Our guest student bloggers this week: Liam, James, Riley, Macoy, Zali, Finn, Seth, Tom , Brigitte, Harry, Stacey, Poppie, Ella, Meg and Samantha.

Thanks to Sally Walsh for pulling it all together.

We have a fabulous school concert band with lots of excellent musicians. Many of our musicians are also very interested in technology, particularly mobile devices. One day our teacher played her iPad by blowing into the microphone using the Ocarina app. Our clarinet and flute teachers played too. It looked like a lot of fun, so- the Boneo PS iPad Orchestra was born! At present we have 20 members in our i-Orchestra. There are lots of music apps for iPad. We already had Garage Band and were looking for instrument apps that matched the instruments we play in our concert band. We researched lots of apps and came up with the following list to use.

Garage Band: Turns your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch into a collection of Touch Instruments and a full-featured recording studio — so you can make music anywhere you go. Use Multi-Touch gestures to play pianos, organs, guitars, drums, and basses.

Real Piano: A full 88-key piano app that brings you realistic grand piano sound, smoothly moving and zooming, customizable key labels, and professional tuning & transposition functionalities.

Woodwind instrumentSS: A music application packed with 12 different woodwind instruments such as the flute and the clarinet.

Viola: Play Viola on iPhone, options are smooth performance or bowed and pizzicato sound

Ocarina 2:  Blow into your phone, play the notes, feel the magic as Ocarina 2 responds to your breath, touch and movement. Turn your phone into an ancient flute-like instrument.

Drum Kit: is the fastest and most realistic drum app in the App Store. It blends in cymbal sounds like a real kit, a feature that isn’t available on any other drum app.

How it works:  Each group plays their own part together – keyboard players, then guitarists, flautists, etc using the apps we chose. Then we try to play two groups together, adding parts until we are all performing together.  When we first started we had problems because we couldn’t hear what other people were playing, but then we bought mini hamburger speakers to each iPad. That solved the problem.

Opportunity to collaborate:

Would you like your class to collaborate with ours for music lessons? Join in the fun at Boneo PS online. All you will need is a data projector or IWB and a computer. Lessons are at different times of the week, covering all primary grades and lots of different activities. No experience in either music or technology necessary!

Contact Sally Walsh:  walsh.sally.j@edumail.vic.gov.au