Want to get more Brad & Pete? Come join the GBL Community of Practice by hitting the ‘Learn With Us’ button at the top of this page. What you will get:

• An introductory 1hr zoom call with us.

• Access to all GBL courses and resources published now and in the future.

• Weekly 1hr group Q&A 's (we call them 'Jams').

• Weekly topic threads discussing music philosophy, pedagogy, technology, & content (we call them ‘Riffs’)

• Opportunities to connect & collaborate virtually and IRL

Transcript:

All right we're doing really well - we now have a strong foundation to lay down a melody. We’ll show you three ways to do this. First up we’ve created a tutorial called ‘Play the Alchemy Synth’ but let’s take a moment to do some upskilling by looking at some highlights.

The Alchemy synth has a load of presets and oftentimes you'll never actually be satisfied with any of them and so you can spend a lot of time sifting through billions of presets without making any music. We find a good method for us and students is to pick one that's close using the search categories and then from there use the tools of the synthesizer to get the sound that you can hear in your brain.

One way to get the sound and performance that you are after is by utilising the sustain and the fx controls. You can play the keyboard with one hand and toggle sustain by sliding it. But if you wanted to get a bit more precise then with your other hand you could hold it down for the parts that you wanted to run into each other and then let go to have finer control. For now let’s just toggle it on and play a chord or note and this frees you up to tap and drag the framing box. Essentially you are just manipulating the synth controls but you don’t need to know about them. For most people, they just know the sound that they want so once they get a preset that’s close to what’s in their brain they can use this box to tweak it really easily until they get the right sound.

You can also swipe to access some more controls. So see how these three little dots above where it says glissando indicates we've got some more pages, let’s swipe to discover what we have. We've got two little xy pads and there is a whole world here that you could spend a week on without trying.

Gyro and Face Control

If your iPad has a smiley face you have access to face control. This will depend on which iPad generation you're on. It's the classic apple inventing a feature that makes you want to upgrade your iPad and they say it's because it requires heavy duty hardware but we will never really know.

It is next level though, are you ready? Tap a note and slide sustain then tap the gyro control button (face) and move your iPad around. Amazing right? You can actually see the face moving, and its effect on the synth controls.

Ok enough fun, let’s lay down our melody. So the guided listening task for this would just be to get some ideas about note lengths and the note types and then the pitch material and we'd want to guide students towards a minor pentatonic scale and then tune our keyboard to a minor pentatonic scale. Let’s pause this video and have a go.