I created a whole bunch of resources and a unit of work for high school classes when YouTube sensation Andrew Huang brought out Flip Sampler for iPhone and iPad a few years ago. I updated them this week for my Junior Secondary classes at the Sydney Con this week, and realised that while I’ve shared them a bunch of times with teachers and children around the world, I hadn’t added them as a page on my website!
If you haven’t already, check out Andrew’s YouTube channel where he shares heaps of creative composition and technology ideas. Here he is showing you some great creative ideas with his app, Flip (if you want to watch tutorials and learn the app completely, he has also provided those here):
The whole project is designed to take around 8 weeks. Students will write their own original composition/song that is made with samples, listen to music that is made with samples, and perform/improvise with both electronic samplers and music related to sampling.
Although this is a very tech-based unit of work, there are hands-on, screen-free musical activities that draw on traditional pedagogies and relate to sampling ideas in simple ways. Some of these are Starter Activities: 10-minute “do now” activities designed to get students into the lesson in very musical ways (in the degree, we read about the theory behind Starter Activities in a chaptter by the wonderful Patricia Campbell). There’s also a performance activity on Orff instruments, although it can be transfered onto other instrumentation. And yes, there’s lots of songwriting in Flip Sampler.
Starter activities
We start the first and second classes not using Flip Sampler, but a ridiculous (hopefully fun) excercise in which groups of students are sound-makers, and the teacher, then other students, “trigger” them (think conducting!). I have made a deck of colourful laminated cards, each one with a descriptor of a sound which may be very literal or abstract. These cards are shuffled and then, as it says in the lesson plan:
- Divide into 2 groups.
- Groups choose one card each, work out how to make that sound (some ideas are very abstract).
- Teacher directs students to make sound when they point, establishes beat and some subdivision.
- Divide into 3 groups.
- Each group has a new card (sound), teacher directs again. This time with 3 layers, an obvious 4/4 beat.
- Teacher gives one (confident) student cards, they hand them out to 3 groups, and direct them.
- Can repeat 6 as many times as you like. Don’t forget to shuffle the cards.
- Variation: each group has their own director, but they aim to make a beat together. Can shuffle and repeat and give everyone a go until the 10 mins are up.
The original deck of cards were simple shapes of things like animals and vehicles. This year I decided I’d make the deck of cards bigger for my own fun, and make new images with AI art creator DALL-E. The original cards were still in the deck – here’s some of them:
You can download the cards (I’m afraid you’ll have to double-sided print, cut out, and laminate yourself!) here:
Here’s the original Apple Pages file that I made the cards in, if you’d like to change or adapt them”
The second starter activity (which starts the second lesson) is pretty much a repeat of the first, except that I use Boomwhackers for students to add a “bass line” to a beat (made with sounds from the sound cards). In 10 minutes, I divide the class into groups, and try to cycle them all through the bass line group once.
The third starter activity focuses on listening. Remember that by now, the students have had two classes of experimenting with Flip sampler. So, they get a sheet with the Flip interface on it, and use this to recognise the 9 samples created by Rachel K Collier in her song Control. We listen to it twice using the section of the video in which she plays it (starts at 45 seconds) here:
Students then write in the sounds on the sheet –
Finally, if you’ve got another $2.99, you can buy Rachel’s song, and at this point students turn those sound-identifying skills into re-composing skills, and make as much of her song as they can again, in-app, with the exact samples they heard in the professionally-produced song.
So, those are the starter activities. But what order do we learn Flip Sampler in? What’s the pedagogy?
Learning Flip Sampler as a class
As much as we know learning music is very student-centred (for example, the importance of practising an instrument to get better at it!), there’s no way to avoid a little teacher-led instruction to get started using Flip Sampler. My aim, though, is to keep it short and succinct, and then to help them as they go when they hit hurdles. Lots of students also self-extend. I made a video showing the things I teach for the last ISME conference, so I’ve cut a bit out of that here.
Essentially, in the first class I’m just showing them how to record 9 samples. I do this with the Sound Cards again, recording them in the classroom and showing them how I can then perform their sounds through the app.
Then I send them away for as long as possible to record 9 sounds. If your school isn’t quite a cool with you sending students rogue, don’t worry – this can be done inside the classroom too (you’ll just get lots of background noise), or you can make a group trip. Lots of great sounds in the gym!
In the second class, students learn how to record a one-bar beat, and then in subsequent classes, they learn how to sequence beats made with their 9 samples into songs, and also how to play pitched samples at different pitches. The Starter Activity with the bass line on Boomwhackers gives us a chance to talk about bass lines, and I have an electric guitar and a synthesizer set up for sampling if they want to start making a bass line.
Things like effects, repitching samples, editing the start point, and so on, students will quite often discover on their own. If they don’t, I back-fill, in normal Project-Based Learning manner.
The other performance activity
As you’ll see in the documentation, I’ve included some further listening to songs that include famous samples (or maybe I should say, famous songs built on samples). I arranged one of those samples (the horn sample from Beyonce’s Crazy in Love) for Orff-Keetman Schulwerk ensemble, and here I’ve provided a Sibelius and MusicXML file so you could do further arranging if you like.
Lesson plans and the whole unit of work
Here are the lesson plans and the unit of work that I wrote for my students. It’s all aligned to the NSW curriculum, but it could easily be translated to work for any high school syllabus:
I also made an assessment template, which may be helpful if you’re not used to assessing outcomes through creative work:
All of these resources are free of charge, of course, and I’ve given you the editable files so you can adapt this unit of work/project to suit your own classroom and community. You don’t need to credit me, but I’m always interested to see any work that derives from my own, so do get in touch via the comments panel below if you use this, especially if you have some success!
