The performing arts are made of fleeting moments of genius.

Whether on nights under the lights on the school stage, or transcendent travels among musicians from different places and cultures, I’ve been fortunate to spend time basking in the magic created by our school’s musicians for a few years now. As a newly minted member of the fine arts department when I started teaching guitar five years ago, I often found myself in awe dropping in on choir rehearsals and jazz workshops, and forging connections with student-performers who in many cases served as musical inspiration, if not outright mentors.

Having begun blogging with the TALONS a few years earlier, … Continue reading →

I have to thank TALONS (and #introguitar) alum Clayton for recommending the MelodyLab app that allows you to make multi-part video-harmonies with your phone.  It might be a ways from replicating Matt Mulholland’s epic multi-part Ghostbusters theme song, but the free app introduces aspects of the loop pedal to video editing, offering this semester’s #introguitar crowd an exciting way to explore and document their learning about guitar.

But beyond the music-makers, it’s exciting to think that MelodyLab also equips visual storytellers with a mobile split-screen video camera anywhere they pack their phones. It is a potential that reminds me of Radiolab‘s poetic Symmetry video, and other epic split-screen moments in cinema.