Category: Creativty
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The Paul Grabowsky Sibelius Education Kit (from 2006)
There’s a funny story about this one. Sibelius 5 had lots of cool things to show off. A new audio engine, the Ideas Hub, support for VST and AU plug-ins, a new view in Panorama, super-easy cues and much, much more. Here in Australia Sibelius went all out and commissioned a work from composer Paul…
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Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials (Book, no longer in print).
Because this book is no longer in print, I have made the resources and tutorial videos (which are still quite relevant to the current version of Sibelius) available here! There are plenty of second hand copies of the book available if you need one. Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials was the only official, Avid-endorsed course for…
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Luka Lesson X James Humberstone, locked down 20-21
Luka and I had been working on Odysseus since 2016, but it became clear that our massive orchestral-choral-Hip-Hop-cinematic theatrical work wasn’t going to premiere through the pandemic, so we got to work remotely, through the lockdowns, on three orchestrated video-poems, written and performed by Luka, with music by me. There’s a strong theme of Social…
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Drum Programming Minus One, and The Patented Humberstone Four-Finger Technique (Text Book Chapters)
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…
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Seeking Innovation as Exploration of Aesthetic (Book Chapter)
My chapter in the new book Creative Research in Music, edited by my colleagues Anna Reid, Jeanell Carrigan, and Neal Peres Da Costa, accounts for the creative research process for my 2015 release Noise Husbandry, an electro-acoustic installation at the Australian National Maritime Museum on Sydney’s Darling Harbour, performed by Ensemble Offspring. Abstract This chapter presents a…
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Remixular bells
In this unit of work you will examine how Mike Oldfield built the opening of his seminal progressive rock work Tubular Bells. By following each step as instructed below, you will rebuild the work yourself, remix it, and then compose a new piece based on the original. Simply follow the process outlined as follows. Listening Learn…
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Songwriting in GarageBand with Musical Cryptography
I developed several units of work to go with my composition Passion for Symphonic Winds, and this electronic version has nothing to do with that work except that that’s where the interest in hiding messages in music began. Since I found it interesting, I thought my students would, and they’ve had a lot of success playing around…
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SixEightThreeFour
This piece is part of my Symphony of the Child, commissioned and premiered by the International Grammar School in Sydney in 2009. It uses alternating six-eight and three-four time signatures, like a Flamenco, and is perfect for middle school classes to perform. In this unit of work students move from performing the piece in class to…
James Humberstone 