Electronic Music Pedagogy: how a one-to-one iPad program and a YouTuber changed everything.

In 2013, I worked at a school where every student had an iPad from Grades 4-6. The primary music teachers were encouraged to use the iPads as much as possible in class. We were excited! This was the early days of iPads in schools and we felt like we were at the forefront of something pretty special.

We created all sorts of cool units and integrated apps like GarageBand into composition, performance, formative/peer/self-assessment, listening activities, and more. It was such an amazing opportunity to try something new and we dove into it.

Students started some projects, they were generally engaged, and lessons became quite different from what we'd done before. But a problem also began to surface:

We found ourselves spending hours of class time helping learners to navigate/troubleshoot the GarageBand interface. GarageBand was meant to be an 'entry-level' piece of software, yet students kept getting lost, pressed the wrong buttons, or they would simply get left behind during teacher-led explanations. They used the iPads, they were slowly learning how to use a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), but they didn't actually do much music-making.

That was until I found Arvid Sandgren.

Arvid Sandgren, a.k.a. Arrived, is a YouTuber. At some point in 2014/15, when I was getting a bit sick of making endless DAW-focused video tutorials, I started wondering if there was another way. I went to YouTube and searched for 'how to make Counting Stars in GarageBand iOS' and one of Arvid's videos popped up. It was a super snappy jump-cut video that simply walked you through how to make a song using many of the features in GarageBand iOS.

I decided to give the tutorial to my next Year 6 class. I was hesitant to do this because I felt like I was outsourcing my 'teaching' to a YouTuber. I would no longer be the fountain-of-all-knowledge. I would allow my students to learn from someone else ??. I didn't tell the rest of the team because I wasn't sure if it would work, and I didn't want them to think I was weird.

The lesson began and after about 10 minutes I didn't know what to do with myself. The classroom was silent, students were crazily engaged, and I had no questions about how to 'fix' GarageBand. The students just wanted to keep showing me how cool their work was. They wanted me to check if they had it correct, and I would say something like: "you listen to it, does it sound correct?" We'd identify any issues and they'd rewind the video and they would try to correct their mistake.

Let me be clear, Arvid Sandgren is not a 'trained' teacher (as far as I can tell!). He is a dude that makes YouTube video tutorials for fun and to engage an audience of GarageBand nerds. His tutorials aren't perfect...but they also kind of are perfect. They don't fluff around. They simply say do this, do that, change this, change that. By the end of the tutorial the song is complete! It's super satisfying.

I tried the tutorial with a few more classes. Same result. I asked my colleagues to give it a crack. Guess what? Yep, same result.

It became pretty clear: the tutorials taught the students how to use the DAW by helping them make a song they knew and wanted to make.

So, with the tutorials guiding my students, what did I do during lessons then?

Well, I did things backwards. I didn't need to spend time 'teaching' them how to use the DAW, I just needed to facilitate a space where they could follow the tutorial and give them feedback on their output by getting them to listen and identify their mistakes. They knew what Counting Stars sounded like and most of them (sometimes with some persistent questioning from me) could identify if they'd not quite got it right. They were using a process of aural learning. This would be a foundational idea that I would later understand to be a core element of how electronic musicians tend to learn. More on that in the next article!

Once the tutorial was finished (or even half-finished!), we would spend time deconstructing what we did. I would ask the students to identify/discuss...

1. elements and functions of the DAW .
2. the instruments used in the piece and what role each one played.
3. some of the structural and textural elements in the piece such as verses/choruses, sections, layers.
4. any effects that had been applied to instruments.
5. melodies and harmonies used.
6. the piano roll and what the grid represented and MIDI notes meant.

The conversations were deep. Sometimes students would ask to plug their iPad into the AV system in the room (this was pre-Airplay ??) and talk through an idea. We sometimes related things to conventions used in standard Western Art Music notation, and other times we spoke in boxes, lines and other various abstractions. My lessons went from me constantly trying to work out which part of the DAW to 'teach' first, to me helping students develop their aural skills and learn about musical structure, texture, melody, harmony, tone and rhythm.

A couple of weeks after those first sessions, I remember a student excitedly came up to me in the hallway and said, "Mr. Chris, I finished 6 tutorials!".

What?! I hadn't really even noticed that Arvid Sandgren had a massive catalogue of these tutorials! I was stoked. By using Arvid's tutorial in the first session, I had unknowlingly facilitated space for student choice and differentiation for those who wanted to move at their own pace ????

So, after a few months I had the majority of my Year 6 classes with some pretty solid skills in GarageBand iOS. They knew how to add instruments, change tempo, input MIDI, cut, copy, paste, use automation, apply effects, reverse tracks, and lots of other stuff. They had also picked up a bunch of compositional techniques and electronic music production ideas. There were still gaps and a bunch of things that were missing in this approach, but it was a great start.

It had definitely planted a seed for me as an educator.

A seed that wouldn't germinate until 10 years later.

In the next article I'm going to explore what happened after these first months and how the idea has now evolved.

If you want to skip ahead, check out Electronic Music Pedagogy - a project based on this approach that has now been delivered to thousands of students and teachers in schools around the world.

P.S. Unfortunately, Arvid stopped making his tutorials about 8 years ago. His playlists are a little out of date, but there is still plenty of gold in there. If you're a music teacher, check out the tutorials and give one of them a go!

We are currently building our own catalogue of tutorials at Electronic Music Pedagogy - we already have a couple for GarageBand and BandLab, so do have a look at them here: https://empedagogy.com/resources/