In the class I have been teaching we were studying the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. During this era there were radical and interesting cultural and social changes. A big part of these changes involved music, and basically it was around this time that the white culture started to pay attention to the black music culture and began to copy and popularize it. Whites adopting black music styles has actually happened several times in the twentieth century. Think about the 60’s, and bands like the Rolling Stones, their whole music base was founded in the blues from black musicians of the 40’s and 50’s. Then there was rap which was confined to the black culture for quite a while, and lately it’s a big part of the white youth music diet. Blues started in the cotton fields with slave chants, it moved into the churches, and then into the black culture with lyrics and guitars with basic chord patterns. The roots of jazz started when the blues was played on a horn. So the blues have a strong foundation in the history of the twenties and thirties. In this unit I wanted to include a section of this blues history, and I thought a great culminating activity would be to have the students write their own blues songs, and they could perform it to music and I would record it for them. This lesson would not specifically involve the students learning the software, but I would have to learn it.
This was a very frustrating experience. From the very beginning, just trying to find the right software was difficult. This in itself took a lot of research. There is an abundance of digital recording software out there, but figuring out what would work for me was difficult. The two main things I was looking for was ease of use, and something that was not too expensive. So a lot of software was quickly eliminated because it was outrageously expensive. Some of the software had down loadable trial programs, and I could try it out, but then they never included the full package and I couldn’t do everything I needed to do, and then I couldn’t tell if the full package would be what I wanted and needed, so that was frustrating. Most of this software is so loaded with extras that it became some what mind boggling to figure out.
I finally decided on the NCH software, which fit my two requirements of being affordable and seemingly easy to use. The software came with some instructions, but it took a lot of hours of just experimenting to be able to do what I wanted to do. I kept a brief journal of my day to day wrestling match with this software, eventually I pinned it downed. Now I will be able to record my students in the classroom with some form of background music, either a student musician or a recorded basic blues track. I was never able to do this in class this year, because by the time I had it all figured out, we had been long finished with our unit. But I am really looking forward to the time I will be able to use this in the classroom. The journal of my trials and successes with this program is on Google Docs and so are the lesson plans. The lesson plans are mostly about introducing and learning about the blues in the context of history, and then moves into recording the students own songs.
I also have an instructional video using movie maker, on basic step by step recording and tracking using the NCH software.Check it out on teacher tube
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