Lauren Two, Electric Boogaloo

Trick or Treat

What's new in the Library for October?

Spooky happenings are afoot in this month’s resources. We have been having some Halloween fun at Figurenotes HQ with potions and spells, spooky stories, and famous theme tunes.

Transition Games

If there is one thing about Figurenotes that makes teachers a little fearful (’tis the season, after all), it is transitioning between stages. Because the notation is so literal and self-explanatory in stages 1 and 2, people often overcomplicate the switch to stage 3.

Games are our number one route. They make everything more fun and take the fear out of learning something new. We also recommend playing much easier pieces while moving to the next stage of Figurenotes notation, as well as having multiple stages on the music stand to compare.

In our latest transition worksheet, Cosmo the potion brewer needs help sorting the potion room for Halloween. Can your musicians help by labelling the potions with the correct note names? Can they find the correct keys on the piano for each potion bottle? How about writing the potion mixes on a stave, or perhaps brewing spells in a cauldron? Matching and moving from colours to letters for each note will help musical wizards and witches learn to move beyond Figurenotes notation.

Composition and Creative Play

Halloween is made for spooky storytelling. Explore your instrument by making the spookiest and strangest sounds you can. This is a great excuse to make all the sounds you are normally discouraged from making – scratchy bows, ghosty howling sounds, tapping, screeching, you name it!

Develop creativity in both storytelling and musicality by using our template to write and soundtrack a spooky Halloween tale. This can be done individually, or in bigger groups for a whole orchestra of spooky sounds!

Swing Rhythms

Or if you just want something fun to play, have a go at the Addams Family theme tune. Explore swing rhythms to get the proper feel of the tune, but it is fine to have a go with straight quavers too. This can be turned into a rhythm and pulse exercise by getting your group to click, clap, or tap in time together too.

As ever, you can request resources using our Wish List form.

Training

To get the most out of your free resources, join us for November’s online training. Explore rhythm, composition, and group work over 3 sessions. We keep groups small to maximise interaction and discussion, and you’ll get a 1:1 follow-up session too. No jump scares here! Student discount is available. Find out more in the training section of our website.

Uncategorised

Lauren Two, Electric Boogaloo

The Future of Community Music

Training students is a brilliant way to ensure the future of music education and community music fits with our mission. We love working with the next generation of musicians, giving them the tools to lead accessible and inclusive sessions as they embark on their careers.

Last Monday, Drake Music Scotland led a workshop for the BA(Hons) Community Music course at Edinburgh College. With a cohort of about 45 students, we managed to cram a lot in. The most valuable aspect of our training is always the hands-on learning. We firmly believe in learning by doing, so naturally, we built our famous 5-minute band.

A percussion section used body percussion to keep a beat, while the rest of the room divided into groups playing various instruments – bass, adapted Figurenotes guitar, switches with Notion, iPads using Thumbjam and GarageBand, as well as a chime bar choir. Figurenotes scores helped keep everyone on track, especially people playing instruments they had never tried before. Everyone loves a Figurenotes bass! Pink Pony Club has never sounded so cool.

We finished with a beautiful improvisation using an image of colourful houses in Tobermory harbour as our starting point. Everyone coming together in a creative vision was the perfect end to the session, and everyone went home very relaxed. Twinkling sun rays on the water played out over moving chords underneath, all led by a volunteer conductor with a chime bar. Figurenotes colours make improvisation and composition easy, taking away the anxiety of the ‘blank page’.

The feedback was wonderful to read: ‘joyful’, ‘inspiring’, ‘engaging ‘, and even ‘pretty darn cool’. Our hopes for the future of community music are pretty high right now. Thanks for having us, Edinburgh College.

If you are interested in training, take a look at our flagship Figurenotes course. Focusing on the fundamentals of music-making, these interactive sessions are delivered online in small groups. We also run bespoke training for organisations. Get in touch for more information, or check out Figurenotes.org/training.

Uncategorised

Lauren Two, Electric Boogaloo

Time to Celebrate

Creative Edinburgh is celebrating 15 years of the Creative Edinburgh Awards. They invited us to mark the occasion and celebrate with other previous award winners.

The timing could not have been more perfect. We won our award back in 2022 for our collaboration with Tayfusion to produce Notate. This project brought our Figurenotes notation programme into an internet browser, which meant people could access it without the need for installation. This had always been a sore spot, as teachers needed to contact their IT department with any problems, and we couldn’t fix them as quickly as we’d have liked. By moving online, we removed barriers and increased accessibility, particularly for musicians travelling between classrooms, schools, and projects.

The Next Phase

The next phase of this project launched this summer. We have removed subscription costs and created a brand new resources library. No fees, just accessible resources.

We’ve campaigned for decades for better access to music education, so what better way to make this a reality. Anyone can now access Notate and the Library for free, with no installation. All you need is an internet browser.

And if that isn’t enough, you can make requests via our Wish List form for more resources. Help shape the Library by letting us know what you want to see. It can be as basic as ‘More trad tunes’, or something really specific. Let us know what you’d like to see.

Take a look at the previous winners on Creative Edinburgh’s website. We are in very good company!

Nominations are now open for this year’s Creative Edinburgh Awards. If you are in the Edinburgh area, take a peek at the categories and see who you would nominate.

Uncategorised

Lauren Two, Electric Boogaloo

The Rhythm of Life

What’s new in the Library for September?

Calling all drummers. We’ve put the focus on rhythm for this month’s resources. Explore a whole host of drum beats to develop your skills, from basic beats to variations and fills. We’ve got rock beats and blues beats, editable files, and PDFs in stage 1 and stage 3.

Not a drummer? There is something for you too.

If you’re looking for some ‘get to know you’ songs for the new school term, try The Pie Song. Get your group to come up with their own pie fillings as you learn to sing together. This sweet little song explores the So-Mi interval, which is often used in the Kodály method.

Most kids love to come up with the most disgusting filling possible, resulting in a fun-filled session full of giggles. Just be glad you don’t have to eat them afterwards. You could also develop this by creating a load of filling rhythms and tapping/clapping them to a beat.

For our pianists, we have some lovely wee tunes, such as Bartók’s Conversation 1 (sometimes called Dialogue 1). This is a great tune for developing the skill of playing with 2 hands on the piano.

Don’t forget you can request resources using the Wish List form. This helps us tailor the resources to our users. We’d love to hear from you.

And in case you’ve forgotten, this is all FREE! Register an account on our website to explore the Library and download your free resources. If you have previously had a Notate account, make sure you register on this new website with the same email address you used for Notate. You can find a step-by-step video below to help you with registering.