Online Resources for Musicians
- Raven Luiz Simon
- Jul 18, 2020
- 3 min read
Education in 2020 has taken a drastic change due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of instruction has shifted from in person classes to mostly online or hybrid classes. Throughout this chaos it can seem that the arts, especially band, can feel forgotten. I want to share a few online resources that can help our young musicians further their skills on their instrument or foster musical creativity.
Our armed forces have some of the best and most professional wind bands of the whole world. In this video members of the U.S Army Band demonstrate the different instruments in the concert band. This is a great resources for our young musicians that are trying to choose which instrument they would like to play.
This video is great for our budding trumpet players. Posture is a fundamental aspect into creating a wonderful tone. The Army Band explains how to achieve perfect posture for our beginning trumpet players.
This website is great for students that want more practice on their reading skills. You can do some quick exercises on note, rhythm, and pitch idenifications.
Chrome music lab is a fun website to explore different aspects of music in a visual and audial way. Go ahead and experiment with the different activities that music lab gives you. It's a great way to be creative.
Noteflight is a free to use cloud based notation software. If you ever have an itch to start composing on manuscript, noteflight is a great program to write music with.
If you need to practice sight reading, Sight Reading Factory is a website that generates short sight reading exercises. You can customize how hard the sight reading is as well as which instruments you want it to write for. You can go ahead and practice sight reading with friends or siblings!
8notes has a lot of free music for all instruments. If you are seeking brand new music to play to popular music, 8notes has all of that. Go ahead and play those popular songs that you love on the radio on your instrument.
Practicing alone can be boring sometimes, the free version of Smart Music allows you to play along with a recroding and tells you what you can improve on right away. Ask your band director if your program has a license with Smart Music, you could access the whole library if your band has one.
The Music Lab has great games and resources for all ages. Take a music IQ test or play some games. Relax and unwind while learning something abhout music.
This is a beautiful video from Benjamin Zander about the power of music. This a great video to watch every once in a while to remind us why we play music and the effect that our art has on other people.
There is always something that we can improve on. This is Elmer Churampi, one of the best young trumpet players today. Benjamin Zander takes him on a one on one lesson and shows us how much more we can improve on close to perfection. This is a great video to reflect upon. Even the best musicians in the world have somehting to work on, and it reminds us that being a musician asks us to always be open to criticism and always grow.
This is a simple backing track for C Jam blues. Since we cannot play with a rhythm section during quarentine, jazz players can use this backing track to practice our soloing. It is important to practice solos even though we don't have a rhythm section or jazz band to play with so we can get better on our creative soloing.
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