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.

The idea of software judging a student's musicality can be unsettling, especially for younger students. Music is an art form, but when students start to learn an instrument, it may not exactly sound like it. It takes practice, and in my opinion, encouraging students to practice consistently is both the biggest challenge and the biggest ingredient for success. The thought of a program assigning a score to a student’s performance might seem limiting or even discouraging. However, in the reality of today’s music classrooms, where teachers often have over a hundred students in a performance ensemble, providing individualized, meaningful feedback without the help of technology is nearly impossible. This raises an essential question: Does the accuracy of performance assessment software matter?

Yesterday, Saturday, February 22, 2025, MusicFirst hosted a free professional development event at the incredible Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a completely FREE event and we had over 50 music teachers from around the state join us for a full day of high quality PD delivered by local music educators who use MusicFirst products in their classroom, as well as Jaye Mateyko and I. It was an incredible day, and I am SO proud of the MusicFirst team, including Jaye Mateyko, Natalia Buitrago, and Matt Ferry. Here was the schedule of events for the day:

Nearly 30 years ago, I turned in my Masters Project at Teachers College, Columbia University to Dr. Lee Pogonowski - my advisor - as part of the requirements for graduating with a Masters Degree. I spent over a year on the project, which focused on how to implement and assess the National Standards in Music Education with technology. What I did was write a lesson plan and an assessment for every National Standard and its sub-standards, for elementary, middle and high school - over 60 lesson plans and assessments. Little did I know then that almost 30 years later that project would become the seed idea for the company that I founded, MusicFirst. Even though I was in the digital dark ages when I worked on the project (you couldn’t record more than 30 seconds of audio into a computer without extremely expensive equipment), I knew that when used as an enhancement to teaching and learning and an archive of assessment data, technology in music education was a very important part of its future.

YuStudio - an online digital audio workstation created by the team at Charanga (a sister company of MusicFirst) is a very powerful music creation tool, and the only one that allows students to incorporate video into their projects). They recently announced a new Sampler tool, and it is really cool. A Sampler is an instrument that allows you to record any audio, and then manipulate that audio to play it as an instrument. When I was a young synthesizer enthusiast, this was one of the dream features for any keyboard - like the legendary Casio SK-1 from the mid-1980s. There are SO many possibilities for students when utilizing a sampler - many are just a lot of fun (like recording your own voice and then playing a song with that sample). The sampler in YuStudio has three main modes: Pitched instrument, One-shot Kit and Sliced Loop Kit. The Pitched Instrument mode is when a single sound is loaded or recorded, and is pitched across the keyboard’s octaves. This allows you to play the sound like a traditional instrument. The One-shot mode allows the user to load or record up to 48 different sounds and then assign each of them to a pad or key on the keyboard. This allows you to build kits of sounds you like, creating drum kits, sets of sound effects, or anything you desire. Finally, the Sliced mode is when a single sound is loaded or recorded, and is automatically split into up to slices, each slice being assigned to a pad. What follows is an overview of each.

I have spent the last year speaking with music educators about AI and its potential impact on music education. I always feature AI-powered digital audio workstations like Udio and Suno in my presentations because I believe they best demonstrate not only how powerful they are, but also the issues surrounding copyright adn the data that these tools have been trained on without compensating the artists. I came across a review of another one of these tools called Riffusion, and I have to say, I’m really impressed. Riffusion is a web-based AI tool that generates music from text prompts, but unlike Udio and Suno, which require paid accounts to make full length songs, Riffusion is 100% free and generates complete songs - and they’re really good. I’ll start by sharing a song that I generated based on the following prompt: “Create a jam band tune about snowing in Vermont.” I’m currently snowed in at my house in Vermont and thought this would be fun. Here is what it generated, titled Lost in the White:

The U.S. Copyright Office just released the second part of its Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, and it has some big takeaways for musicians and composers working with AI. The main takeaway? Copyright still belongs to humans, not machines. While AI can be a very helpful (and often scary) tool in the creative process, it can’t replace human originality when it comes to copyright protection. If a piece of music is entirely AI-generated with no real human input, it won’t qualify for copyright. But if a composer uses AI as part of their creative process—shaping, editing, or adding their own original touch—that human contribution can be protected. This is an important report that should help guide students in understanding where the legal lines are drawn. AI can be a great tool for inspiration or assistance, but students need to make sure they’re actively involved in shaping the final product. Encouraging them to think critically about their creative choices, rather than just relying on AI to generate ideas, will not only help them understand what is an original work and what isn’t, but also help them grow as musicians.