Thank you! You ask a great question. We have an after school program where students can study instruments privately. When I first proposed the 5th grade program, I did my research and found out that there was a significant lacking of woodwinds in the after school program. Therefore, the 5th grade class will balance that for the next year or two. After that, there could be a possibility that the band will becoming woodwind heavy. I wish that I could teach brass, strings, and percussion as well as woodwinds, but when I thought of a class of 17 students all learning a variety of instruments, I thought that it would be best that the instruments be the three that I could teach well.

I hope that helps!
Amy

I’m wondering what effect you feel this will have on the instrumentation of your band program for the long term. Will you eventually have a woodwind-heavy band with small numbers of brass players?

Of course, students playing any instrument is better than not having the students in band at all!

Thank you!

Smart Music worked well, but I had to lower the tuning on it. Since it tunes at A 440 and my students did not quite have that tuning on their instruments yet (due to their weak embouchures), I lowered the tuning to 438 and that helped a lot. Then the students were scoring much better on their exercises.

The advantages that I found were that we were using Standard of Excellence, and it was easy to pull up all of the exercises on screen. The students would come up to the computer, play along with Smart Music, and then see how many correct notes they played (green notes were correct; red notes were incorrect). This encouraged them to practice more because they were all about making their score higher.

The flute players needed microphones because the computer microphone would not cut it. They could not produce enough sound for their playing to be assessed.

The obstacles were that the students and I would have to work out the details during class. For example, once I experienced the tuning issue, I was able to correct it. However, students had to play and be assessed low for me to see that it could be fixed. So, trying to fix the obstacles as they occur was difficult because I had to convince the students that it was not them, it was me working with the software,

Overall, once you work the software for your class, then it works very well.

I hope that helps!
Amy

I am interested in your use of SmartMusic for assessment. I’ve used it before with limited success with my string players, but it was a few years ago. How did that work for you? What were the advantages? disadvantages? obstacles?