Writing and recording music remotely with a group of musicians with learning disabilities. Part 3: Making music
One of the challenges of working with a group online as a music facilitator is not being able to assemble musical equipment for a group to use and ensure everyone has equal access to that equipment. The reality of people working remotely can create barriers for those who cannot access the internet or a suitable device as well as musical instruments. It is certainly something that i feel needs to be kept at the forefront of all considerations when trying to support people in this way.
Fortunately in the context of this project with the Carousel House Band we were able to distribute some resources such as ipads and composition tools that we usually use in our face to face work. We were able to work with the support of parents and carers to configure music apps on the ipads to be able to be used in a remote group working scenario.
Thumbjam
Thumbjam is a really great music app that essentially turns the screen of the ipad into a high quality instrument a bit like a keyboard. You can select sounds from a bank of high quality sampled instruments and access some really useful functions such as loop recording. We were able to set ipads to be in the same musical key so band members could share ideas for musical phrases over the remotes video call. Utilising a notation system called figurenotes which amongst other things assigns colours to notes we were able to make good use of the ipads as tools to developing some musical ideas.
You can find out more about thumbjam here:
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/thumbjam/id338977566
you can find out more about figurenotes here: