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.
Did you miss out on our online course in May? 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, we’re launching it early! You can now book your place on the November course. Our early bird rate of £99.99 will be available until 25th July. 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.
Booking is now open for our ever-popular course for music educators and facilitators. Read on for more information, including funding pots and new discount for full-time students.
Figurenotes: Developing Your Practice
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.
Figurenotes: Developing Your Practice takes place over 3 interactive group sessions via Zoom, building your skills in Figurenotes and accessible music practices. Consolidate 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 one 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.
Funding and Discounts
To improve access to our courses, we are offering £50 off for full-time students. Please email us at Figurenotes@DrakeMusicScotland.org with your institution and course-name. We’ll authorise the discount and send you a code to use at checkout.
“Really great to see everyone’s ideas and the range of different minds from all over the world – great for inspiration!”
We had a fantastic time delivering our new online course designed to help people explore Figurenotes within their own teaching settings. Running 2 small groups across 3 weeks of training, we’ve really enjoyed getting to know more about the people involved and how they work.
Thank you to all our participants for engaging so well with this course. The activities and ideas created by your homework tasks were phenomenal and have such potential. We can’t wait to hear what you achieve in your lessons.
I have learnt how to use the Figurenotes system itself, but also some great ideas about planning, differentiation and different ways into composing.
Trainee 2021
Each week had a different focus, which was consolidated in the homework activity. Week 1 was an introduction to Figurenotes with particular emphasis on rhythm. Week 2 explored the world of creative play and composition. Week 3 focused on groups, ensembles, and differentiation.
As always, the creative composition task had the most wide-ranging results. The opportunities are endless when working with colour and shape. We have had everything from Kandinsky to puppets, train journeys to braille Bananagrams, Moomins to holiday snaps – and everything inbetween! What a creative bunch.
Tools for Creative Composition (week 2)
Our in-person training nearly always has a visitor to Scotland from another country, but with online delivery we can reach so many more people who could benefit from this training. With participants from Hong Kong, Greece, USA, and the UK this time around, we hope to reach even more countries with our next course date.
If you are interested in attending this course in the future, please get in touch, as we are currently working out dates and timings for the next run. With so many timezones to consider, it is helpful to know what works best for you.
The information was presented really well and you are both super knowledgable about teaching to diverse groups. It was great to get your insight.
After a year of lockdowns, school closures, and U-turns, many of you will be total pros at remote, hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous lessons. Here we compile some of the top tips we’ve gathered along the way.
Breakout Rooms = Practice Rooms
Delivering to a group and need to check up on their individual work? Whether in a classroom setting or a group rehearsal, assigning pupils their own breakout rooms as practice spaces means you can visit each pupil and see how they’re doing. No scheduling needed, just pop in when you feel like it. The threat of an imminent visit from a teacher can help keep them on task too, especially if they’ve got many distractions at home (how many pets have you seen over Zoom by now?)
Know Your Platform
Some schools will be very strict about the platform you can use and you’re stuck with it. If you’re a private teacher, try to get everyone on the same platform as you. We’ve found Zoom to be the best, as their sound options seem the most comprehensive. The Original Sound feature is fantastic and teaching instrumental lessons would be much harder without it. The new high fidelity music settings haven’t blown us away and sometimes caused more problems, but original sound should see you right.
Make sure you send accessible resources and instructions to students, parents/guardians, or support staff, so everyone is set up and ready to go.
Know the accessibility features of your platforms and technologies. There are new updates all the time, such as Zoom now having in-meeting closed captions. Google Meet’s captions are generally accurate, even when singing.
Online Recitals
My first online recital had 100% engagement. Normally I get about half of my pupils wanting to perform live, and virtually none of my adult pupils ever want to get involved in concerts. Let them choose between playing live or sending you a video beforehand for you to share from your screen. One of my pupils has always point-blank refused to play in concerts and she took part by sending in a video, even though she couldn’t attend the concert itself.
One brilliant bonus of performing online is that you can invite family and friends from far afield who would never have been able to see the live show. We used the chat feature in Zoom to post positive and supportive comments. It was lovely.
Connection is Everything
The strength of your internet connection has become the difference between a great lesson and a frustrating waste of time. If you find you or a pupil has terrible wi-fi, try an ethernet cable. Directly plugging into your router can do wonders for the strength of your connection.
Human connection is important too. Take time to discuss how the week has gone, not just in terms of their practice. Find ways to play together (your student needs to be muted) or play games. A laugh can go a long way during a pandemic.
Get Creative
Figurenotes lends itself to creativity, and this is no different online. Grab household items in Figurenotes colours and compose with them. Share screens and use the Figurenotes software to do some composing or arranging – a great way to sneak some stealth theory in. Try using the whiteboard feature, or Google Jamboard, to draw graphic scores in Figurenotes colours and play them. Wherever you can find colour, you can compose and improvise. Remember those homemade instruments mentioned in Fiona Sharp’s excellent blog? Endless fun and a way to entertain the kids during school closures and cancelled clubs.
Improve Your Skills
This is a great time to build on the skills you have and take a training course, as most are online and don’t require travel. Getting stuck into skill development is much more beneficial to both your mental health and job satisfaction than completing Netflix. There are plenty available. Our new online course, Figurenotes Online: Developing Your Practice, is ideal for emerging and established musicians, teachers, and music practitioners. You’ll learn how to make your work more accessible, inclusive, and fun! The groups will be kept nice and small in order to focus on your needs and help develop resources that fit your setting and style. You can find out more here: https://figurenotes.org/new-online-training/
Emily Carr-Martin from Hear My Music has continued to provide high quality music provision during lockdown. Here she gives us an insight into how they moved sessions online, as well as some of the unexpected benefits of working in this way.
I’m Emily and I’m the creative director of Hear My Music, a charity enabling people with complex needs and/or autism to express themselves as individuals through inclusive participant-led music making. In short, pre-pandemic, this meant that I spent most of my time making/teaching/facilitating music with remarkable people in schools, community centres, and the green room of the Glad Café where we held our classes. In the current world I now do this from my laptop screen via Zoom or Teams with the company of my wonderful office companion, Isla the spaniel.
Isla the spaniel at Hear My Music HQ
I have used Figurenotes in my work for a number of years and love it! As a dyslexic musician, something in the logic of the visual system immediately clicked with me and the colours are so ingrained with pitch in my brain that I can get very twitchy when looking at a solid block of colour and hearing music that is not in the corresponding key.
I love that moment when you introduce a child to a Figurenotes score on a piano or chime bars and before the adult in the room has finished drawing breath to ask how the system works, the child has played their first full tune! No words required. This suits both me and the majority of people I work with!
Hear My Music runs a project called Glad Spectrum Music (GSM), an after school group and individual music classes for autistic children and young people. It is this project that this blog post will focus on with a particular emphasis on how we have moved the project to remote delivery and our continued use of Figurenotes within this.
I’m sure everyone remembers the run up to the lockdown in March vividly. I spent a surreal week cancelling every project we run and then swiftly working out how to run remote music sessions for the following week. GSM took one week off, the week before the schools closed, and the following week we were delivering our classes online, this was perhaps quicker than was sensible, however the craving for routine and normality was tangible and it was that that I reacted to.
Zoom Group session – Lockdown Hairstyles…
The setup/preparation for these sessions wasn’t huge. Anyone who didn’t have a keyboard in their house was provided with one to borrow, with Figurenotes stickers. We sent out many ‘fingers’ templates (available on the Resource Base under ‘General‘ or in the free bundle), and huge amounts of music for home printing. When presented with my first bit of black and white music from the other side of the screen (no colour printer!) I learnt that sometimes posting music was the best option.
I discovered that there are popular coloured keyboard stickers with notes drawn on them and letter names that don’t correspond to Figurenotes colours, a lot of information on one sticker that maybe a sibling was using on a shared keyboard. Add a Figurenotes ‘fingers’ template to this and it made my head hurt to look at it! Fortunately, the same sticker company also makes a black and white version!
We quickly learnt about the limitations of group music making on the internet. We began to learn what works and what you have to accept as a no-go. Playing as a group, that feeling of absolute ‘togetherness’, the sound and vibrations of instruments working together – that cannot be replicated. Listening to each other, however, is something that can be honed and worked on in ways that would be more difficult in person. I wrote a very simple piece of music called Online Turn-Taking and it was with this piece of music that we learnt the skills of turn-taking online, first with heavy operation of the mute button from practitioners and over time with participants learning when to listen, when to play, how the music could still be a group effort.
Our crutch for early remote group sessions
There was a really lovely discovery within our remote sessions that some people with very high anxiety found remote sessions much less anxiety inducing. This could be due to a number of reasons: no travel, total control over your own environment, no fear of external sounds/smells/visual distractions, the ability to switch us off at will…It meant that for some participants we have made more musical progress than we would have in person and while we will never exclusively deliver sessions online if we don’t need to, a hybrid approach for some individuals is definitely something to consider.
We also put on a Zoom concert in the summer; this was livestreamed on Facebook and involved two separate breakout rooms as our ‘green rooms’ and a main stage using the broadcast message function to call people to the ‘stage’. The livestream was streamed in the breakout rooms. This set-up was probably one of the most anxiety inducing concerts we’d ever put on for practitioners, however some young people who wouldn’t dream of walking into a room with an audience nonchalantly performed exceptionally well!
We use Figurenotes creatively in sessions and this has been easy to transfer to doing online. We miss the huge coloured pieces of lycra that we would set up in a room as different lands; jumping quickly from the red hot lava – C, swimming in the blue sea – F, relaxing in the green grass – B etc. This has been replaced by the screenshare function with Figurenotes software and has resulted in me now having an encyclopaedic knowledge of different dinosaur species and some excellent original pieces of music.
https://youtu.be/NSW8r6nbrsc
This is the first group piece we wrote and recorded during lockdown, it was written with coloured chord flashcards to choose the chord pattern which formed the basis for the rest of the song. Our recording and editing skills have become much more refined over time but I remain very proud of this first one.
The transition to remote music sessions has been both very challenging and remarkably smooth. The fundamentals of what we do have not changed and I think that is one of the things that has helped practitioners and participants alike throughout this difficult time. The continuity of seeing each other and working together every week has certainly provided some much needed routine for me and I am so proud of the resilience of each and every one of our participants. As we continue on navigating our way through this difficult time we will have the safety of mutual musical goals and the community that we have developed through this.
You booked it – we made it bigger!
Due to a rush of bookings, we have decided to release more places for our Music Teacher’s Toolbox on 25th March. Get in quick before we run out of space again.
You’ll get expert guidance on using Figurenotes with different instruments and in different scenarios. You’ll learn how to get your students to progress to reading standard notation. Whatever your teaching situation, there’s a way for your music lessons to incorporate inclusive, cross-curricular learning using Figurenotes. Want to create your own resources? You’ll be guided through the software, allowing you to tailor your resources to your pupils’ needs. With warm up ideas, games, and personalised advice, you’ll leave inspired and ready to shake up your teaching. It is also a great chance to network and share good practice.
Take a look at the full programme and complete the booking form, so that we can tailor our sessions according to your needs. You can also pay online or request an invoice at checkout. Get in touch if you need to send a purchase order.
We’d love to have you there, but you’ll need to book soon, as we always get fully booked!
