Ear Training for Beginners (Plus "InTune!" App Review!)

One thing I neglected my first year of teaching was devoting time to ear training. I was probably overwhelmed as it was, but really it's not difficult to incorporate this critical musical skill. We want our student musicians to have discerning ears. You can start this right from the beginning of the year. Here are a few of the things I did this past year. I feel like it's resulted in more musically intelligent students.

Five Ways to Teach or Clean Articulation

It's never safe to assume that students are articulating correctly. Students get by through their beginner year with ways of faking it, and of course we as teachers can only spend so much time on one given thing. It's understandable. Articulation has to be retaught and reinforced every year, throughout the year. Sometimes I forget this, and yet I'm always surprised by how much things clean up after addressing articulation. It's as if the band was slurring it's speech, and suddenly they remember how to enunciate. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to teach it, or word it, but here are a few of the things I've used with some success.

The Beginner Band Starter Kit

Does your beginner band class feel
like this? Hopefully these articles can
give you some ideas that help!

I made a lot of mistakes with my approach to Beginning Band in my first year. There were some things I did right, but man was there a lot I could've done better. I wish I knew then what I know now - which I admit, still isn't much! There is still so much I'd like to know and learn when it comes to beginning band. But both my co-worker and I feel like we're both doing a much better job now than we did at our previous gigs. If you're a veteran, you might not find much here. But for the new or pre-service band director, I hope you'll find some useful ideas here. Presenting the Cooper's Divertimento Beginning Band Starter Kit!

4 Ways to Supplement the Beginner Band Book

Beginning Band students need
supplemental exercises to develop their
playing just like we did to develop ours.

I made a lot of mistakes with my first beginner class. One of the biggest by far was not supplementing their beginner band book. It's not that I didn't want to, or didn't know how to. It was more that I was so busy in my one man gig that it ended up as one of those things that just slipped by. Determined to make the beginners at my next job vastly different, I started working over the summer to create supplements. I've always been told that if you present everything through the book, you're probably in trouble, or that it's all about how you use the book. In some recent conversations on the Yellow Board I've found that some teachers use the book itself as a supplement, and have a large list of other things that are the base. Currently I'm in the school that spends half the class out of the book, and half in the book. The first twenty minutes or so are spent on supplements. I wish I were one of those teachers who had spent years collecting various materials to incorporate into their beginner curriculum. I need more time. Until then, if you're still spending the bulk of your time in the book, hopefully this will give you a few ideas to get started:

The Easy Way to Teach Scales

Forget playing the scales, I used
to get this way just teaching them.

It was my first year of teaching. I had a heterogeneous beginning band class, and I was ambitious enough to include horns, giving me four different pitches of instruments to contend with when note naming. I wanted so badly for them to have as many scales as we could get, or at least get them up to the scales they needed for the All-District Band Auditions they would face the next year. So I pushed. But every time we started a new scale, it was a nightmare. Going one group at a time, grinding out the notes, checking the fingers, it took forever. And even with my best efforts, nearly half the group would play wrong notes. I wish I knew now what I knew then. There is a much, much easier way to teach scales to beginners!

A Motivating Pass Off System

On second thought, yes!

In my first year of teaching I rarely used playing tests for beginners. I mostly did it for grades, and sometimes only once per grading cycle. I didn't understand how important it could be for motivation. Instead I wanted to use every moment of class time to learn new lines, and move as quickly through the book as we could, battling classroom management problems along the way. All of the good beginner teachers I know regularly have their students play for a grade. Over the summer I discovered a music pass off system that, it turns out, has worked wonders for student motivation, leading to students being more on task in class and an explosion of practicing outside of class. If you are like I was then, I hope this will encourage you to adopt a regular individual performance grade. If you already do regular playing test grades, then this system might interest you as well!

Teach Beginners to Count Rhythms

It's easy for a young musician to get lost
without some kind of counting system.

By now counting systems have been adopted by almost everyone, but some people still avoid teaching a counting system. My thought is that most people who don't teach a counting system probably are not familiar enough with one, or perhaps they already use one and have thought about switching to another but haven't because they're not used to it. Either way, students need a schema that helps them understand how to break down rhythms, and counting systems become extremely useful the more complicated the rhythms get. Personally, I'm an Eastman Counting System guy. I wanted to provide links to pages explaining the counting systems, but after the first 3 pages of google search I gave up on finding them. So here I'll briefly explain the two most widely used systems for band, traditional and Eastman, and then tell you why I recommend A) Using a counting system and B) Using Eastman.

Simple Procedures to Develop Literacy & Technique

Wait... is he the only one reading music???

Two of the biggest goals we work towards with beginners, after tone quality, is music literacy and playing technique. When I was in college I had the chance to observe a great beginning band teacher, and made notes of the procedures he used to teach new music to his students. Later on, attending workshops and reading posts on the YellowBoard reaffirmed that this was indeed a widely used practice by great beginning band teachers. The procedures are simple, easy to teach, and quickly become a routine to learn new lines of music. In the process it teaches music literacy, technique, and teach students how to break down and learn new music independently. If you're an experienced teacher, you probably already do this or something like it. But if you're struggling with your beginners, or if you're a pre-service teacher, then I hope this article will help shed some light on how to help your beginners with what can be a daunting task when presented all at once - learning and playing new music.

10 Motivational Strategies for Beginners

What does it take to be the Beginner
Band Champion? Many hours
of practice!

Motivation can be an elusive goal, and beginners will need plenty as they start on the long road to becoming literate, musical artists. We're just over a quarter of the way through the school year, and although the honeymoon has worn off, our students this year are more motivated than they were in the first few weeks! My friend and I are both new to this school system, and we hope to build a dynastic program here. We know that starts with our first class of beginners, so we've pulled out all the stops we can think of, and it seems to really be paying off for our students. I don't know how they're doing compared to other similar sized schools, but neither of us have seen anything like this kind of excitement for band and commitment to practicing in our previous efforts. Did I mention that all 6th graders here are required to be in band? Here are some of the extra, fun things we're doing to create a band class that the kids hopefully look forward to, and also to motivate them to practice outside of class!

Building Beginners Through Sound Before Sight

The first several weeks of Beginner Band are crucial to the over all success of the students. These kids are often required to learn two skills at once, both of which involve multitasking - playing and instrument, and reading music. I had heard for years about the idea of Sound Before Sight, mostly as an elementary pedagogy but also by some as a beginning band method. My earliest attempt at this was missing some key components that ultimately resulted in a slower start to reading and playing, and less progress over the year. This year my friend and I worked together to develop a comprehensive curriculum that would both train the students on the basics of playing while simultaneously building them up for reading and playing. The two classes who got the full treatment are currently having better success than anything we've experienced, while the class that didn't get all of it is still struggling on the literacy end. Hopefully there's something in here that will give you ideas for your own Sound Before Sight curriculum, as having one that is effective can definitely make a big difference for your students!

5 1/2 Teaching Toys to Improve Tone

Just kidding... not these kinds of toys!

One of the big changes we've made this year is that we wanted to find a variety of ways to tackle embouchure and tone, including using various toys and tools to keep things fresh and hopefully give them something to relate to when switching over to the instrument. I've wanted to do some of this stuff before, but just never got off my butt to go get the stuff. This year was going to be different, and while some of these things are just small stuff, I think it's made those classes memorable for the kids while "tricking them" into learning. Enjoy!