Ben Siddall Music Tuition
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FaceTime Lessons

25/1/2016

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Lately, I'm getting more and more pupil enquiries for lessons via video-conferencing. The three most popular being FaceTime, Skype and Google Hangouts. 

It's easy to see why as then you can study from home with all your usual comforts, there are no travel costs, lesson times can be flexible and it's a simple as switching on your iPad or laptop and making a call. The quality, content and pricing structure of my online lessons are exactly the same as my private lessons. 

Contact me here for more information!
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App of the week: #2 - Staff Wars

20/1/2016

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I'm going to be recommending a different app every week which I've found helpful in my life as an instrumental teacher, producer and/or musician in general.
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Learning how to read the notes on the stave can be a slow and difficult process for youngsters (and adults!), and this app takes a fun and simple, arcade game style approach to the subject. You can choose from Treble, Bass and Alto Clefs and customise the range of notes to include or exclude ledger lines. Notes fly across the stave on the screen and you have to guess the correct note. A spaceship fires at the stave, akin to Space Invaders. The speed of the travelling notes increases with each new level. 

I have used this app with lots of children in a private lesson context,  but it works even better in a school situation. With a lot of pupils you can create a class leaderboard and encourage some healthy competition between classmates!

Download Staff Wars here

Also see Note Perfect which is another note-recognition game.
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App of the week: #1 - GarageBand for iPad / iPhone

13/1/2016

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I'm going to be recommending a different app every week which I've found helpful in my life as an instrumental teacher, producer and/or musician in general.

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I'd like to start with the very obvious choice of GarageBand. GarageBand comes preloaded for free with a newly shipped iPad, although you must pay the fee of £3.99 to have access to most of the features. 

Essentially, GarageBand is a portable recording studio, enabling the user to record via the inbuilt microphone and sequence together their own music using a variety of "smart instruments" such as piano, drums, guitars, basses and strings, as well as pre-existing "apple loops" of various styles. You can even plug a guitar directly into your iPad via a USB camera connection kit and use virtual guitar amplifiers to emulate the experience of a genuine recording session.

Although  it could never be an alternative for real instrument performance, it is a useful way of jotting down musical ideas, encouraging creative composition for a beginner, and getting young people enthused about and engaged with music-making.

Download GarageBand here
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