A central difficulty of building a curriculum around current popular music styles is the rapid evolution of those styles. In this chapter, we give strategies for maintaining a music technology program’s cultural relevance over longer time spans, without rewriting every lesson plan every year. Rather than trying to respond to every new development in popular culture, we propose that teachers follow the hip-hop ethos of maintaining freshness. And rather than chasing novelty, we suggest that teachers look for common threads across popular styles and trends, and teach to those commonalities. We also propose identifying out-of-date styles that have become appealingly retro, since these can become a long-lasting feature of the curriculum without losing freshness. We also give strategies for maintaining cultural continuity as student cohorts graduate, and how the same set of technical skills can underlie a wide variety of genre-based projects. Finally, we address broader problems like adapting to new teaching formats and the ramifications of committing to a software platform.

This book is a practical blueprint for teachers who want to begin teaching project-based music technology, production, and songwriting to secondary and college-age students. It aims to inspire teachers to expand beyond the usual ensemble offerings and to create a culture of unique creativity at their schools. The approach primarily draws upon the authors’ experiences developing and implementing the music technology program at Lebanon (Ohio) High School, one of the nation’s largest secondary-level programs, and courses at New York University and Montclair State University. While the lesson templates can be used with any hardware and software setup, the popular digital audio workstation Ableton Live is used for specific examples and screenshots.

This chapter offers a guide to designing relevant, lasting, and engaging music creation projects for students of all levels of ability, as well as suggestions on how to assess these projects. Project design is approached from the perspective of beginners and their distinct needs. The constructivist philosophy of pedagogy is applied to a process through which students can gain a set of relevant skills in music production that will help them to develop a unique creative voice. The method scaffolds learning so that students are able to attain meaningful creative success at any level of skill and ability. Furthermore, the projects have sufficiently high ceilings that experienced musicians can benefit from them as well. The chapter also describes an iterative methodology that electronic music teachers can apply as students with varying tastes and goals cycle in and out of their programs. This includes a strategy of pop-cultural ethnographic observation.

This chapter describes in detail a constructivist philosophy for music curricula. Alternatives to traditional performance ensembles, including songwriting, sound design, remixing, sampling, and other computer-based music creation techniques, are discussed. The constructivist approach adopts learning strategies used by popular musicians, including aural learning by listening to and copying recordings, and personal learning with minimal adult guidance and intervention. Furthermore, project prompts are designed to guide students from tightly scaffolded and formulaic production exercises to more open-ended creative projects. The affordances of digital audio workstations support trial-and-error experimentation by linking visualization to immediate auditory feedback for each action. The chapter also covers the role of sound design in popular music production, the remix as a scaffold for creating original songs, and the intellectual property considerations inherent in sampling. The goal is for students to have created a portfolio of music that expresses their tastes and identities, and that they are proud of.

This chapter presents a first set of project plans, which deal mainly with the mechanics of working with recorded sound, with basic editing techniques, and with the concept of the multitrack timeline. As projects progress, they introduce successively more complex techniques. The projects include making a song from pre-existing audio clips, making a radio advertisement, creating a simple remix using acapella tracks, analyzing a professional multitrack recording, creating custom cover songs, and using a variety of editing techniques to create a fully formed soundtrack for a movie clip. The chapter also discusses the specific affordances of Ableton Live for arranging and performing audio clips, compares the traditionally linear Arrangement View with the innovative nonlinear Session View, and explains rationales for using each one depending on musical context.