Educators Highlight the Best Teaching Tools from the 2014 Winter NAMM Show
The annual Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim California is the place where hundreds of thousands of musical instruments, accessories, and related products are debuted to industry insiders. For the fourth consecutive year, educators at the music products convention combed the exhibit halls looking for the best products for classroom use in an array of different categories. Using an online voting process at sboplus.net and hard-copy ballots from attendees, music teachers made their selections, which culminated in a presentation of the 2014 Best Tools for Schools from the Winter NAMM Show.
Special thanks to panelists Dr. Karen Childress-Evans of the San Diego Unified School District, Jamie Knight of Huntington Beach High School’s Academy of the Performing Arts, and SBO columnist Dr. John Kuzmich.
Best Teaching Tool for Young/Elementary Students
With fun cartoon-based graphics, Piano Mania is an app designed for teaching the fundamentals of piano to young learners.
joytunes.com/piano/pianomania.php
Best Teaching Tool for Secondary Students
Breezin’ Thru Theory, Breezin’ Thru Composing
These dynamic web-based curricula for grades five-12 use a five-step learning process to teach music theory and composition.
Best Teaching Tool for Beginner Students
Hal Leonard’s Essential Elements Interactive Band & String Method
This online tool for teaching, learning, assessment, and communication facilitates instruction for beginning band and string students, both in the classroom and at home.
halleonard.com/ee/interactive/
Best Intermediate Teaching Tool
The new Theremini by Moog is both a flexible, affordable music-making tool as well as an entryway into great cross-curricular activities about music, science, inventors and more.
Best Advanced Teaching Tool
Available in 16, 24, and 32-track models, the new StudioLive Digital Mixer series from PreSonus give schools a flexible and powerful tool for recording and mixing at a school-friendly price-point.
Best Practice Tool (Traditional ensembles)
The redesigned Silent Brass line from Yamaha offers lightweight, compact brass mutes that sits in the bell of the horn, almost completely silencing the instrument, while translating the audio to a ultra high quality digital signal that the student can listen to with headphones.
usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/winds/silentbrass/
Best Practice Tool (Pop ensembles)
FretLight Guitars
FretLight Guitars are high quality musical instruments that have embedded into the fret board LED lights that light up, indicating where the student’s fingers should go. The accompanying software comes with 130 lessons, 150 playing-along tracks, and over 1,300 chord inversions.
Honorable Mention: JamHub Tour Bus
Best Percussion Teaching Tool
Vic Firth’s Hingestix are drumsticks that have an adjustable plastic swivel pad that teaches young learners where the fulcrum of the stick is, making proper grip and finger technique a veritable certainty.
vicfirth.com/products/hingestix.php
Best Jazz Teaching Tool
Band in a Box is accompaniment software that automatically generates a complete professional-quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar, and strings or horns.
Best Concert Band/Orchestra Teaching Tool
SmartMusic’s new iPad app brings the program’s full-featured, cloud-based rehearsal and assessment tools to the new portable iPad medium.
Best Alternative Co-Curricular Teaching Tool
The Fresh Beats standards-based hip-hop curriculum from Alfred Music Publishing is a great tool for students (and teachers!) to learn about hip-hop culture, beat-making, lyrical composition and more.