Electronic Music Pedagogy: hardware as the missing link?

Recently, I wrote a reflective piece about how a YouTuber called Arvid Sandgren and an expectation to have all primary school students using GarageBand iOS, led to a major shift in perspective for me back in 2013. If you haven't done so yet, I encourage you to read that article before this one.

This article explores what happened next.

After a few years using the approach outlined in the previous article, I noticed the following happening during my lessons:

1. Learners worked happily at their own pace,
2. Learners could choose their preferred piece to work on from the YouTube catalogue,
3. Learners began by asking for my help if they got stuck, but soon realised that they could simply rewind the video as many times as they wanted and work out what to do by listening carefully to the video and taking notes.
4. Learners naturally began working together, almost as if they were decoding a puzzle together.
5. Some learners became frustrated with the pace of the videos, but soon realised they could use the YouTube speed controls to slow things down (likewise, they could speed up if they wanted to!) to improve the accuracy of their work.
6. Learners naturally asked questions about what they were doing and why. For example, 'why is the video asking me to add reverb to that instrument?'. This created perfect moments for discussions based on listening to the difference between adding reverb or not.
7. Learners became highly proficient at navigating around the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).
8. There was a high level of satisfaction at completing a video and accurately recreating the chosen song.

This was all great! We were then able to do lots of cool projects where students used their DAW-skills to make their own music. We heard from students who began using GarageBand iOS as a launchpad into Logic, Reaper and FL Studio. But, we also had a bit of a disconnect starting to appear.

It's a complex disconnect that I won't try to pretend I fully understand, but I'll draw on what I remember. Basically, it was a problem of knobs, sliders, buttons and switches.

My students were recreating songs, doing all the right stuff, and using some of these ideas in their own songs. But, something seemed off. The hundreds of digital knobs, sliders, buttons and switches in GarageBand iOS seemed to make little sense to the students.

In fact, many had no idea what these things even were. Most of them had never used a physical amplifier, or looping pedal or rack-mounted reverb unit. Many had never even plugged in a cable. They had no concept of channels on a mixing desk, or sliding the small faders on an EQ unit. The concept of having two speakers to 'pan' to the left or right was foreign. They were using virtual versions of things they'd never seen or touched in the real world. The designers of GarageBand iOS obviously had contextual references for all of these elements so it makes sense to them. But, my students had no idea!

The DAW seemed to be an abstract space for many of these learners. They could learn how to use it, but some important context seemed to be missing. Imagine if we never gave our students the opportunity to have a tactile experience with a xylophone and only let them use PlayXylo. Or no physical guitars, just the virtual GarageBand iOS guitar. Maybe not so great, right?

So what did we do?

Well, I knew that doing some kind of deep dive into vintage hardware and how cool it was, and who made it, and what year it was made, and blah blah wasn't the answer. That would be just about as unengaging as talking about your classic guitar collection to students ??

But what if we gave every student some kind of opportunity to use electronic music production hardware in the classroom, just like we gave our students keyboards, ukuleles, Orff instruments and guitars to play?

But how the hell was I going to do this? Hardware was historically heavy, expensive, involved many cables (or a whole studio space), and was often super complex. That's why DAWs like GarageBand were created in the first place...accessibility!

So, I gave up.

I just kept plugging along for a few years with the recreate approach on GarageBand, all the while knowing many students just weren't quite 'getting' it.

But then in around 2016 I saw the Korg Volca drum machine at a friend's school. What the!?

This was a tiny battery-powered drum machine and it was cool. Well, almost! It was a bit clunky and boxy and some of the buttons/knobs were confusing. Plus the sequencer triggers were touch-sensitive pads that made it difficult at times to tell if you'd turned a step on or not. But, it was a start. I considered how I might integrate it at my school, but just didn't have the time to make it all happen.

Fast-foward to May 2023 and a fateful meeting at Roland Corporation HQ in Australia with David Whitehead and Matt Walsham setup by Ken Owen from Musical Futures International . I was looking to do some work in schools with Boss RC-1 loop pedals and Roland were happy to talk about supplying me with them to use in workshops.

We started chatting about possibilities with loopers and sequencers and all sorts of things, when suddenly David left the meeting room and came back with a set of AIRA Compacts for me to try. I tinkered around and couldn't believe it!

This was the kind of gear I'd been hoping for since way back in 2013 when we started the 1-to-1 iPad program. The T-8 drum machine was super intuitive and the J-6 chord sequencer sounded like a Juno synth. The E-4 vocal looper was fun too!

The gear was light, about the size of a Nintendo DS, operated with an on-board battery, was intuitive to use, and sounded amazing! You can read a brief summary of each of the AIRA Compacts that I wrote for the Chamberlain Music website here.

So I started testing the gear with just about every young person (from 5 years old and above) that I knew!

BTW, I didn't necessarily 'teach' them anything. I'd been exploring the literature on 'how electronic musicians learn' for a while and knew that most just start their learning process by 'tinkering'. So that's what I did. I told people how to turn the machines on, where to plug in the headphones, and that was about it. Then I just stood by and watched the reactions and answered questions. Of course, I'd been tinkering a lot with the gear in my own time too!

I noticed that by giving young people the space to tinker with headphones on, the following things consistently occurred:

1. Facials and vocalisations expressed wonder at what they were able to create so quickly.
2. They pressed buttons and turned dials (especially the steps on the T-8 drum machine) and worked out how to change rhythms, sounds, chord banks, drum kit tone, pitch and more. They did all of this aurally without any intervention.
3. Questions about the various knobs and buttons came thick and fast. What does this do? What does that do? Some I could answer, some I could not. That's when we turned to YouTube like most electronic musicians do.
4. Statements such as, 'this sounds like xyz artist!' were common. There were so many different artists mentioned!
5. They wanted to show each other the cool things they'd found/made. They would swap headphones and laugh, cheer and move to the music their friend created.
6. Questions such as 'how do I make this sound', 'How do I make xyz song?', or, 'how do I do a mad build and drop' were popular.

I continued facilitating these tinkering 'moments' whenever I could for about two months. I also encouraged some young people to jump on to GarageBand iOS to see if they could find/explore some of the buttons and dials on the AIRA Compacts within the virtual DAW space. And guess what? They seemed to get it straight away, especially when sequencing drums and using effects like Delay and Reverb. It was cool!

And so the 'missing link' may have been found. I couldn't wait to get some classes hands-on with this gear to see what would happen!

At the time of writing this article, it's been 15 months since we started the first workshops with students in schools and it's been insane to see the levels of engagement with the approach, and the obvious transfer of skills into the DAW space! We've done student/teacher workshops in 15 countries and have worked with thousands of students so far. It's been wild!

There's so much more to share, but I'll save that for the next article.

If you want to skip ahead and see a bit of what we've been doing, check it out here:

Website: https://empedagogy.com

YouTube Channel (with loads of FREE resources for schools): https://www.youtube.com/@electronicmusicpedagogy

Linkedin Page: https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/electronic-music-pedagogy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/empedagogy/