>I teach band in a junior high and am interested, along with our vocal >teacher, of creating an electronic music lab in our building. Funds are >available from grants. I have no idea what the upper limit of >those funds would be. Ooh aah. :-) Well, see below for some ideas. > >The help I need from you is to know what is available in equipment that >would be good to use in a junior high as teaching and CREATING tools. > First, I can't recommend enough that, if you have sufficient resources (both hardware and people), you get normally non-music folks in on the fun. You may be very surprised at how people who normally never even thought about being musicians suddenly become devoted to practice and learning technique. Equipment is far secondary to creating an environment in which the students are not afraid to try things and to stretch themselves musically. >1. What synthesizers? >2. What keyboards? >3. What computers? >4. What programs? >5. What about mixers? >6. What else that I don't even know enough to ask? There are a couple of different ways to approach the problem. (I guess with input from others, this could end up being another good reference file!) I) Traditionalist's studio This is more appropriate to the students who are more interested in the nuts and bolts of synthesis. Equipment is a couple-three reel-to-reel tape recorders, an old analog synth (say an ARP 2600, Sequential Six-Trak, Minimoog or Micromoog - anything with real knobs), a splicing block, and plenty of tape. Introduce your students to the concepts first - waveforms, filtering, recording techniques, and splicing - and then bombard them with as much ear-stretching music as you can find to help them get ideas on how the resources can be used. Everything from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Peter Gabriel to Wendy Carlos to Charles Dodge. Two projects in a semester is a pretty good number to shoot for given a class size of 10-15. Advantages: Low-cost, very good introduction to the basic principles and techniques of electronic music; really pushes the students to discover their creative boundaries. The restricted palette of techniques forces them to explore the outer edges of the equipment. Disadvantages: Very work-intensive and not well suited for larger classes. Music is definitely not "commercial"; students anticipating being able to do a complete orchestration will be disappointed. The skills learned are valuable but not necessarily applicable to the current music scene. Bill Fox (wbf@aloft.att.com) notes: I'd add: Raid the local EE department, TV repair shops, pawn shops, electronics outlets, junk yard, recording studios, etc. and get (for cheap or free) old test equipment, oscillators, oscilloscopes, filters, function generators, old radios/TVs/record players, amps, speakers, processors, and anything else that can make, modify, or record sound, be it electronic or some old piece of sheet metal you can bang on with body parts, ball peen hammers, or ham sandwiches. II) The micro-studio. This is the approach I've used. The micro-studio consists of a "workstation" keyboard - that is, a single keyboard which is multitimbral and which has its own built-in sequencer. For recording, a simple cassette deck is sufficient unless you intend to have the students create stuff for a CD, say, in which case a DAT deck would serve better. General procedure is to create tracks and record them on the workstation's sequencer, building up the arrangement as you go, creating a master tape after all of the tracks are laid down. How well this works is highly dependent upon how good the built-in sequencer is. I have used the sequencer on my Ensoniq VFXsd to do this and have been very satisfied. Students will need to be taught how to arrange and orchestrate, at least somewhat. Advantages: Provides a fairly powerful basis from which to work with a good bit of flexibility. Restricted amount of hardware allows students to concentrate on producing music instead of trying to learn forty-seven operating systems on keyboards and computers. Emphasis on orchestration rather than simply throwing hardware at it. Disadvantages: Students may easily hit the limits of the equipment and become frustrated, especially if they are attempting to use multi-oscillator voices in thicker polyphony. Requires more musical sophistication. III) The larger studio To solution II above, add another synthesizer or more, perhaps some external effects and modules. To use these effectively, it is best to go to a computer-controlled setup; the computer should definitely be running a sequencer (and an editor/librarian package if one is available). I personally prefer a mixer and a good mastering deck to a multi-track recorder for better quality, though the multi-track approach is cheaper. Advantages: Incredible power and flexibility. Disadvantages: Incredible power and flexibilty can be daunting to someone unfamiliar with it; I still hesitate to try to do anything in some of my friends' studios because I'm not altogether sure what's hooked to what. (Nick Rothwell has observed ironically that he has the same problem in his *own* studio.) --- Joe M. General observations by others: Bill Fox (wbf@aloft.att.com): I suggest that, since you say you have some budget, start with both I and II. And II is something that you can grow into III as funding permits. Just make sure that the workstation synth of method II can still be used stand-alone for beginners not yet ready for (prime time) the full blown studio in method III. Bill Matthews (wmatthew@abacus.bates.edu) observes on options II and III: Having taught both the workstation approach (albeit on older synths, a DX7iiFD and an antique Casio CTsomething) I will add that students seem to be able to get a better grasp on MIDI sequencing by using a software sequencer -- the more low-end, the better. Piano roll notation, some visual indication of program changes & channel numbers, etc., were picked up quickly by all the students. If the workstation has only a cryptic LED window and a bazillion buttons for editing, etc., students had more trouble conceptualizing what was going on. For software, we used Trax, which was fine, and costs less than $100. This is not an ad for Trax; there are others that do the same job. To some extent, seeing and hearing reinforce each other in the learning process, so anything which gives a clear visual representation is helpful pedagogically. This is also not an ad for Macintosh, but my students have done better work quicker on Macs than on pc's. The easy cut'n'paste editing & click'n'go approach seems to work better for them. Caveat: I have not tried newer Windows versions of available software. The present pedagogical path is: elementary MIDI sequencing, midifiles from ftp-land, sound tweaking on synth modules, Max, csound, digital recording/editing (using Deck II) -- this path was relatively smooth on our Mac 840AV platform, and we did it in a semester. (These are bright liberal arts undergraduates.) We did not cover any one thing in *depth,* obviously, but the students are getting a real feel for the range of computer music possibilities, and most of them are downright exhilarated, turning out really interesting work after only ten weeks of experience. Rob Wallace (29220@EF.GC.MARICOPA.EDU) reports: There is an article in the April 94 issue of Electronic Musician called, "Music Education Software for Children". It is useful and also provides a pretty darn complete listing of the pulishers that have good products.