Phone and tablet based apps are proving to be marvelously helpful to musicians – from beginners to seasoned professionals.

“Fake books” – i.e. sets of staff-paper charts for jazz musicians to read “heads,” or melodies, of well-known jazz standards – used to be heavy tomes. Music stands would bend under the weight of these weighty, 400-page behemoths. And flipping from page 121 to page 385 was a distracting bit of bother for audiences as well. Now, musicians can navigate these books easily on a single mic-stand-mounted tablet, removing the need for an onstage music stand altogether.

Similarly, apps that allow bandleaders to share charts with their bandmates make changes to scores and arrangements remarkably fluid. “Pit bands,” the orchestras which accompany musical theater productions, can communicate the director’s changes to scenes and show flow with a simple edit. The players’ tablets all receive the edit at once – no more copy machines, no more reams of revisions and stacks of paper.

Online Music Tutorials

For a young music student, online tutorials can go a long way to boost the lessons from your private teacher.

This tutorial from Ableton shows how to program a beat, including instrumentation, harmonic choices, rhythmic arrangement, and key.

And, as you learn how to divide a measure into 16 sixteenth-notes, and how to view a song in 8-bar and 16-bar phrases, this subdivision training helps with sight reading, with learning parts, and with composing your own original musical ideas.

Your one-on-one teacher can help you use these online tools to your advantage, and can show how to incorporate those lessons into your personal musical development.

For Cincinnati music lessons – on drums, piano, bass, double bass, guitar, woodwinds, trumpet, violin, viola, and voice — use the form below.