MUSIC TOOLS & APPS

Some more tools that may be of interest:

  1. Audacity - basic editing, transpose a song, remove vocals, change tempo, chop up musical examples, add fade-ins and fade-outs, podcasting, digital storytelling, record students
  2. Acid Xpress - From Sony - Free version, easy to use: good for looping, film composition
  3. Tonematrix - simple, pentatonic-based melodic tool
  4. Loop Labs - Free cloud-based loop studio:
  5. Papatap - each key triggers a percussive or melodic sound and visual to go with it. Good for exploring sound, experimenting with rhythmic patterns and as a discussion starter for sampling.
  6. Typatone - combines text and music. Use musical phase as basis for composition. Can embed sequences in web page.
  7. Typedrummer - text played back with series of rhythmic sounds
  8. UJam - put together a song using preset styles, upload audio tracks or record your voice, change chord sequences and write a melody.
  9. Voicethread - create collaborative multimedia slide-shows, upload, share and comment on videos, images and documents, leave comments via text, video or audio
  10. Animoto - simple to use video maker, upload images and audio, slide show created automatically
  11. WeVideo - free (Free accounts are limited to 5 minutes of published video time and 1GB of cloud storage) online video editor and maker, simple editing and sharing of videos

Create interactive digital posters with links, texts, images etc. Students can use to demonstrate learning (ie. By labelling the parts of a drum kit on a photo)

TOOLS FOR ADVANCED USERS:

A review of Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software (2016).


WEB2 Advanced Synth & DAW

  1. Audio sauna - sophisticated on-line synth.
  2. Soundation - Sophisticated on-line digital audio workstation, includes virtual instruments, effects.

Linux Professional Quality, Open Source DAWs

Choosing a Linux audio-orientated music system

For example, Ardour 3 is a complete, pre-configured and free Music and Multimedia software:

AVLinux can be run from DVD or USB Thumb drive on most PC hardware. It can also be installed as part of a fully pre-configured multimedia workstation direct to hard disk.


MIDI Music Keyboards & Controllers

Using Entry Level Hardware & MIDI Controllers

In case you do not have a 'proper' keyboard, Ardour provides two ways to use a computer keyboard to play MIDI notes. The simplest way is to use step entry (right-click on the record button of a MIDI track to bring up the step entry keyboard)).

This video is part of a series on how to record audio using MIDI in Ardour3:

Ardour3 Part 1 of 6 - Setting up a MIDI track & adding an instrument

* IF UNABLE TO ACCESS YOUTUBE, TRY VIEWPURE:Ardour3 Intro


Ardour3 Video Part 2 of 6 - Setting up a MIDI track & adding an instrument

* IF UNABLE TO ACCESS YOUTUBE, TRY VIEWPURE:Ardour3 howto - Part 1


Ardour3 Video Part 3 of 6 - Setting up a MIDI track & Piano Roll