Loopy

As some of you may know, I'm about a month in to my new job as a music teacher here in HK, for 160 kids, aged four to fifteen. So far, I'm having an absolute blast. One of my favorite aspects is the variety of every day, as would be expected with such a wide age range. For the older kids, we've started using GarageBand in our once a week Music Tech class. My co-teacher Aaron is the expert in all things tech so I've pretty much sat back and become a student for many of these classes, rediscovering the wonders of GarageBand. I still remember when my family got the new iMac in 2005 and playing around with that recording software for the first time. It was magical.

But even after ten years, this is the first song I've made entirely of loops. No original parts in this song, but an original result, just like the kids' assignment. In my three years of teaching, one invaluable thing I've discovered is that the teacher can learn tons when s/he takes the time to do the students' activities. It's one thing to teach through instruction but another to test out and model!

Another thing the middle school students did was set up their own SoundCloud account, as did I. So here it is, the first song on my newly created SoundCloud account, created in a classroom of young kids navigating music composition for the first time. Follow me, yo!

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