GarageBand for Music Teachers

Music Teachers using GarageBand

Using GarageBand in your teaching practise

basic

GarageBand is an ideal music teaching tool for those teachers and students lucky enough to have access to a Mac. Some techniques for using Garageband in your teaching practise:

Make a quick audio recording (even the Mac's inbuilt microphone will give good enough quality for most study situations) of a study piece, export to iTunes and send to the student's e-mail address as an MP3 file, or burn onto CD.
Record a midi track from a keyboard (handy if you want to correct the timing, or the pitch of individual notes)
Use Google to search the Internet for a Midifile of a piece to be studied. Import and edit in GarageBand and burn onto CD after exporting to iTunes
Record a spoken instruction track and edit to synchronize the regions to the music track(s)
Record a scale, phrase or technical etude from the keyboard to a software instrument track. Match the student's instrument as the sound source if possible.
Then either loop this region for continued practise, or copy-paste and transpose to as many different keys as the student can handle. Speak the name of the new key on the accompanying audio track to avoid confusion.
Record the melody and accompaniment tracks separately. Burn twice onto CD, once with the melody muted. The student can now practise with or without the melody audible.

More advanced techniques

Some more sophisticated GB teaching techniques include:

Record a spoken instruction track and edit to synchronize the regions to the music track(s)
Record a scale, phrase or technical etude from the keyboard to a software instrument track. Match the student's instrument as the sound source if possible.
Then either loop this region for continued practise, or copy-paste and transpose to as many different keys as the student can handle. Speak the name of the new key on the accompanying audio track to avoid confusion.
Record the melody and accompaniment tracks separately. Burn twice onto CD, once with the melody muted. The student can now practise with or without the melody audible.

Elementary School Middle School High School

Using GarageBand in a classroom music lab

Have a cuppa while they work..

If the students have access to GarageBand, say in a classroom lab situation, brilliant opportunities for self-directed learning open up. The GarageDoor.com has pioneered some of the methods:

These are some examples of adding text instructions to a GB file:
Use the track name on the left to indicate the steps in the learning process, progressively more difficult or complex. You can have up to 12 tracks or more.
Use the region name fields for more precise instructions and explanations, directly related to the music in that region. You can have up to 27 characters (but no semi-colon)

Additional resources: