hip-hop version. I have no idea how this will turn out, but I know that it will be a discovery process for each student.
One topic I've been meaning to research is beat slicing. Tonight as I read my emails I opened one from Electronic Musician and saw that they had featured a Windows-based beat slicer as their download of the month. It's called LiveSlice and is from LiveLab.
I did a little surfing and found some other beat slicers:
Dale Witte is the choir director and music technology teacher at Winnebago Lutheran Academy, Fond du Lac, WI. He has been teaching since January 1990 and really enjoys teaching students how God's gift of music works. Dale is also a church organist, piano player, violinist, and church music composer.