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.
We have updated our free bundle of resources for 2025. Anyone who receives our email newsletter can get the new ‘Starter Pack’, so if you haven’t signed up already, you can do so here.
The songs and activities can be used in group and 1:1 settings, with options to adapt and extend for more creativity.
We’re thrilled to be launching this set of resources, available free to anyone with an email address. It is especially lovely to feature musicians from Drake Music Scotland’s Singing Group in the recordings. To learn more about the charity behind Figurenotes, take a peek at Drake Music Scotland’s website.
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.
The end of November saw the Figurenotes team heading down to Southampton to present at the Music Mark Conference 2023. After the complimentary tea and caramel wafer on the tiny plane, we were set up nicely for a day of inspiring talks. The day started with a key note on Learning to Thrive in a Generative AI world, which was fascinating and started some lively debate. The conference was themed around ‘Dynamism’ and there was a particular focus on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. This was a fantastically forward-thinking conference and we were thrilled to be a part of it.
Photo Credit: Rachel Cherry. Provided by Music Mark.
As Music Mark was celebrating their 10 year anniversary, the inaugural Music Mark Awards took place in the evening. Some brilliant projects and people were highlighted in the shortlists, with emotional judges speeches that really brought the meaning of our work home. Congratulations to all the worthy winners.
Our session was titled ‘Building Rhythm Confidence with Figurenotes’ and highlighted the ease with which this accessible notation shows rhythm. We had everyone stomping, clapping, tapping, and clicking. By bringing out the iPads with Garageband and Thumbjam (our favourite app!) we had chords and solos. Adding chimes and vocals into the mix gave us a full band.
We had settled on Don’t Worry, Be Happy as our featured tune, because it always brings a lot of joy into the room. It felt good to bring some movement and energy at the end of a long day of sessions, and we were rewarded with lots of keen teachers hoping to use Figurenotes in their projects. We can’t wait to see what people do with Figurenotes as a result of this session. We’ll be putting the Don’t Worry, Be Happy parts up on the Hub soon, so keep an eye out for them there.
It was also lovely to meet up with our friends at Charanga, ABRSM, Open Up Music, DIGIT, MiSST, and many more organisations. What a lovely community there is in the music education world. We hope to be back at this invigorating event next year.
Photo Credit: Rachel Cherry. Provided by Music Mark.
Calling all MuseScore users. Are you up-to-date with MuseScore 4? Have you also updated your Figurenotes plugins?
There are 2 plugins for Figurenotes. The first creates coloured noteheads in Figurenotes colours with just one click.
An example of the Figurenotes Colours plugin
The second creates shaped noteheads with Figurenotes colours for a slightly easier transition into reading stage 3.
An example of the Figurenotes Colours and Shapes plugin
Both plugins have been updated to use with MuseScore 4. You can access them via the FAM Hub or the MuseScore plugin library, where they are helpfully bundled into one package.
We’ve made a little video to help you install your plugin, in case this is new to you. Once installed, it will appear within MuseScore, ready for you to apply to your scores.
You can create stage 1 and 2 scores in our Notate programme. The plugins help you to create stage 3 scores. If you need a refresher on the different stages of Figurenotes, take a look at our Progression pages. We have lots of games in the Hub to help you transition from one stage to the next, moving towards reading standard notation, if that is your goal.
“Not only was the training great, it was also really fun, which is so important”
As always, we had an absolute blast delivering the Figurenotes: Developing Your Practice course. The interactive elements always have everyone smiling and it really brightens our day to work with such enthusiastic music leaders.
The inspiration was sparking for our fabulous course participants from the very first week! It is so invigorating to set an activity or a homework challenge and see the ideas pouring out of the wonderful teachers before us.
“Online worked a treat! Well planned for the context and plenty of opportunity to share practice. Good space for thoughts to be absorbed too.“
The Group
Last time we had an international crowd, but this crew were all based in Scotland, so we are also building a lovely network of musicians that can support each other in their day-to-day work too. That is why we encourage all our Figurenoters to join the private Facebook group too. It’s a great place to ask questions and share ideas with other Figurenotes teachers and leaders.
Getting to know our small groups and working together over the weeks really helps us to deliver practical advice relevant to each person and their working environment. With such broad portfolio careers in music and music education, we love hearing about the incredible professional experience each attendee brings to their work. Instrumental and classroom teachers, mainstream and specialist schools, composers and community musicians – we had a wealth of knowledge and experience within this group. Music education in Scotland is very lucky to have such an inspirational bunch of musicians teaching the next generation.
“Excellent, fun, interactive, and curious sessions that were active and engaging.“
Week 1 – Rhythm
After introducing the basic principles of Figurenotes, we start the fun and games. Our rhythm activities using canon even got a live outing with a woodwind group in the week following the session, which went down very well with the pupils!
Our rhythm homework challenge inspired such innovative responses. These ranged from movement activities inspired by Pachelbel’s Canon, exploring and listening on an adventure with a cuckoo (Saint-Saens), all the way into outer space for a space-themed rhythm and structure activity. Their pupils are going to be having a lot of fun in the coming weeks working on this lot.
Week 2 – Composition
Chime cam made an appearance this week to showcase some compositions created during the session. We played with different ways of using rhythm and colour (pitch), as well as directing each other’s playing. It is always lovely to hear some live playing in an online setting too (the viola played as a cello was my personal highlight).
Week 3 – Groups
The Gingerbread Man came to play today. Incorporating elements from the past 2 weeks, this activity is great for differentiation, turn-taking and other ensemble skills, as well as having more extension activities than you can shake a rainstick at!
By combining this with practical tips for making group-work accessible and fun, this action packed week should set up our music leaders with the tools they need to get cracking with Figurenotes.
“I’ve already started using it and the kids just get it straight away. It’s definitely here to stay. It’s been life-changing!”
1:1 Follow-ups
Every participant can book a follow-up session with course leaders to ask whatever questions and queries that weren’t covered in the training or to dive deeper into certain aspects of their practice. This could be anything from reviewing and discussing resources created during the course, refining and developing them, or a walk-through of the software. These sessions are a wonderful way to tie up the learning from the previous 3 weeks to set our participants up with the skills and confidence to dive into using Figurenotes in their practice.
What Next?
Our next course will run in March 2022. Book your place here and join us for more Figurenotes fun and games, learning skills for delivering accessible music sessions, whatever your work setting.
“Loved all of the compositional games gifted and the resources of materials – an amazing package of tools to get going in a lot of contexts.“
It was a long wait, but our first in-person training since the pandemic started took place last week. It was an absolute joy.
We delivered training to new Associate Musicians of Drake Music Scotland who are working with the Sound Explorers projects. They spent two days in the company of Drake Music Scotland staff, with in-depth sessions learning about technology and Figurenotes.
Lauren and Rebecca took our new musicians through a fun play-together on instruments they do not usually play, forming a makeshift band. As always, the shorty bass proved very popular, especially with Figurenotes making it easy to play!
Our wee band was grooving away to tunes by Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Nancy Sinatra, and Ben E. King – all while learning about ensemble skills, leading a group, reading Figurenotes notation, catering for mixed-abilities, and choosing accessible repertoire.
For the second day, we took on a scheme of work based around a story, The Gingerbread Man, with a whole host of extension activities. This activity includes composition, turn-taking, performance, and much more! We’ll be featuring this in our online training course in September too, so make sure to bag your place before they all get snapped up. You can find out more through our training pages.
There were giggles galore when performing our story, complete with musical motifs composed by the group. The dramatic narration and turn-taking kept everyone on their toes, and Saint-Saëns would have been impressed with our animal inspired tunes and sounds.
So much fun was had, all through learning-by-doing, which we love!
We may have been socially distanced and masked, but that allowed us to feel safe, explore music together, and have some great discussions. Thank you to everyone involved in this training.
“I just wanted to say thank you so much for a brilliant two days of training. It was so good to meet everyone and the training was just excellent. I feel like I am going into this term so full of inspiration and motivation because of last week and all the tools you gave us on the training course. You are an incredibly inspirational organisation.”
Trainee
Want to join in?
If you’d like to join us for some more Figurenotes fun and games, book your place on our ‘Figurenotes – Developing Your Practice’ course. Running online over 4 sessions, we dive into the fundamentals of music-making with Figurenotes for all music leaders and teachers. Come and join in the fun!
The Gingerbread ManA clip of our makeshift band working on Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5.
Transcript of video lyrics:
9 to 5. For service and devotion, you would think that I would deserve a big promotion. Want to move ahead, but the boss won’t seem to let me. I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.
Did you miss out on our online course back in April? Well, we have great news!
Figurenotes training is BACK 🎉 for all teachers, tutors, music practitioners, and music therapists.
Join us for Figurenotes: Developing Your Practice, running online in September. Live delivery takes place in small groups on Thursdays, September 16th, 23rd, and 30th. We’ve adapted the time for this course, so that those who couldn’t make last time will get the chance to come; 1pm – 3pm (UK time)
We specifically wanted to highlight funding opportunities for this course, so keep an eye on our Facebook group where we will share these opportunities with you. For people working in Scotland this fund is brilliant: https://www.scottishmusiccentre.com/ymi-cpd. There is a fairly quick turnaround, so get your application in as soon as you can.
We can’t wait to meet you, whether you’ve attended previous training or are brand new to Figurenotes. With more interactive activities, opportunities for 1:1 sessions, peer feedback, and a whole load of practical advice and guidance, this is not one to be missed!
Our highly sophisticated random selection tool has chosen a winner for our Figurenotes Champion competition. Congratulations, Lifesize! You have won a bundle of Figurenotes goodies, including a stickers value pack, your choice of tune book, a year’s subscription to the Resource Base, and the new Figurenotes Software (which you’ll receive as soon as it is released!)
Lifesize is a Community Interest Company (CIC) based in Hastings and St. Leonards-on-Sea, UK. Providing music and arts engagement with young people and adults.
This fantastic organisation was founded in 2019 and delivers work in a variety of settings using both traditional instruments and technology. Lifesize works with all ages, including people with learning disabilities and people experiencing mental and physical health challenges. They aim to support artistic and musical ambitions, while working in a responsive and person-centred way, promoting overall wellbeing and self-esteem.
Figurenotes has helped Lifesize to “enable a creative environment where workshop participants of all abilities are supported to collaborate effectively.”
Our Figurenotes Champions map and profiles page are filling up nicely. We’d love to feature more of the wonderful organisations, schools, and institutions that are using Figurenotes in their work. Take a look at the profiles already on the site and complete the form to feature. This is a great way to reach new pupils, connect with local networks, and make global connections and collaborations. We’ll be highlighting as many as we can through our social media channels and newsletter too.
