3 ideas to liven up your online music lessons with digital sheet music

Since last year, music teachers have had to learn to give lessons at a distance, often using videoconferencing software such as Zoom.

These include making sure students get the right link to the virtual room, letting everyone in and managing the inevitable mess when everyone logs in with their mikes on. Who would have thought that the keyboard shortcut to mute all participants on Zoom would be at the top of a teacher's to-do list?

(In case you're wondering: it's alt+M on Windows and Command+Control+M on macOS)

But these technical obstacles aren't the only challenges facing teachers: how do you keep students motivated? How to make distance learning courses interactive and interesting?

Indeed, students can quickly feel isolated when the rest of the class is no longer there to motivate them. They lose interest in their lessons, as the social factor is one of the main motivators for young students. That's why ensemble classes and group music-making exercises are so much fun for kids.

How can we recreate the atmosphere of a classroom during an online course, while retaining a pedagogical input?

As Marketing Director of NewzikI hear these questions every day from the teachers I talk to.

That's why, in this article, I'd like to share 3 musical experiments you can try with your students to help you recreate the atmosphere of a classroom and motivate your students, using digital scores.

Digital scores are much more than just the digital equivalent of paper scores. Digital technology brings your scores to life, adding layers of interactivity and creating a truly collective experience. Let's take a look at how software like Newzik, which offers a free version which you can easily use with your students.

1. Create interactive, dynamic exercises in minutes

The Newzik platform lets you add audio and video files to a score. You can also record yourself while you play, to set an example for your students. But that's not all: once the recording is complete, you can speed it up or slow it down without affecting tonality, or transpose it without changing its speed.

You can then speed up or slow down this recording without affecting its pitch, or transpose it to the original tempo.

Just imagine. In just a few minutes, using nothing more than a PDF score, your computer's microphone and some free software, you can create an interactive lesson that your students can work on at the tempo and tonality of their choice. Practical, isn't it?

Once you've created your exercise, all that's left to do is share it with your class. To do this, you can use a particularly ingenious Newzik feature: "projects".

It works like a shared folder to which all your students can have access. Anything you or your students add to this folder (scores, audio files, videos, annotations) is automatically shared with the rest of the members, in real time. Think of it as the Google Drive or Dropbox of digital sheet music.

Thanks to projects, you can easily share learning materials with your students... but you can also collect copies or assignments from your students, automatically.

Your pupils can also hear their classmates' performances, and feel like they're back in a real classroom. Recreating this group cohesion is the key to motivating children.

2. Record a multi-part percussion piece remotely in 15 minutes

rythm is often the first thing we learn as young musicians, and probably one of the most important. The ability to listen and react to the rhythmic placement of other musicians is crucial when playing in a band or ensemble. Let's take a look at how digital sheet music can help you work on these notions from a distance!

Divide your class into teams of 3 to 5 students: each group will record a collaborative rhythm piece remotely. Using the audio recorder available in Newzik, students take it in turns to record an element of this piece, superimposing their own recording on that of the others, on the principle of "overdubbing".

First, provide your students with a rhythmic exercise. Start with a simple groove, or perhaps something like Queen's "We Will Rock You". Depending on the level of your students, you can also complicate things by incorporating swing or polyrhythm.

It's important to spread the various components of rythm over several staves - one for each team member. Make sure that these elements gradually come together to form the complete rythm , adding them one by one after a few bars. If you're looking for a concrete example, I've created various plans for you - from easy exercises for beginners to my much more complicated "Polyrhythm Challenge". Click here to download them!

The first student in each group records the first part using the software's audio recorder. Remember: everything is shared in real time, so the other students will receive the audio as soon as it has been recorded.

The second person can then play the track and record it with their own part. Warning: don 't use headphones! Unlike virtual choirs, the original audio must be dubbed by the microphone for the exercise to work. With percussion, the question of level balance is less important than with melodic instruments, so the result will be usable without the need for additional mixing.

Move on to the next person in the group, and so on. In less than 15 minutes, you can review all your students' contributions, give your opinion, your advice... and so can your students!

Taking it a step further: make this activity more interesting by asking the children to find a fun-sounding object and use it as percussion. Each group will have its own sound result, and you can then challenge the other groups to guess which objects produced which sound.

3. Compose an original piece with your class in 7 days

Let's apply the same principle as in the previous exercise to writing or music theory classes. This third experiment is a variant of an "exquisite corpse" - a creative method well known to the Surrealist poets and applied to music in the 1940s by John Cage, among others.

This is a group project that students have to complete together within a week. In addition to Newzik, you'll also need notation software such as Sibelius or Dorico. For free alternatives, you can try Flat or Musescore.

Start by writing a few bars to establish a melodic or harmonic base. Your students will then work together to build the rest of the piece.

Share your PDF with the class, and provide a link to the notation file at the beginning of the score (insert it using Newzik's text annotation tool). To get a download link to your notation file, simply import it to Google Drive or Dropbox, or use WeTransfer.

Ask the first group to download the file and write a few more bars , then re-import the new version of the PDF into the Newzik project, not forgetting to provide a link to the updated notation file. The next group takes over, and so on until everyone has contributed to the collective work.

Each group can introduce melodic variations or new harmonies. You can give them specific guidelines to help them come up with interesting ideas - such as adding extensions ofchord, using a certain mode of scale, or writing in a given shape or structure.

At the end of the week, you get not only the score of the final piece, but also of each stage of the composition. You can analyze them with the class to understand how certain ideas influenced later stages of the composition.

*To go further: ask all groups to complete each step of the process, although only one group is responsible for providing the class with the updated scoring file. In this way, students can compare their different approaches with the choices made by their classmates.

When you analyze the final piece with the class, your students will have a better understanding of it, and will immediately be able to suggest alternatives to solve any musical problems. This will make the discussion more lively and interactive!*

So you see, using digital scores is the key to fun, engaging and interesting online music lessons. I hope these few examples will inspire you to find new creative principles to experiment with in your group: digital scores offer so many pedagogical possibilities! These range from more "serious" activities such as virtual choirs to more creative and fun exercises. For example, you could organize a treasure hunt... inside a score!

Wondering how? I'm working on an explanatory guide: click here to sign up and receive it as soon as it's ready! Many other resources are also in preparation, such as the easiest way to set up your virtual choir in less than 30 minutes and without any technical skills!