There are apps for just about everything but choosing when to embrace them for instruction needs to be a careful decision. In this episode, Trevor Jorgensen joins us to discuss how the decision to use mobile apps in music instruction is affected by where students are developmentally, convenience, cost, and other factors. Trevor is an Assistant Professor of Music and the Student Learning Outcomes Assessment Coordinator at SUNY Oswego.
Show Notes
- Amazing Slower Downer – iOS Android Mac Windows
- Amazon Music
- Johannes Brahms’ Trio in A-minor, op. 114th
- Symphoria
- Clarinetist Karl Leister performing Brahm’s Trio in A-minor, op. 114th
- Clarinetist David Shifrin performing Brahm’s Trio in A-minor, op. 114th
- Clarinetist Martin Frost performing Brahm’s Trio in A-minor, op. 114th
Additional Resources
- Wilf, E. Y. (2014). School for cool: the academic jazz program and the paradox of institutionalized creativity. University of Chicago Press.
- Berliner, P. F. (2009). Thinking in jazz: The infinite art of improvisation. University of Chicago Press.
- Music learning software: Smart Music – iOS *not offered for Android
- Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Tuner: Cleartune – iOS Android
- Tuner and Metronome: TonalEnergy Tuner- iOS Android
- Shashi Kanbur – Physics professor at SUNY Oswego
- Interactive music book: iReal Pro – iOS Android Mac *not offered for Windows
- Jamey Aebersold’s Jazz “Play-a-Longs”
- “Straight, No Chaser” by Thelonious Monk
- Jazz Saxophonist, Dick Oatts
- Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra by Aaron Copland
- Rob Auler – Music Department Chair, professor at SUNY Oswego
- Bluetooth Foot Switch: AirTurn Duo
Transcript
John: There are apps for just about everything but choosing when to embrace them for instruction needs to be a careful decision. In this episode we consider where students are developmentally in a discipline, convenience, cost, and other factors on the choice of supporting music instruction using mobile applications.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.
Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.
Rebecca: Today our guest is Trevor Jorgensen, an Assistant Professor of Music and Student Learning Outcomes Assessment Coordinator at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Trevor.
John: Welcome.
Trevor: Hey.
John: Our teas today are:
Trevor: Pure Leaf Peach Flavor tea.
John: Iced tea.
Trevor: Iced tea. Sorry. Thank you.
John: …and Rebecca.
Rebecca: I have Chai today…
John:…and I have black raspberry green tea. We’ve invited you here to talk about how you’ve been using mobile technology in applied music instruction, specifically related to performance. Could you tell us a bit about that?
Trevor: Yeah, I think one of the most important things is to decide when to use technology where it benefits as opposed to be either a substitute for something you should learn in a different way, or whether you should implement it because it’s just convenient. Sometimes when it’s convenient, though, it takes away some of the learning behind it, and I’ll get into some of that later. So I think that’s the first thing. I have to make that decision on every app that I use, or every device that I employ. So, one of the main things that I do is decide what’s best for the student and what’s best for me. And a lot of it does substitute for other things, but in the end, it can’t. For instance, if I do a collaborative piano thing with my colleague, there’s a lot of tools that we’ll talk about today that will substitute for that collaboration. Except for, I cannot phrase with the app in the the same way that I can. We can’t make decisions on a moment’s notice, like I can with another musician. We can’t have talks… at least I shouldn’t be talking to my apps… about what the best way to do something is and then make that interpretation or change colors of stuff. But what it allows me to do is, instead of having a more rehearsals with somebody that’s really busy, it allows me to rehearse by myself. And then therefore, save some time when we’re actually in the rehearsal to talk about those musical decisions as opposed to just to try to learn notes or trying to learn one anothers parts.
John: What are some of the apps that you use with instruction or performance?
Trevor: One of my favorite ones is Amazing Slow Downer, and I use this for both jazz and classical, being a saxophonist, and also a multi-reed player…I play clarinet, oboe, and bassoon. I like to use it in every circumstance I can. And it’s really a great app because even though there’s things like YouTube where you can now click over the three little dots in the corner, and you can slow down to 25%, 50% and 75% and speed it up if you so desire. This tool is just something that I always have with me and I can always use. And I’m also more familiar with it, it allows me to do multiple things. So let me give you example if I can play musical selection here. The first two are not going to be on the music slower downer, it’s going to be on Amazon Music. But I want you to listen. These are Brahms’ Clarinet Trio. I performed this with a colleague and somebody from Symphoria recently. And one of the things you’re doing as a musician is you have to interpret the history of music, and that includes listening. So if I listened to multiple recordings of something, you know, we always ask “Why are there a thousand recordings—might be overstated—but of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?” That’s because the composer had a certain thing in mind. And then the conductor who prepares the music, and the individuals in that group have different ways of interpreting that music and every one is different. But for a lot of younger students, and sometimes myself when it’s really advanced players, I’m not exactly sure what they’re doing, either articulation wise or what they’re doing phrasing wise. And the slower downer allows me to think about what they’re doing and compare all these great artists together. So I’ll do multiple recordings on something like this Brahms’ clarinet trio in A minor and have my students listen to it. I’m going to play one of them for you, and then I’ll play another one, and then I’ll play the third one. And then the third one I’ll slow down to show you how we can listen for different articulations. You may or may not tell the difference between the three, some of them are obvious, like there’s a tempo difference between them. But as far as the phrasing and the articulation used by the cellist, and by that clarinetist, and by the pianist, is something to think about. What do I want to sound like? It’s great to imitate people, but it’s also great to make decisions between all these different things you’re, in a way, sourcing and decide what you want to do and why you’re doing those musical decisions.
Rebecca: Before we jump into listening, for our audience who maybe is not as familiar with the music terms that you’re using? Can you clarify the difference between phrasing and articulation?
Trevor: Sure. Great. So articulation is the front of the note, and thank you for your much for that. So as a saxophonist, it’s how I tongue the note, if I put an emphasis through air or through my tongue. Another word for that is “attack,” how it attacks into it. For a string player, it might be the direction—up bow or down bow—how fast they’re moving the bow. For the pianist, how they voice the chords and are there some fingers stronger than the others. A third comes out of the chord and the fifth comes out of the chord. For a chord you have multiple, you know 1-3-5s, or the seventh of the chord. And each one of those, as a pianist, when they’re putting down multiple fingers, they can decide which ones are the most important. Whether it be the melody, whether it be the bass part, whether it be the inner harmony. So, from a pianist’s point-of-view, they can listen for that, or how the touches on the piano, how much they pressurize it, or if they use pedal in this area that’s not dictated by the score exactly. So phrasing, the best way to describe it is like minute dynamics. Or just using what we normally do. We, as human beings phrase, if you like somebody you change your voice, or if you get excited like, “I have go to the bathroom,” you don’t think, “Hey, I should elevate the dynamic of my voice. I should make it sound strained, so that I show the excitement of me having to go to the bathroom.” But in music, we have to think about that. We have to think about where, based on the harmony that’s below the music, how much am I going to emphasize that note or more importantly, maybe even growth of that note, or that musical phrase. So phrasing’s how people interpret the music beyond playing the right notes in the right place, and doing the pianoforte dynamics; it’s how they’re going to go to a note and resolve a note. And not only that, they think about overall structure of a piece for phrasing and how everything fits together, if they’re amazing musicians. When we listen to amazing musicians—like the ones who found in these recordings, then what we’re going to do is interpret what they did. And then maybe in our own minds figure out why you think they did that, if that’s a choice that you like to do based on the harmony or just a different tone color they do. And that’s obviously easier to figure out when you slow down to 70% than it is when you’re listening to it at 100%. So before I play the examples, the actual artists will be in the show notes below in the description. First one is, I’m just going to name the clarinetist, Karl Leister, and this is them playing the Brahms’ Trio. And I’ll do the first 30 seconds or so, so you can hear how it sounds.
[KARL LEISTER PLAYING BRAHMS’ TRIO]
Trevor: The next example will be by the clarinetist David Shifrin, that trio that he’s in. I’ll play about the same amount of time for it.
[DAVID SHIFRIN PLAYING BRAHMS’ TRIO]
Trevor: The last one I’ll do on Amazing Slower Downer, the app. And we’ll actually play it in tempo first, since its Martin Frost as the clarinetist, playing the same piece.
[MARTIN FROST PLAYING BRAHMS’ TRIO]
Trevor: So what we’ll do now is we’ll actually slow it down to like 70% so we can actually hear a little bit better the articulations, the dynamics—as the artist gets louder, you’ll be able to hear it more individual. And we can even slow it down after that into something ridiculous like 25%, where you can actually hear the front of each note. It’s almost painstaking how slow it is, but interpreting different things, it’s interesting to see if they use a breath attack or a tongue attack, and some of them are so subtle, I’d have to listen to it 25 times without slowing it down where I can actually hear it at 25% right away. So let’s go back and do it about 70%.
[BRAHMS’ TRIO PLAYED AT 70% SPEED]
Trevor: Here’s 25%.
[BRAHMS’ TRIO PLAYED AT 25% SPEED]
Trevor: I’m just going to jump ahead a little bit so we get into the clarinetist and stuff. I’m just going to scroll ahead.
[BRAHMS’ TRIO PLAYED AT 25% SPEED]
Trevor: First of all it’s very unfair because I would never want to be heard at 25%—it’s just impossible to keep a phrase sometimes or keep a note perfectly that way—but what it does is for us is we can actually hear them the front of the note… we can hear the shape of that note even if it’s a quarter note if he—in this case it’s a he—de-crescendos or crescendos into it and we can look at the overall structure of the dynamics too. You can see if he’s actually growing on that note, if you’re taping the note as I said before… the overall picture or phrase too. I think 25% might be a little excessive, you have to find the happy medium based on the tempo of the piece. I think initially 25% for this one might have been a little painstaking at the beginning.
John: But for students, perhaps having the ability to slow it down to that level would be much more helpful than for someone with more experience?
Trevor: Right, there’s definitely that and then we’re looking into transcription later on too. There’s this great book called School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity by Eitan Wilf and I hope I’m pronouncing his name right. He wrote it in 2014 and he basically went to Berklee School of Music and then The New School in Manhattan. And he noticed that students were using this application even back then—and when I say back then is only five years ago, or four years ago, or three, because in the time of technology, that’s way back then—and they were actually interpreting, transcribing not only John Coltrane and getting his notes like I would have done when I was in grad school or undergrad, but also then listening to his articulation at the front of the note. So trying to make their tongue sound exactly like that slow, and then they’d be speeding it up. Also, in a real fast passage we use a fake fingering. What fake fingering is, is there’s a normal way of fingering D on saxophone which is like 123-123 fingers down and then there’s a way of playing the high D but not using the octave key so it comes out in kind of a muffled way, I could probably demonstrate it for you if you’d like.
[TREVOR PLAYS D NOTE 3 DIFFERENT WAYS]
Trevor: So you use three different fingerings for the same note, which I’d probably not do in classical, but for jazz, it adds a different color. A lot of people know certain people will play that way so that you can actually determine those notes when it’s really fast it’s hard to tell. Just that nuanced playing that you can actually interpret when you’re listening to John Coltrane, that I didn’t when I was that age of the students that he was, you know, surveying. But, slowing it down, it’s not something new. There’s another great book too, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation by Paul Berliner who was published in 1994. He talks about how the old school players would get a vinyl record and they’d put their thumb on it and slow it down to like a third of the speed and then obviously transpose. Now they would be in the wrong key and way too low, and then they just transpose it up. So this technology, or using this technology, has been available as far as transcription. But if you did put your thumb on a record, it would probably distort the sound and the way that you can figure out articulation and you couldn’t figure out phrasing.
John: And the advantage of this is that students can preserve the pitch because all these apps maintain the pitch and you can hear the attack… just more slowly.
Trevor: This one is specifically and I’m sure a lot of things you can probably do this on YouTube. Also, a lot of my students have to in order to avoid buying a $15 app like this one is—at least when I bought it it was—they’ll find other sources, which I think is great. It doesn’t matter to me what they use as long as it does the same thing. I think on YouTube, you can do the same thing where you can loop it, and there is these three seconds or 10 seconds or whatever, and just loop it and here you can loop it. You can also save the file, save the section of the piece, call it what you want, and the next time you open up the app, it’s there. And you can also share your ideas with people. You can download stuff from things you buy on iTunes or you can use Spotify and there are other ways of importing into this app that’s really beneficial too. The nice part about this app is it can be used for classical and jazz. Most people use it mainly for jazz and transcription but I use it for everything and additionally you can actually slow your own self down which is always painful and hear that you weren’t phrasing that well or that your end of notes aren’t as tapered as they could be. And once you listen to amazing players you realize that they have control over everything. I’ve slowed myself down. I always know the differences between me and like the best person in the world, although I knew already but but it’s so evident when you slow it down to 50% and you hear the attack of your note is not as clear and not as shaped as the people that are just geniuses.
John: And you can also use that with students, though, to show them what they’re doing, right?
Trevor: Exactly. I mean, it’s a very revealing tool. So as far as students are concerned, I think it’s great tool for them but also can be somewhat depressing to hear yourself. It has to be a good balance and the student has to be at the point where we’re finding things not initially at the beginning, or maybe they’re even in their freshman or sophomore year, but at the end when they’re preparing for grad school or something like that, and it depends on the student as it does with every situation… what you can push them on and what you can’t. But, it’s just a great tool for that. So I also use the Amazing Slower Downer when I have a piece that I don’t have a—we’ll talk about Smart Music later where it is an intuitive accompaniment tool that takes away the saxophone or takes away or whatever it is you’re working on—but when it’s in pieces not in there or I don’t know the piece, I’ll find a recording of it and then I’ll play along with it. And this I can adjust a little bit of pitch if I need to and more importantly speed if I needed to get slower or I decided to take the piece at the end faster. Maybe now’s the time to talk about what the disadvantage of some technology is. I’ve got colleagues that don’t like using slower downers, not just colleagues but I’ve read articles and everything else, because you don’t have to go through the work and the persistence of doing so, and you should be able to hear it in the moment in the spot. And I think there’s something to be said for that. But I look at myself as one of the things where I get discouraged. I always think about one of my favorite reads, which is a psychologist by the name of Csikszentmihalyi and he’s got the flow theory, which is a book he published in 1990, which a lot of people are aware of. And number three of his flow theory is that there has to be a balance between the challenge and skills. For me, there wasn’t, my skills were low and my patience were also maybe lower when I was younger. [LAUGHTER]
John: And I think that’s true for most starting students. And a lot of people get discouraged when they don’t see that immediate progress.
Trevor: Yeah, that’s exactly it. So for me, I was able to use the tools that helped me a lot more. I painstakingly did it when I was my students’ age that was also because of the slower downers were $400 and I didn’t have the money. Now most students have phones but they use them for social media or actually using them as phones, or texting more likely. But now you can just download an app instead of buying a $400 machine for about $15, or you can go to YouTube and use that function or other tools that come with any kind of PC nowadays. Microsoft has their recording software and you can slow it down too. Not in such a certain way, but any of those tools are great too. Anyways I’ll slow my own recordings down of me playing along with other things. But the problem is trying to figure out that balance where I should be taking it to the tempo there I just took it or slowing it down. You just have to progress and move it forward so that you take it faster, faster each time. The thing about anything is once we do it more often, it becomes easier.
John: And the more they practice with this at a slow pace, the better they’ll be able to do it in real time as well.
Trevor: Right, and their ears develop immediately, faster and faster, and then therefore they can get to that point. I commend my colleagues and all the articles that I’ve read where you know, it’s better to do it that way. But for me, it was a wall, as it is for some of my students.
Rebecca: Sometimes it’s good to recognize when you are a beginner and that sometimes you need those training wheels just to feel like you got a little success.
Trevor: Right. That success as we all know it from pedagogy is that wields more success and it gets better and better every time. Let’s go on to a different app. Some of the obvious apps are metronome apps, every student can get a free metronome. I was excited in the mid 2000s when they dropped down to $20 as opposed to like $200, or the tuner is the same way, and then balancing that out. For me it’s I could buy a $20 tuner and put one on every one of my instruments but I always have my cell phone on me that’s what I love about it. I always have a tuner, I always have a metronome and I have no excuse, nor do my students. You know it’s a free app; you already own the phone. But there are some tuners and some metronomes that are better than others and I am not an authority, I don’t know every app that’s out there because there’s thousands. The ones that I know are the ones that I like… people have introduced to me and I’ll switch apps all the time if I find one that’s better. As far as the tuner or metronome it doesn’t really matter what my student brings in… whether she brings in the one that I prefer, like Cleartune for everyday apps, or if she brings in like TonalEnergy Tuner, but I’m going to talk about that one because it’s one that I found really interesting and it has a lot of functions on it. And it’s not only a tuner but a metronome. I use Tempo app for metronome primarily when I’m practicing but I’m getting into the TonalEnergy app for inside of it has also a metronome that I’m trying to investigate. So the app has so many different features to it, and I’ll show you and then maybe both of you can also chime in on what you think they look like, but…
John: I use the Cleartune app myself.
Trevor: Yeah, I loved that app until I saw this app. To give you a total side story, this one does analysis by waveform as it does it by another analysis and note names, too. This weekend, I judged a competition for high school students to get into all-county bands. And one of the other judges in the brass room said one of the students—and I don’t know the name of the student nor the judge—but the performance was really not great at all, where he actually pulled out his TonalEnergy Tuner to figure out what note the student was on to see if he could find out where he or she was was in the piece. That being the extreme of what the app is used for… nor do you want to use it for transcription because there are transcription apps where you plug it in and it’ll transcribe it for you. For playing our transcriptions—there’s worth to all those things—as far as actual transcriptions… a tool that you should have so that it ingrains in your memory and you have those phrases for jazz specifically. So this one here you can choose from waveform, you can do spectral harmonic analysis and note analysis. As you can see right now as we’re talking, sometimes I’m talking in tune and he gives me a happy face—it could be a she—gives me a smiley face, or if I’m really badly out of tune, there’s this little question mark with the thumb and finger or very sadness as you get way out of tune. But more importantly, as I do the waveform thing, it will record what I do.
Rebecca: I was also noticing that the color was changing as well. So, there was a lot of different identifiers to the user so if you had a certain kind of disability it’s actually providing that information in multiple ways.
Trevor: Yeah, and that’s great. And then over on the side it tells you pluses and minuses, I’m 13 cents sharp or whatever, 13.6 or flat. So, I can show the pitch, I can show the wave, and I can record it. Let’s go ahead and record it. You’ll see as we’re talking the spectrum, and then if I do with the notes, it’ll show me the notes, which ones they are, and how badly out of tune they are and we’re just talking. I could play my saxophone. But it would give you the same thing.
Rebecca: Right.
Trevor: So as far as I’m concerned, if I turn this away, and I can record it, and then go back and look at it, I’ll know that if I do nothing, or how much I need to do on the D. The D that I played for you before, nd gave you three different examples is the worse out-of-tune note on saxophone. So, I probably was sharp but this will tell me every note that I need to. You can even slow it down and stuff. You can also record your student visually and with audio. The visual thing is interesting because a lot of movement in the face will affect tuning. When I came to college, I chewed a lot, I had movements in my throat and my face and my teacher would just tell me what they were. But now I can like hold the video against them, show what their movements are, and how it’s affecting tuning and it’s, you know, just another another tool to get you there beyond just recording their facial features and hearing it.
Rebecca: It’s an interesting way to note take because it’s a visual note-taking method that you’re not just having to remember the conversation that you had with your faculty member or mentor, but that you can go back to and see again, if you’re able to record it and save it for later.
Trevor: Right. Yeah, I know, it’s great. It’s a neat tool. So, I’m starting to love this tuner and this metronome as much as the others. It does a lot of specific things where if I’m just pulling out a tuner like Cleartune, as we talked about, or Tempo, that’s more my functional as opposed to how badly I’m out of tune when I’m playing this passage. And the same thing I notice whether I’m using this app, TonalEnergy Tuner, or I’m using Amazing Slower Downer, or I’m using what we’ll talk about later, Smart Music, is that when I’m playing along with the pitch, in the case of Amazing Slower Downer, I know I can hear I’m out of tune, and then I can check it against this or if I’m playing along with Smart Music and you check it against here and see where I’m out. And I play multiple instruments so I’d like to tell you I’m perfectly in tune on every instrument but sometimes I’ll be playing A clarinet and I haven’t played that for a while where I normally do B-flat clarinet and I’m like, “Oh, that’s right. This B-flat is flat on the A but sharp on the…” you know, you have to adjust and unlearn and it allows me to do that prior to getting in there with my collaborative pianist and realizing that I’m out of tune. It’s a great tool. It’s got so many more features that I’m going to start looking into but there are funny features like… not really funny… but the band director or the the judge using it to try to figure out where they were, which hopefully we won’t have to use it very often for.
Rebecca: I wonder for a beginning student who has very little experience… maybe someone who’s not in the music program, but is learning an instrument. Have you worked with students using these kinds of apps with that population of students… like total beginners?
Trevor: Prior to teaching here at SUNY Oswego, I was teaching beginning students… so, seven to eighth in junior high program and then had fifth and sixth grade students. I haven’t used it and mainly because of physicality. Until you develop your armature, until you learn how to use the air, it’s almost impossible to use this effectively because if you don’t have the proper air you can’t make those minute adjustments. That being said, to get the initial tuning for every instrument, whether you’re in fifth grade or fourth grade, you do want to make sure the violin is in tune so students will start using that, you do want to make sure that your concert B-flat’s in tune, which only means after that all the other 11 notes are out of tune, but it’s a good reference point. And then students start to use tuners that way, and amazingly some of them like apps and stuff, and they get into and they show me different things they’re using for that I never thought. But initially, I try not… until those physical things are employed properly. It’s almost futile to actually do it all the time.
John: They need the fundamentals before you can work on tweaking.
Trevor: Right, yeah, especially for you know, with piano you don’t have to worry about tuning. Guitar, that’s got frets so it’s good to know how to tune it. You know that more…
John: You’ve never seen my piano, but… [LAUGHTER]
Trevor: Yeah, but yeah, no… We’ll talk about the next thing, Smart Music, and how it’s used more, or at least, I think more band directors in the public schools use it at elementary all the way through high school, then maybe as far as band music and material is than college professors. I use it for the solo literature, like clarinet concertos and sonatas ….but in the public schools they’re using this technology we’ll get into to not only evaluate their students—how they’re doing, to keep track of their practicing—but as a preparation tool, it’s great. And it can also be not as great for certain specific things and we’ll talk about that when we get there. The next tool—and we’re kind of focusing on my phone right now—the only app that is not available on a phone, a mobile platform that way, but is only on an iPad—is the Smart Music. As I said, we’ll get into that later. The next app I like a lot and I just got an email right before this, there’s a physics professor on campus who’s named Shashi and he’s a saxophone player. And he does exceptionally well, he’s way better of a saxophone player than I am in physics by any means. [LAUGHTER] He loves it. But he gave me an update “I used iReal Pro yesterday at an open jam session. I played these tunes” and went “Great, I’m excited.” It’s great to see that it can be used by by anyone. And as I said, he’s come miles and he loves this because for a physics professor he probably jams with people and he’s been doing a lot more of that. But initially, he’s like, “Who do I get to play with?” and if you don’t play music with somebody—it’s a social thing too… or people hear it—then you kind of like “Why am I doing this?” Even myself as a professional musician, my colleagues and I will prepare harder and more for either recordings or performances coming up then we will during the summer when there’s nothing to do. That being said, we’re preparing always for the next semester, but it’s always great to have that motivation. If I never played with anybody I probably wouldn’t continue playing, especially being a saxophone. A pianist is different, a guitarist is different, perhaps. Drummer is probably different too. I can’t imagine one person only being a drummer and doing that for the rest of life without collaborating with someone.
John: Did you tell us what iReal Pro is?
Trevor: In jazz, there’s these things called real books or fake books. Now, they’re legal. Back about 20, 30 years ago you can only buy them through illegal sources, and they were the melodies of famous popular music standards and jazz compositions, with chord changes behind them. And then you would get together with musicians and you’d play. Now back in the 70s, a guy by the name of Jamey Aebersold used professional musicians who recorded them on CDs—or back then I guess vinyl—and then gave a play along book with it. So he’s got the Jamey Aebersold play along. And what this is done is taking non-live musicians and put it into an app where you can play along with. You can see the chord changes. There are no melodies because you’d have to pay money and royalties for the melodies. But there is no royalties needed for chord changes, and so of the title of the tune and then the chord changes. It comes with no actual pieces on it until you go to the forum and then you can download thousands of pieces that are already programmed in that you can play along with. So I’m just going to pick up right now blues “Straight, No Chaser” by Thelonious Monk. Although it could be any blues until you hear the head and I’m just going to play you a little bit of how it sounds and then I’ll give you a visual description later about it.
[“Straight, No Chaser” PLAYS]
As you notice, when the music goes by, or the chord changes goes by, there’s a highlighted measure so that you know where you are, which is handy for students that are learning to improvise. Later on it’s not necessary, you could just look off a real book lead sheet and play along with it. There’s many features, one I can make the transposing instrument like I’m playing saxophone in the key of B-flat instead of C. I can see the chords transposed in front of me even though it’s playing the key of C. I can do that for any instrument. There’s like a balancing… if I’m a pianist, I can take the piano out or if I’m a drummer, I can take the drummer out. I’m not sure why a drummer would want to do that. And I can control the reverb… I can change the tempo… I can change the style—this is a jazz medium up swing—I can change it to almost anything—Latin, Gypsy jazz, trio guitar, slow swing, traditional jazz—and there’s pop and Latin stuff so I can change the beat behind. I don’t do that as much unless you’re working in the Latin situation but it’s nice to have and as I said, you can also program pieces in. So we just did a concert with this great alto saxophone player by the name of Dick Oatts down in the Village Vanguard Band—that’s where he is primarily and teaches at Temple University—a world renowned musician. And he sent us his charts which are really hard and don’t follow normal progressions. They’re really kind of tricky so I actually programmed them, or one of them, into here just so I could play along with it a little bit… hear the changes a little bit better. I mean I’ll voice them out on my saxophone like normal but it’s a really handy tool to have. And speed it up too like I can’t take it to the tempo he wants it so I’m gonna slow it down and feel good about myself and they’re not really that odd but they’re more unusual chord changes. They made sense but just needed more time to practice and I just programmed in it by…you kind of scroll up and type in F major and put a seven and you can do all the different things. It’s really interesting and you can save them and if you want and you can share them on the forum so other people can look at tunes. So this is an amazing tool. I love it for that because I can speed it up and slow it down, but there are other options. I think Aebersold things are still available online unfortunately for Aebersold ‘cause you know, he’s losing royalties and stuff on that. But then on YouTube, there’s “Learn to Play Jazz” I think if you type that in and whatever tune you want to do there’s that for the people that actually have iReal Pro copies on YouTube. You can’t slow it down, you can’t transpose it. You can adjust the balance and blend and stuff but it’s there. So my students will find those things too and use them. And I’m totally fine with that. You know, financially it makes sense. One of my favorite features is…and John, you have this app you said?
John: Yeah, I do.
Trevor: So you use this app, and have you have you looked at the tablature part of the app?
John: I haven’t been using it recently. Since we started the podcast I haven’t been playing so much music.
[LAUGHTER]
Trevor: Got ya. Give me a second here. So I’m going to show you…and do you play an instrument at all?
Rebecca: No. That’s why I was asking all those music questions.
Trevor: And please continue to do so. [LAUGHTER] In the corner of the app there’s this little thing that looks like a tablature and you can choose from multiple things. One is for guitar so you can select guitar chords. You can do piano, and the piano you can do one hand or two hands. You can do ukulele, which is a new feature and more importantly for me is the chord scale library which I use all the time. So let’s go back and add the chord scale library. So if I press play and then I pause it right away it’ll give me chords down at the bottom. So for that C7 chord I can do either dominant mixolydian chord if I scroll over. Actually for this one, there’s only one, but for a lot of times when it’s a different chord like flat 5 or something like that it’ll give you multiple options of what scaless you can use over top of it. Once you talk to a pianist—they’re not really fond of this app, because it’s not exactly like you would teach jazz piano—but if you have no skills, and you want to learn from an app, it can give you some things. It’s a really nice tool for myself and all of my students too. And as I said, our physics professor on campus uses it a lot and as do you prior to doing the podcast.
John: I used to use it more before we started this podcast.
[LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Trevor, we found that students were using these tools—or when you’re using these as part of your teaching—that the students abilities have improved or that they’re playing has improved. Have you noticed a difference in the integration or?
Trevor: In some regards more about how they practice and how long they practice. But yeah, I’ve noticed an improvement. By having no one to play along with it’s difficult to improvise—you improvise in different ways—it’s a very valuable skill to be able to cut the changes… and me as a saxophone player, if I play and my colleague walks in the room they say, “Oh, you’re playing this tune” based on the solo I’m doing then I know I’m really cutting the changes. But when I don’t know a tune as well, it’s nice to have the harmonic progression so I can use my ear a little bit more than I can my mind and eventually, it’s a combination of both, I’d hope. But my students will then play along with the blues a lot more than they would if they were just doing it by themselves.
John: And much of the benefit is students can work and get up to a point where they’re ready to play with other students so that everyone can use their time more effectively when they actually do collaborate and meet at once. Rather than each person struggling just to do their own parts, they get to work out playing it together.
Trevor: Exactly, it saves so much time. In addition to that, when we think about rural areas. A lot of times you’ll be able to find a great collaborative pianist for doing your solo so it might be okay to use Smart Music—I hate to say that—or you might not have a chance to prepare so you play along with records—or you play along with, in the old days—and now you can play along with this. You know, even getting out and playing along with it at open mic night it’s just totally acceptable because it’s expensive to find musicians and especially in different places. Where in New York City I think would never see anybody using iReal Pro to play along with at a club, you know, just because…
John: …There’s a few musicians there, yeah.
Trevor: But I’ve heard of people pulling it out and it does irritate people. There is the idea that once you graduate from a jazz program—specifically, if you focus on jazz. I myself, did music education. I play jazz a lot and I also did classical clarinet, classical saxophone—but if you’re only a jazz major, or if you’re good jazz player, you’ll have like 150 to 200 tunes memorized. So you’ll call a tune, you’ll have the head, and you’ll know the chord progressions. But nowadays, a lot of the younger players are… from what I hear and what I hear from complaints from older generation people is that they’ll pull out the iReal Pro if they don’t know a tune and play along with it. And there’s pluses and minuses. Now you can actually play that tune. The minus is it’s not as ingrained as if you had to learn it and memorize it and ingrain in yourself, and that you won’t be able to interact with the high level players you’re playing with in the same way as if you did that work. So there’s, you know, again, pluses and minuses. It never should be a substitute for the ideal, but it should be a tool like you just said to get you there. Or in the cases of where there’s not a bass player to play with, at least it gives you a way to proceed until you can find one.
Rebecca: How do students respond to using these tools?
Trevor: They like them. They enjoy them. They think they’re really neat. This freshman student that came in—he was using YouTube, one of the play alongs he warmed up to it—but yet again, the disadvantage of this is all electronic and they sound electronic. So at least some of the “Learn to Play Jazz” are actually real jazz musicians. But you can alter the tempo—or you can’t—I guess you can with the 75%, 50%. I’ve never tried it, now that I think of it, on YouTube…but you know, it just it takes adjustment. You know, there’s nothing to substitute live musicians. The drummer can’t react to what phrase you just played. Nor can the keyboard voice omething different if you’re going there harmonically. But it is a tool. And yet again, a tool that’s not a substitute, but a tool that’s effective in preparing. The next tool we’ll talk about is actually on my iPad, and it’s Smart Music. Smart Music is an app which originally was on a computer and way back in the 90s when it came out it looked like the old Atari cartridges you’d buy with the machine for $2,000 and each cartridge would be like $80 or something and have one piece—Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. But nowadays it comes on an iPad and you can also get it on your computer. The computer has more features on it but obviously is not as portable as the iPad. And what it does and what it’s being used for is amazing, but also can be negative and we’ll talk about that after we talk about the positives. It has all the band music that you’ll want to play in public school and what the band director can do—including myself as a band director—is that I can say, “I want you to play Holst’s ‘First Suite,’” is which we picked here, and gives you the saxophone part but I can also push the button as you can see, and I can pick whatever instrument I’m playing. So I’m playing bassoon, it gives you the bassoon part. It has the music in front of you and then once I play along with the rest of the band without that bassoon part or that saxophone part, it has little X’s and O’s and tells me what percentage of the music I got right rhythmically and everything else. So band directors will use this to say, “I want you to record this and get it to me and then that’s your percentage on it.” Now it does have some flaws. I’ve listened to students play and myself play and it’s no way that I’m getting 60% I’m getting closer to 85 or something like that. So some advantages and it’s gotten better over the years.
Rebecca: So just to clarify, it’s like Guitar Hero video game?
Trevor: To clarify, Guitar Hero has nothing to do with guitar.
Rebecca: Right. Yeah.
Trevor: It’s more of a rhythmic pushing buttons…
John: Pattern matching, yeah.
Trevor: Pattern matching and it has something to do with the music because it’s actually, you’re hitting it rhythmically along with the song, that’s about it. But you’re right, it’s like a play along, it’s like karaoke without the part you’re on. But this karaoke, in this case, records where your notes are wrong with red and green, where you’re behind, and it tells you where you’ve missed things, and then that goes back to the band director and they can grade you accordingly. So it saves them time.
Rebecca: The visual cues are similar is really what I’m…
Trevor: Oh I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I haven’t I haven’t played a lot of Guitar Hero and I apologize. Most of my knowledge of Guitar Hero’s from South Park and we won’t talk about that. So it allows you to do all those different things and then record them. As far as soloists are concerned, that’s where I use it more. I use it more to play along with a collaborative pianist that’s not there. And it follows you. So for instance, I’m going to pick the clarinet Copland concerto that I’ve prepared for, and it’s got a piano reduction to it. It’s a very difficult piece to put together when you’re a clarinetists like me, who’s a saxophone player that also plays clarinet well. So I use it a lot of time to prepare before I meet with my collaborative pianist. And I’m going to pick an arbitrary section in the middle so you can hear the piano part. And the piano part will play and then once I play along with it—and I’m not actually going to play—it will record it, and I can play it back so I hear all my mistakes which is really nice, and also my pitch errors and stuff. And then if I am unsure of myself, I can actually set it so that it will play with the clarinet part along with me so that I can hear that part to make sure I’m rhythmically accurate with it. That comes to one of the problems with being able to play along with something that has 100% rhythmic accuracy, but you don’t. You know, our ear can pick up on things so quickly that… let me give you the example. When I was in high school, there’s this lady named Amanda and she was the first-chair alto saxophone. And Amanda would have the rhythm perfectly the first time and then me, who would after listening to her having it perfect the fifth or sixth time, so I didn’t really learn how to count properly. And by playing along with the Smart Music, where the piano is actually playing your saxophone part or clarinet part, and you’ve been listening to that. Then when it comes to actual real performances, if you play along with it all the time, then you’re relying on it so much and your rhythm goes out the window. So that’s where some technology can get in your way, specifically with rhythmic attributes, but also with other things too. But yet again, it’s a tool and if you recognize that, you know, I prepare it rhythmically with the students first, I don’t let them use Smart Music until they’re at almost the performance level. So we’re going to play a little bit of the Copland Clarinet Concerto somewhere, but 140 measures into it. I’m going to play it initially with the accompaniment but with nobody playing, and then I’m going to set it and you can hear the difference now with the clarinet part being played by a different sounding piano.
[COPLAND’S CLARINET CONCERTO PLAYS ON PIANO]
So that was just the piano alone. Now I will do it with the clarinet part being played by a secondary piano, and you’ll hear how it fits in and that’d be what I’d be playing along with if I needed the rhythmic help or I wanted to check my pitch.
[COPLAND’S CLARINET CONCERTO PLAYS ON PIANO WITH SECONDARY PIANO]
That wasn’t as obvious an example but if you knew the part you’d be able to hear there’s extra additional things added to that which should be the clarinetist. So this tool is just remarkable for that and as I said, for band directors in public school and at the university level too, it seems like an appealing thing. I just haven’t figured out a way to automate it or include it in my, you know, as part of the practicing routine for my students. And if they don’t come from it from the schools, it’s a little bit more difficult to implement. I’m not sure at the university level it’s ideal for me to implement. I’m still wrestling with that as I am with implementing any technology.
John: So how have your colleagues responded?
Trevor: One of my colleagues, Rob Auler, he uses it as much or more than I do, we always check out, “Hey man, check this app out. Do you think it works really well?” So we check out different apps and sometimes those apps apply—or in the case of Rob, a tuning app wouldn’t apply for him because, you know, somebody else tunes his piano for him—but he really loves Amazing Slower Downer. He uses the iReal Pro probably less than I do, because he could collaborate with himself in his left hand while he’s playing solo lines in his right hand. And he doesn’t use it as a tool like Smart Music because, you know, pianists are not usually playing along with other pianists, they’re the collaborators. And we’ve talked about that, too. He knows it’s not a tool that can replace a pianist. But when we work together, Rob is a consummate musician and so he learns things way faster than I do. His mother would feel the TV to see if he was practicing five hours a day when he was younger, where I was probably you know, playing out in the backyard with dirt or something. He learns things so much faster and he doesn’t want to spend time rehearsing. So for me I’ll prepare on Smart Music and I’ll prepare on these other apps and get to that point where now I don’t have to spend so much time rehearsing with him. We’ll just do it once or twice like professional musicians do and he’s always been that way. For me, it’s upped my ante and I’ve really enjoyed that. So we’ll talk about all kinds of technologies, he’s huge into it. Other colleagues, for vocal people, they prefer having a pianist collaborate with them—which makes total sense—so it’s not as prevalent and I understand that. But most of them are not against, they just don’t understand how to tie things into doing it because what they’re doing already is fine. And that’s one of my philosophies too: If something is working, and it’s not going to be any better by adding the technology, there’s no need to add it. But if it can be an efficiency, the fact that usually in history—and as I got older, I realized this—that convenience wins out. And if I look at audio recording, you know, tapes. Small tapes were horrible audio quality compared to vinyl and CD had finally came up to a very good audio quality, probably not as good as vinyl, but most people can’t hear that spectrum anyways for those people that believe it.
John: And usually it’s better the first couple times you play the vinyl. After, the needles have worn down the grooves, unless you’re reading it with a laser, the quality of vinyl degrades really quickly.
Trevor: It does. And then MP3’s everybody thought, “Oh that won’t stick,” you know, everybody kept to analog, and really, the quality doesn’t sound nearly as good. But most people are listening through cheap headsets and on phones and using it for different background thing. Most people are not audiophiles and most musicians are and they think that technology is not going to last. So unless there’s a technology that other than convenience as a musician that I think benefits my students, I don’t really buy into it too much. A lot of people have embraced it and for different reasons. I think everybody owns a tuner on their phone. Everybody has a metronome on their phone. My colleague Juan La Manna uses the digital recordings and visual recordings of Zooms and stuff like that for his conducting students to record them and give them feedback on it and he uses it to record himself on concerts and a lot of technology being used, but not the Smart Music so much outside of wind players, I think. And it’s also ingrained in the band world. Jazz musicians have always used technology as far as like play along recordings with Jamey Aebersold and later on so it’s only a natural progression to use something like iReal Pro, I think. But you know, most of my faculty enjoy technology when it’s beneficial if it doesn’t help them out, there’s no need to learn it.
Rebecca: So I always wrap up our podcast by asking, what’s next?
Trevor: One of the things I’ve held off on and my colleague Rob Auler has not is reading off of tablets for music instead of bringing paper along with them. So for him it made a lot more sense, because he can use the AirTurn Duo Bluetooth pedal, and he doesn’t have to rely on anyone to turn his page. It’ll take them a little time to practice it. You can actually write and notate things in there if you’re in the middle of rehearsal, you know, we want more piano here, or we listen to the cello or whatever. But for me as a single line instrument, it didn’t make that much more sense other than the convenience of it, which we’ve talked about, which is to not have a lot of music in your backpack. But then a few things have changed over the course of the last few weeks that made me think I need to do it for my students and myself. They should know this technology. So I went to a rock gig—I hadn’t played a rock gig for 20 years at a wedding one of my friends asked me to do—The bread, the money was pretty good so I decided to do it for the first time in a while. And most of the people were playing on that, I had this like four inch binder that the guy gave me. He wouldn’t give me his iPad, and I played there and then I did a soloist with the Syracuse Symphoria and I was there just watching the orchestra play in one of the pieces and the harpist… and harpists are one of the people that are not known for…you know, they play an antiquated instrument…. It’s a gorgeous instrument… But she was using an iPad. Ironically she was reading a hard copy book while she was waiting for her turn to play in different pieces [LAUGHTER] so I thought that was ironic but she was using an iPad and I thought, “Oh, maybe I should do this.” And also the advent of the iPad Pro, where it’s large enough. You know I tried it when Vornhagen came here when I was doing some pieces, and I wrote it and sketched it and put it on the iPad, it just wasn’t conducive to reading with low light. And then Rob mentioned something to me that I thought would be the ultimate reason why to get one. He goes, “Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody played off the score?” By that I mean piano score that has a cello and the clarinet part there and we could all take a look to see vertically what’s going on as opposed to what we normally play off, the cellist has a single line as do I. Obviously the problem behind that would…we have to like learn how to read music differently. Instead of going from one line to the other, I’d have to skip them things, but I’m a conductor so that’s not a problem. But it would actually save a lot of time in rehearsal if we got off, or more importantly, if we want to phrase something together or we’re talking about something like, “What happens there?” I’d have to go over and look over Rob’s shoulder. So that to me, outside of the convenience of it, and that I probably should get back into the 21st century and actually get playing off them so our students know how to do it. I think it’s something that my next step is going to be starting to do that. And yet again, you can edit it. You can draw on it. You can put in repeats. It just seems so much more logical to do. I put in for grant for this and at the end, they’re evaluating it and they asked me specifically, “What would you do if you didn’t get this?” and I said, “Probably use paper” other than than what Rob just mentioned to me right after that session where it’d be great to read off the score ourselves. The advantage of it is more mobility and portability. These fake books are two and a half to three inches thick and there’s three or four of them and he has them all on his iPad and I have to slug them around with me, so I have nothing against paper.
John: But it’s a whole lot easier carrying around an iPad where you can have tens of thousands of scores with you.
Trevor: It is. And a battery pack too. That’s the other thing, if you don’t have a way to charge it and stuff like that, but that nowadays that doesn’t seem like it’s a concern at all.
John: And iPads generally got 10 or 12 hours at least of battery life.
Trevor: Right.
Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Trevor. It’s been really interesting to hear you talk about your practice with mobile technology. And I know for me as a visual artist, it was making me think about the kinds of tools that we use as a visual artist and kind of translating the kinds of activities that you’re thinking about with students to different kinds of activities that I could do with my students and also thinking about how to use those to kind of push students just a little bit further.
Trevor: Nice. That’s great.
John: Thank you.
Trevor: Thank you, appreciate it.
[Music]
John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fisher, Chris Wallace, Kelly Knight, Joseph Bandla, and Jacob Alverson.