I wrote two chapters for a wonderful new music education textbook, The Music Technology Cookbook, edited by Adam Patrick Bell. The book itself has 56 chapters, some as single activities for learning music with technology, and others linked ideas to create term-long projects with your students.
My chapter Drum Programming Minus One is a play on the idea that something might come before the “101” lesson. I’ve done this activity hundreds of times with children as young as 7 to retired music teachers: essentially, it’s a constructivist, lightly scaffolded but highly student-centred exploration of drum programming.
In my chapter The Patented Humberstone Four-Finger Technique, I show how students can create interesting and sophisticated chord-based compositions/songs even if they have no music theory knowledge and don’t know how to play a major or minor chord, supported by free and easy apps.
The book is published by Oxford University Press and, I’m sure, “available in all good book stores”!
James Humberstone 