The Figurenotes team will host online drop-in sessions throughout 2026. These will take place every few months over the course of the year, and will usually take place in the first week of the month.
Each 30min sessions will provide a space to ask questions and gain guidance on all things Figurenotes. Some will be more general and open sessions, whilst others may have a particular focus, such as using Notate or working with a specific group.
Come along and ask questions, gain insight or just bounce ideas off the Figurenotes team and the wider community.
The first is a general drop-in session and takes place on Wed 4th February at 4pm.
Did you miss out on our online course in November? Secure your spot for the next one and enjoy a discounted price with the early bird rate.
After lots of enquiries about when the next Figurenotes: Developing Your Practice course will take place, you can now book your place on our May 2026 course. Our early bird rate of £99.99 will be available until 20th Feb. Places are limited, so book quickly to avoid disappointment.
You’ll learn how to use Figurenotes as a tool, working through the fundamentals of music. We’ll focus on rhythm, composition and creative play, as well as working with mixed-ability groups and ensembles. Each interactive session will be delivered in a small group.
Between sessions you’ll create resources that work for you, getting feedback and ideas from the rest of the group and course leaders. A follow-up 1-to-1 gives you the opportunity to go deeper, with course leaders focused entirely on you and your work.
As festive concerts come to an end, we wish all of our Figurenotes community a restful and happy holiday season. Figurenotes HQ is shutting up shop, but we will still be around to answer queries.
Tech Army, Assemble! We’ve never responded to an offer of help so quickly. Scottish Tech Army got in touch to say Drake Music Scotland had been chosen by one of their corporate partners for a day of volunteering. This isn’t your usual volunteering. A team of highly skilled tech folk swoop in and give you a full day of their time (and then some) to help solve a tech issue.
Scottish Tech Army are a catalyst for a step change in the application of technology for public good in the UK. Their highly-engaged volunteer community works in partnership with the technology ecosystem of the UK to deliver scalable, impactful solutions.
As a non-profit, we rely on funding and offers of support. Such is the nature of working in the third sector (and the arts!) This way of working means progress is never linear, so anything that gets us closer to our goals is welcomed with open arms.
PWC linked up with Scottish Tech Army for ‘One Firm, One Day’. The UK contingent worked on 3 projects across Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. We were lucky enough to be chosen by the Edinburgh team.
With offices in 151 countries and more than 364,000 people, PWC are among the leading professional services networks in the world. They help organisations and individuals create the value they are looking for, by delivering quality in Assurance, Tax and Advisory services.
One Firm One Day is described as an “annual firm-wide fundraising and volunteering event, where staff across the UK and Channel Islands are encouraged to join together and take part in giving something back to our local communities.”
The Edinburgh team worked tirelessly and we are incredibly grateful. Thank you to Scottish Tech Army for setting this up, PWC for choosing our project, and the volunteers for being so welcoming and working so hard.
Keep an eye out for the postie if you’ve made an order with us recently. Figurenoters receiving stickers, magnets, and tune packs may notice a wee extra in their parcel.
We’ve been gradually improving the environmental impact of our packaging, from compostable ‘plastic’ envelopes, to limiting the amount of paper included in each parcel. Our latest endeavour is blooming beautiful!
Feast your eyes on these little seeded beauties.
Scan the QR code to get support and information on anything Figurenotes related. You can bookmark the Linktree page for the future.
Break your card up into small pieces
Place them in soil and water them lightly
Treat those little seeds well and you’ll be rewarded with some wonderful wildflowers! They’d be perfect for a classroom project.
For more instructions on planting your card, see this blog from the company that creates them.
We’ll be following up with some music resources inspired by nature, so keep an eye on the Hub and our newsletter. Remember that you can upload your own resources to the Hub to share with other teachers too. Let’s build a global network of accessible music educators and facilitators sharing what works; sowing the seeds of inspiration and watching them bloom.
What better way to spend the last few weeks of term than get a whole class band going!
In the run up to the winter holidays, Caitlin and Rebecca from the Figurenotes team spent three weeks at Prestonfield Primary School with the Primary 4 class. Focusing on rhythm and composition, we played and created music as a whole class band using Figurenotes. We were lucky enough to have great connections with the school beforehand, so we could ask for song suggestions from the class prior to the project starting. This created a sense of ownership for the pupils from the off.
Prestonfield Primary is a local school to Figurenotes HQ, in the heart of Craigmillar, Edinburgh. The building is as beautiful as the ethos there.
“Vision: Prestonfield Primary School is an inclusive community of committed learners where we all belong.
Values: We are Kind, We are Responsible, We are Ambitious
Aims: By building friendship, communication and resilience we offer a nurturing environment where our community plays, learns and grows together.“
Here’s a run down of what we got up to:
Rhythm Week
Our first session was an introduction to Figurenotes rhythm. We used a tried and tested rhythm canon with body percussion to kick us off. Anyone who has done some training with us will know the rhythm canon well. It makes a great wam up! You can find it on our Figurenotes Music Hub.
We tweaked the rhythm canon to work with one of the chosen songs – Shotgun by George Ezra. This meant we could carry the rhythm work straight through the lesson.
By the end of the canon, the whole class had the colours and the rhythms down. We could then introduce a mixture of chime bars, keyboards, hand percussion, and digital instruments on tablets to play our song.
Sustain Week
Next session, we started by revisiting the rhythm canon. We tweaked the canon yet again to marry the song for this week, focusing on sustaining notes for two beats or more. Figurenotes notation is great for this, because the note is as long as it looks. The literal nature of the rhythmic notation makes it much easier to understand – the longer notes are longer on the page.
Once we had the canon down, we jumped into playing As it Was by Harry Styles. There was so much fun to be had by swapping instruments around, so everyone could have a go at each one. The class were amazing! They had a solid sense of rhythm, pulse, and bags of energy.
Composition Week
For our last session we wanted to create a huge piece together that was all ours. We showed some pieces of art that contained Figurenotes colours. You can easily find images to use in various online galleries available for free.
Once we had our images up, we first asked for volunteers to be the ‘Director’. Each volunteer used the image as a score, pointing at a colour and expressing how they would like it to be played. For example, going fast or slow. This was a wonderful way to allow ownership over the piece.
Finally, we all took the lead from Caitlin. She began with a picture of a bird projected in the classroom. She used her physicality to show the bird waking up, taking flight, finding berries, landing, and going to sleep.
The class was so responsive. The sound was enormous and vibrant, followed the storyline, and everyone worked so well together.
We had such a great time. The class were lovely and even drew us some pictures to say thank you.
Come and join us for award-winning CPD for music practitioners and educators. Do you want your pupils to learn to play and read music quickly and to their full potential? Develop your teaching practice with Figurenotes, a form of notation that uses colour and shape to aid the first steps of learning music, progressing to standard notation in 3 simple steps.
Enjoy 3 interactive group sessions, building your skills in Figurenotes and accessible music practices. Consolidate on your work with homework activities between sessions. Follow-up with a 1:1 session with course leaders to answer any further questions you have, get advice on specific aspects of your work, or for more general queries.
You’ll be guided through Figurenotes, from how it works, to its many applications. We will focus each session on some of the fundamentals of music-making:
Rhythm
All musicians need to develop a solid sense of pulse. Through rhythm games and challenges, learn how to make learning rhythm fun and engaging. Figurenotes notation shows rhythm in a very logical way, which then transitions easily to standard notation.
Creative Composition
We’ll explore a range of composition tools you can use in different settings. You’ll learn how to build and adapt an idea in an accessible way, enabling success across a range of abilities and additional support needs.
Ensembles and Differentiation
Learn how to use Figurenotes on almost any instrument in a variety of settings. From one to one learning, full class activities, and varying ensembles, you’ll be able to get your pupils playing together quickly and easily.
1:1 Follow-up Session
This is an opportunity for you to work 1:1 with course leaders after the main sessions have been completed. The content of these sessions is entirely up to you. We can work with you on resources, help develop ideas, troubleshoot, or help with specific questions you may have.
We can tailor the day to those coming, so the earlier you book, the more we can accommodate your questions. Use your booking form to give us a heads up of what you’d like to learn.
Here’s what some of our recent trainees had to say.
Here’s what our previous training participants had to say.
Our online training programme consists of three interactive Zoom sessions, plus a 1:1 session with course leaders to focus entirely on you and your work. You can attend from anywhere with an internet connection. You’ll also receive a discount code for Figurenotes resources, which you can use on anything from stickers to a software subscription.
Each interactive session lasts 2 hours. There will be opportunities to meet and collaborate with fellow music educators, to discuss your student’s specific needs, and workshop relevant solutions that you can take away with you. Alongside these interactive sessions, you’ll be guided through activities to help you apply Figurenotes to your own working practice.
The groups will be kept small to allow full participation from everyone, ensuring you get valuable feedback from your peers and the course leaders. You should finish this training with resources you can use straight away and a good idea of how to progress your work further.
Complete the booking form, then pay for your place via our online shop. Here you can either pay by PayPal, credit/debit card, or request an invoice.
Can’t make the date in March?
Book now for November 2023
Thursdays 2nd, 9th, 16th November 2023. 1-3pm on Zoom
Tis the season to play jingle bells more times than you care to mention!
Yup, that’s right, the festive season is upon us. You might be rushed of your feet with festive concerts and sharing events, or maybe you are counting down the days until you can eat an enormous amount of chocolate in your PJ’s? Whatever you are doing, make sure you get your Figurenotes orders in before Thursday, 15th December 2022 if you want your Figurenotes order to be posted out to you before 2023!
Figurenotes HQ will be shut up shop for the festive season from Friday 16th December 2022 and we will re-open on Thursday 5th January 2023.
That’s a wrap on the latest Figurenotes training courseFigurenotes: Developing Your Practice with a fabulous group of musicians and educators. We had three weekly sessions, each progressing to a different topic. Here’s what we got up to.
Week 1– Figurenotes Rhythm
Our first week was spent learning a little about each other and going over the basics of Figurenotes. We like to start with rhythm, as it is SO intuitive and we know it can make a huge difference to the learners sense of pulse. We all played a high tech rhythm canon game in our Zoom room and then created our very own low-fi canons with enough fun extensions to last weeks. You can find version of the rhythm canon we used on our FAMHub.
Week 2 – Figurenotes Composition
In our second session, we explored the many ways in which Figurnotes can be used to compose. Colour and shape is everywhere! This gives us lots of opportunities as educators to think creatively and find those magic keys that help engage learners and get the creative juices flowing. Our group had some great ideas, including Emma from Hear My Music who came up with this brilliant comic book themed session. POW!
Week 3 – Groups and Differentiation
Our final week was all about working in groups and differentiation within them. There are so many great ways to get everyone playing together using Figurnotes, removing the initial barriers of notation that some find challenging. We used our creative minds to make a sound story based on the story of The Gingerbread Man. Each character had its own theme and everyone got right stuck in. It was a hoot. You can find our Gingerbread Man Sound Story on the FAMHub.
Here are some of the things our trainees had to say at the end of our training course:
“Very helpful ideas and templates – and so great to see/hear how others are using the materials. Loved it all!“
“Very interesting, informative, and helpful!! thank you!“
“I’ve gained loads of workshop content that will last for years, from not only the training content but everyone else’s ideas too.”
Thanks to everyone that came along. Visit our training pages to find out more about our upcoming training offerings.
“2022’s Awards programme will continue to amplify and unite Edinburgh’s resilient creative ecosystem as we celebrate a decade of hosting the Awards in the City. Combined with our Birthday Bash, we want to get together to raise a glass and cheer on our fellow creatives. Think of it as an awards ceremony, networking event and office Christmas party, all wrapped up in one.”
“Our speciality is building bespoke and unique database systems for clients who have complex and specific requirements or who have odd challenges.
But we also like to build things, break things, and solve problems… and have fun in the process…
In our ranks, we have: current and former musicians, comic book fanatics, D&D enthusiasts, dog lovers, walkers, cyclists, rugby fans and a trained thespian.
But we don’t just build data systems; we can turn our hand to building pretty much anything like, a bass guitar, a distortion pedal, a contactless door locking mechanism; a chicken coop; an artist’s studio, and even a swimming pool for horses. No, really.
“We’re a startup technology partner that delivers the services, teams and expertise you might be missing in house.
Our customers come in all different shapes and sizes, from pre-seed to full enterprise, and they’re all pioneers and game-changers in their field.”
Fun times were had on the night and to top it off, WE WON! We couldn’t be happier and are so grateful to everyone who’s hard work made these projects happen.
To find out more about our new products visit our website or contact us.
