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    One Simple Rule for a GREAT Start

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    This has been the best FIRST week of school EVER! I usually despise the first week of band and orchestra because of how crazy it feels. Here is a short list of the things that must be done with beginners:
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    1-Check out lockers
    2-Pass out class documents
    3-Assign seats
    4-Check out school instruments
    5-Teach how to hold & care for instruments
    6-Teach how to create a good first tone
    7-Teach the basics of music notation
    8-Get students playing their first 3 notes
    9-Establish class rules and norms

    Can anyone truly accomplish all these things in one week?! I have always hated the feelings of frantic CRAZINESS attempting all this in the first week, along with the inevitable feelings of FAILURE that accompany the effort.

    I know that many music teachers say, "That is why I have a summer program", and I agree that starting students in homogeneous summer classes can be extremely beneficial. However, I have personally never been able to get more than 60% of incoming students to attend my summer band or summer orchestra program, and I have really disliked trying to make the first month of school feel successful to each student when there is such disparity in between students' prior musical experience. I determined this year to solve the "HAVES vs HAVE NOTS" problem by eliminating my annual summer program (my family sure enjoyed the extra time we spent together) and starting the school year with a revolutionary approach to teaching heterogenous beginning instrumental classes: NO INSTRUMENTS for 2 WEEKS.

    I can hear plenty of outraged voices from my respected colleagues at this absurd notion: "Students NEED to get playing on instruments as soon as possible to be highly motivated"..."I want to get them making successful sounds as fast as possible"..."Parents become awe-struck, devoted supporters when they hear music after the first day of band".
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    Music Binders for Instant Daily Assessment

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    My job as a band/orchestra teacher has been a lot easier since I started using "Music Binders". Such a lovely, bland name, isn't it? I probably should call them "Secret Codebooks of Sonic Awesomeness" or something, but for now each binder has a printed spine (this year's color of card stock is lime green) that simply says "Music Binder ___" (a number between 1-43 goes in each space) slid into the clear plastic cover. Yep, they are pretty dang awesome!

    Materials & Costs
    Anyone who wants to use the system I am suggesting here will have to deal with a couple of logistical problems. First, you will need a rack or some other system for keeping the binders organized and accessible to the students as they enter your classroom each period. Second, you will need a small but hefty chunk of money to purchase the binders, sheet protectors, dry erase markers, and zipper pouches. I was personally able to use my killer carpentry skills to convert a couple of shelves into racks that perfectly accommodate up to 80 binders. I also used school textbook funds (with full disclosure to my principal) combined with band funds to purchase 50 white view binders from the district warehouse for $3 each, along with zipper pouches ($1 each), white board markers, and tons of sheet protectors from Wal-Mart for a grand total of less than $300. This is some of the best money I have EVER spent!
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    No Musician Left Behind

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    Having taught band for 17 years, I am very aware of the tendency for SOME beginning band and orchestra students to get overwhelmed with note reading after getting to the 4th, 5th, and 6th notes. I have seen this happen every year around the 3rd month of school. As I continue to lead my classes through the method book, teaching new notes and concepts day after day, hoping that everyone is building a comprehensive understanding of music notation, some of my students begin a secret struggle to keep up with the rest of the class.

    How Some Begin to Slip
    I don't notice which students are falling behind at first, because kids don't tend to raise their hands and say, "Mr. Winters, I feel stupid right now, and I am getting totally lost!". Instead they revert to various coping mechanisms, such as trying to play by ear or watching the fingerings of students around them. At the same time they stop focusing on building logical schemata for how their fingerings are organized, because they don't feel like there is any comprehensible order to all the lines, spaces, and accidentals they see, and the keys they press, or fingers they place, or positions they move their slides to. They come to believe that our system of music notation and correlating fingerings is a jumbled mess of unconnected factoids that are impossible to memorize. When they refer to the fingering chart in the back of the method book they can find each note's fingering, but not a way to organize the hundreds of bits of information so it can be easily memorized.

    After teaching for several years I finally noticed this pattern of "losing" a small percentage of young musicians by the 3rd month, and I became obsessive about figuring out how I could teach so that no musician was left behind!
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    What is an Octave? Wavelength, Frequency, and Harmonics Explained!

    The musical interval of an octave can also be referred to as a Perfect Octave, or an eighth. It is fairly obvious that the word means 8 of something, so 8 whats?

    It does not mean 8 steps, because it is really 7 steps away...specifically 5 whole steps and 2 half steps. If you are playing chromatically, then the octave is 12 half steps away. So, the 8 does not come from the number of notes you have to play to arrive at the right note, it really means "the 8th" note in a scale in which you count the starting note as "1" and the next note as "2", and so forth.

    Have you ever noticed that there are only 7 letters used in the musical alphabet? A-G, right? So, if you start on "A" and think of it as "1", then count up through B, C, D, E, F, and G, then you have to use "A" again to get to "8". It doesn't matter whether you are using a major scale, minor scale, or any other type of scale. As long as you only use each letter once (with any combination of sharps or flats) you will arrive at the same letter that you started with for the 8th note.

    This brings up an interesting question: Why is the octave so important that it caused early musicians to base the whole system of music theory on 7 note names? (Remember, 7 note names + 1 repeated note name = 8, or the octave) The answer is complicated, but I will give a somewhat simplified answer.
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    A musical tone can be measured in terms of its wavelength. Any sound causes a ripple or "wave" through the gaseous molecules that make up the air in our atmosphere. One molecule bumps into another, which bumps into another and so forth as the sound travels through the air. A musical tone, unlike other "sounds" or "noises" has a steady pulse of waves. Because the wave pulses are steady, they have a regular, exact, measurable distance between the start of one wave and the start of the next one. This is called the wavelength. When we graph a musical wave we draw a curvy line which goes up and down and up and down... We then show the wavelength as being the distance from one point on the "wave" to the correlating point on the next adjacent wave. Interestingly, the distance from the bottom of the wave to the top is used to show how LOUD a sound is (or the sound's amplitude).