Over the past few years, I have used ChatGPT in many ways - mostly as an editing tool and for generating ideas and emails. I’ve also had lots of fun making all sorts of images. About a year ago, I started experimenting with creating my own custom GPTs after hearing about the ability to do so from a friend. Put simply, Custom GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT that can think and respond in exactly the ways you want them to. You get to create them from scratch and train them so that they can create content that is customized for your specific purpose(s). If you’re a music teacher looking for ways to save time, personalize instruction, and make your classroom more dynamic, creating a Custom GPT could be a VERY useful tool. Whether you're running a general music class, directing a band, or teaching AP Music Theory, there are many ways that Custom GPTs can be used to help you teach music. Before we go into specific uses, let’s explore exactly how to build one. For the purpose of this post, I am using ChatGPT.

To honor the late Brian Wilson, I’m sharing a lesson plan from the Introduction to Popular Music course that is included in the MusicFirst Classroom Content Library. The lesson includes a special Spotify playlist, as well as 4 tasks for your students, including a Remix project. I hope that you can use this lesson plan to help celebrate the life of one of popular music’s true icons.

Whenever I go to a conference, I always pick up a few new sites or tools from attending sessions. This past week at APME in Memphis, I found quite a few. Perhaps my favorite is a site where you can find HUNDREDS of songs that are available to download as stems. Stems are the individual tracks that make up a complete song. While there are now lots of AI-powered software tools that allow you to break down a song into individual stems (check out my post on Moises - my personal favorite tool), the owners of those copyrights aren’t all too thrilled about you doing that. Enter the Cambridge Music Technology website - specifically a page that is dedicated to a book called Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio by Mike Senior. It contains 625 projects - all with downloadable copyright-free stems. If you are working with students who are interested in digital music production and remixing, this is the PERFECT site to find great content for them to work with.

I’ve spent this past week on the road on behalf of MusicFirst - first in the Houston metro area, and then I headed to Memphis for one of my favorite conferences of the year - APME. I was joined my SO many good friends and colleagues, including the one and only Jody Underwood, Lee Whitmore, and of course, Barbara Freedman. My favorite part of the conference are the student performances - and there were TONS this year. It’s always so encouraging to hear just how good these students bands are. The future of music education is in very good hands. There were tons of sessions to choose from, and I had the honor of presenting two of them: Empowering Music Education with MusicFirst & Soundtrap, and Reaching More Students with Modern Band.

Let’s face it - many music teachers find writing relevant lesson plans for when they need a sub so awful that they would rather go to school sick than to take the time to write them. I know I did that quite a few times in the 15 years that I taught. A good strategy? Of course not. When I really needed a sick day, my poor students would often watch videos like Beethoven Lives Upstairs or Riverdance. They truly hated it but I couldn’t think of anything really engaging when I knew that the sub would almost NEVER be a music educator, or even know enough about music to teach anything meaningful in my absence. Sound familiar? Enter Focus On Sound - exclusively from MusicFirst. Every teacher needs to take a day now and then - whether it’s a last-minute emergency, a conference, or a well-earned personal day, music teachers need reliable sub plans that won’t cause anxiety, confusion, or chaos in your classroom.

Elementary music classrooms are spaces that are often full of movement, sound, and budding creativity. One of the very cool tools in the collection of Creative Tools within MusicFirst Elementary that utilizes all of these elements is the Rhythm Grids tool. One of the best parts of teaching elementary music is watching students light up when they feel the music come to life. Rhythm is often the first entry point for that, and Rhythm Grids in MusicFirst Elementary is a fantastic tool for helping students not only feel rhythm but see it, create it, and truly understand it. If you're looking for a dynamic way to build rhythmic literacy while supporting creativity, collaboration, and musical expression, Rhythm Grids is your new best friend. The best part? This tool in included with every implementation of MusicFirst Elementary!

Everyone likes free.  Myself included.  But as I was told by my parents numerous times in my childhood: “Nothing in life is free.”  In my opinion, nowhere is this idea more relevant than the software industry - both music-oriented and non-music apps.  The widespread adoption of free software started around the same time as beginning the smart phone and tablet era.  Certainly there was “freeware” and “shareware” before then for desktop computer users, but they were largely targeted toward “computer geeks” and kids.  When Steve Jobs walked out on stage and showed the iPad, complete with a dizzying array of apps, a shockwave was heard around the entire software industry: people now had access to free, high quality “apps”, and with that came a mentality that software should be free.  To demonstrate this point, ask yourself the following questions: How often have you actually “paid” for an app on your iPhone or Android phone?  Are you more likely to download an app if its free?  Would you consider purchasing an app if it was $4.99?  Do you consider $4.99 a high priced app?  For me, the answers to these questions are as follows: rarely, yes, probably not, and yes.  How about you?  I’ll bet your answers are similar to mine.  Here’s a funny thing, though.  I have absolutely no problem walking into a nice coffee shop and spending $5 on a large venti-half-caff-skinny-mocha-latté.  Even though the drink is over-priced and gone in less than 10 minutes, I don’t give it a second thought.  An app for $4.99?  It had better slice bread, do the laundry, and change my life! 

These past few days I have had the absolute pleasure of attending and presenting the Keynote Address at the Music Teachers Association 2025 Conference at the Trinity Academy in Bristol, England. I was there representing MusicFirst and Charanga along with my colleagues Richard Payne, Mark Cardy, Tony Pinkham, Naomi Cook. There were lots of engaged music educators who were all quite interested in our new Secondary Music Suite. My keynote focused on the impact of AI on music making and learning. If you’d like to download a PDF version of my slide deck, click HERE. Hats off to the entire MTA team for putting on a wonderful few days of meaningful professional development. I hope to be back again next year!

One of the most frequently asked questions that I get is whether there is a tool that can accurately transcribe an audio recording into sheet music. My standard response is that if one ever does emerge, it will likely be sued out of existence pretty quickly, as there are SO many problems with this when it comes to protecting IP and copyrights. I have personally seen some really good technology demoed over the past decade, but I rarely see them actually see the light of day because of those copyright issues. That said, I have seen a tool called Klangio quite a bit over the past few years that claims to do exactly that. Klangio uses AI to convert standard audio recordings to create Sheet Music, TABs, MIDI and MusicXML. It can also transcribe directly from a YouTube video link! While it’s far from perfect in my opinion, it does what is says and will likely only get better (at least while it’s available).

I’m on a ROLL this week with my posts - re-energized after a crazy few months of travel. I thought I would share another AI tool that I found recently, and I really think it’s very cool. Meet Fadr - a browser-based AI music tool that transforms any audio file into editable parts—or “stems”—while also offering remixing, key and tempo changing, and even live DJ-style manipulation. I wrote about one of their tools called SynthGPT a while ago, but I just dug into their other tools and I am impressed. The Create tool is really similar to tools like Moises but there are a couple of unique things about it. Fadr was originally built with DJs in mind, but I think it’s a really useful tool for music educators who want to teach everything from critical listening to composition and music production—all without the steep learning curve of a traditional DAW.

If you’ve ever looked at a printed score and thought, I wish I could just import this into my notation software, you’re not alone. Music educators deal with piles of sheet music—archival works, custom arrangements, student transcriptions—and making those materials editable and digitally interactive has always been a pain point. Fortunately, music OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software has come a long way in recent years, offering teachers the ability to scan, edit, and even play back printed scores quickly and accurately. Whether you’re arranging a simplified band part, analyzing historical scores with your students, or digitizing your library for flexible playback and assessment, OCR tools are a huge time saver. Here’s a look at some of the most useful music OCR options available for educators—and how you might use them in your classroom or program.

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently from teachers who are looking for meaningful assignments for their students post concert. The last few weeks of the school year is often a challenging time for ensemble directors as they try to fill the remaining weeks of the school year with meaningful learning activities for their students. Here’s a project idea from my podcasting curriculum that just might fill that need. This project, which focuses on cultural diversity and awareness, is perfect for a school-wide multicultural festival or celebration, world history unit, foreign language class, music class, or art class. Students will work in small groups to create a podcast about an assigned country that will provide the listener with information about the country, its history, its people, its culture, its language, its food, and any other interesting facts. The focus of the podcast can be adapted to fit the type of class this project is assigned in. Students will research their given country, write a script using the Draft>Edit>Revise process, include representative music (if available), and answer the questions included in the Project Requirements. The students will also find an image of the country’s flag to be used when distributing the podcast. Teachers can create a bulletin board that includes those flags and add a QR code next to each flag so that other members of the school community can easily listen to information about that country. There are many other creative ways to disseminate these podcasts, including adding them to the school or class website.

If you’ve been looking for a way to give your students access to professional-grade instrumental tracks for free, stop scrolling. One of the most interesting—and generous—resources available to music educators right now is MobyGratis. Created by the legendary electronic musician Moby, this platform gives filmmakers, students, and educators access to a vast library of instrumental music at absolutely no cost—provided it’s used for non-commercial purposes. Yes, you read that right. Free. Professional. Music. While Moby originally launched this platform 20 years ago (and I wrote about it back then), this relaunch brings over 300 NEW tracks, as well as multitrack audio so your students can download the individual stems making the music MUCH easier to work with - especially when it comes to remixing.

If you ask any great music educator what the foundation of a successful ensemble program is, chances are they’ll point to one thing: strong music literacy. It’s the skill that underpins everything else—whether students are singing in tune, playing with correct rhythms, composing original music, or analyzing what they hear. And yet, teaching music theory often gets sidelined due to time constraints, resource gaps, or the perception that it’s “not as fun” as rehearsal. That’s where the MusicFirst Theory Bundle steps in—not just as a supplement, but as a transformative solution that can redefine how theory is taught and learned. This bundle, priced at $11/user includes AuraliaFirst, MusitionFirst, Flat for Education, Focus On Sound, and the MusicFirst Classroom - providing music educators with everything they need to teach, reinforce and assess music fundamental skills.

Sight Reading Factory is one of my all-time favorite online tools for music educators. and has been a reliable platform for helping students build sight-reading skills across different levels for over ten years now. They just announced their latest update recently, and it’s a BIG one: Rhythm-Only Auto Assessment. Sight Reading Factory (SRF) now provides a focused way for students to work specifically on rhythm without the added layer of pitch. For teachers who want to target rhythmic development, this tool offers some useful options. To access this new feature, just click on Rhythm-only from the main menu (after you click Start Practicing). You’ll then go through selecting the same types of parameters as you would for other SRF exercises, including difficulty level and time signature. Below is an example that I created using difficulty level 3 and a 4/4 time signature:

If you’re like most ensemble directors that I know, you’re constantly juggling rehearsal schedules, individual assessments, repertoire planning, and trying to find time to actually teach music. It's a lot. And let’s be honest—some of the tools that are being used for ensembles focus on only one thing - playing or singing the right note at the right time. We all know that developing young musicians is WAY more than that. That’s where the MusicFirst Performance Ensemble Bundle comes in. It’s designed specifically for band, orchestra, and choir directors who want to bring the best out of their students—without adding more to their plate. It includes five incredible software titles and a HUGE library of both curricular content as well as over 33,000 interactive pieces in our revolutionary performance assessment software (that works beautifully for voice as well as almost every instrument (including piano and guitar). At $14/seat/year - you get a complete comprehensive suite of everything you need to improve the musicianship skills of the students in your ensembles.

MusicFirst, the company that has been revolutionized music education over the past 13 years, is proud to be right at the cutting edge of technology integration once again. Inspired by the Think System made famous by Professor Harold Hill in the musical The Music Man, we are releasing an AI-powered product today called thinkmusic. After 3 years of designing and testing, the thinkmusic product will radically transform music education for the better. If you need a reminder of the Think System in action, here’s a clip from the 1962 film adaptation of The Music Man starring Robert Preston:

We’re excited to share that a brand-new course has launched on the MusicFirst Classroom platform called OGenPlus Plug & Play! This course provides 20 comprehensive lesson plans and over 60 projects that use our exciting music creation software, OGenPlus. The course, designed by one of the creators of the software, Marcel Pusey along with the MusicFirst Head of Content - Marjorie LoPresti, is designed to inspire creativity and empower students with hands-on music technology experience, this course is a must-see for music educators and students alike. The course can be used either completely on it’s own (it would take at least a marking period to do everything in it), or you can select some of the lessons and projects from it to make a unit within a class you already teach. Here’s a quick preview of one of the projects and how it works:

By now you are probably familiar with Generative AI apps, specifically for music, and how they are slowly being introduced to the music classroom. Tools like PracticeFirst, Sight Reading Factory, and Moises.ai are already reshaping how we approach practice, assessment, and ensemble preparation. For the past two years, music educators who have attended my talks on Generative AI have asked me about tools that might generate music notation, and until very recently, I haven’t been able to point them to anything. Recently however, a new tool called NotaGen came up in my LinkedIn feed that promised to do just that. Created by a group of While it is still in its infancy, it is really impressive. NotaGen is a web-based generative AI tool designed to create musical notation automatically based on user input and parameters. Think of it as ChatGPT meets Flat or Sibelius. With just a few clicks and prompts, NotaGen can generate original sheet music, complete with customizable instrumentation, time signatures, key signatures, and more. Even better, it outputs music notation directly in SVG format, making it easy to embed and share. Pretty cool. Here is a sample composition for orchestra created by this new tool:

As music educators, we all share the same goals: to inspire our students, to foster musical growth, and to make the most of the time we have with them. In today’s classrooms, where technology plays an increasingly important role, finding the right digital tools can be a game-changer. The challenge is sorting through countless options to find a solution that truly understands the unique needs of music education. That’s where MusicFirst comes in—and why so many teachers around the world trust it as their go-to platform.