Music Educator Channels

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Below is an increasing collection of YouTube channels run by music educators and organisations, as well as video summaries, reviews and links.

Music With Mr McNulty

Mr McNulty creates videos as Music Lessons to show to learners, often with teacher to teacher introductions to help you understand what is to be covered. He has great enthusiasm for the range of subjects covered.

He includes Garageband, videos, detailing recording guitar and digital guitar, as well as editing and recording within Garageband. He shows how to  programme and record drums as well as recording an instrument and making music in Garageband.

Mr McNulty has a number of Google Chrome Music Lab related videos, especially using Song Maker and linking with other curricular areas when making music. There is a nice series on using Kandinsky to explore music creation using drawings, focusing on pitch, expression and timbre

Looping and Exploring Rhythm is covered frequently, especially using Super-Looper as a recording app, and making beats, music and learning timing skills.

His Music Theory content covers Reading Notes on the Treble Clef stave with activities, as well as learning first Scales, Identifying Music Notes, and starting to have fun composing simple Music and Rhythms.

Mr McNulty also has a large bank of ukulele and guitar lessons for beginners, including riff of the week to highlight and teach a new motif each time.

Ethan Hein

Ethan Hein is a doctoral Fellow at New York University amongst other roles and his channel builds on the content of his website, and contains a wide range of different content for educators.

Ethan primarily makes music technology videos using different music packages to visualise and help him explain the complexities of a wide range of classical and contemporary pieces. In this way his content is probably too complex for elementary or primary students, you may find it useful in building your own confidence in understanding and explaining musical forms and progressions.

Ethan uses Ableton Live to create visualisations of some famous and beautiful pieces which he talks through, as well as some entertaining and cleverly crafted remixes that may be useful inspiration for class, if likely not in Ableton at this age.

He has a real reservoir of content about Groove Pizza an online drum machine – with a number of different drum kit styles. As well as explanation videos about aqwertyon from NYU design lab that I mentioned earlier, using it to explain and visualise chords and harmonic relationships.

His website also contains further writing about jazz principles and practices and music theory.

Ready GO Music

Ready GO Music is a hobby-project of Sydney Johnson, an elementary music teacher based in Florida. The ‘Rhythm Reader’ videos she most commonly creates are really fun animated play along rhythm games, and animated listening maps for music educators to use with their classes.

She has a balance of traditional notation as well as some different topic-related graphic scoring too. A range of difficulty levels are available and clearly labelled as such.

Sydney includes many original tracks and her play alongs include a number of ‘vs battle’ style sections and elements that you can use to split the learners into groups and play in teams at the same time.

There are a wide range of music genres and content types in her videos and she creates and shares some useful animated form charts too.

Shed The Music

Shedthemusic.com with Mr H is a music education resource website providing content for teachers and students. The YouTube channel includes a wide range of free content, as well some of their course material, and some content from their Teachable courses.

Shed The Music has a wide range of tools covered and explained through tutorials in Garageband, BandLab, NoteFlight, SoundTrap and others.

They have a full curriculum provision via their own online portal with practices, lessons, tasks, assessments and a teacher community, and so some of the content exemplifies this offer as well.

There are some really useful and detailed technical explanations for teachers, such as this microphone explainer video

As well as explainers around more fun things like this make your own memoji video

Shed The Music have  a number of ‘One a day challenges’ to work through, as well as modelled Lap drumming challenges that you can use with learners as well.

Mr Velez Virtual Classroom

Mr Velez has two channels worth a mention, his own personal channel for his creations and tips and his Virtual Classroom Channel of content for learners.

He has really great tutorials – as a composer, arranger, and sound engineer as well as a teacher his videos are very technically accurate as well as very enthusiastic for everything he does. He shares a number of examples of student compositions, in various tools such as chrome song maker which are really useful to share in your own classrooms to help students understand what they are working towards, as well as play-a-longs in aqwertyon, a browser based tool for easily playing chords on a computer keyboard.

Mr Velez also has good tutorial videos for learning to use and teach with aqwertyon – and on his website, pop songs and classics arranged using aqwertyon as well.

Song maker  as part of the Chrome Music Lab set  of online tools is covered extensively, with lesson introductions and examples to use to show in class.

He has some useful explainer videos around chord demonstrations and notation reading.

There are frequent examples of his own students performing and learning the music, which is great to share to your own class.

Mr Velez explains the ‘Figure’ music app piece by piece with demos and examples as well.

He also has a good number of recorder tutorials with play along, as if in class, that you can use direct to students or in tandem with your own explanations.

On his other page you will find his own compositions, as well as demonstrations and tutorials about using Studio One, Reason and a number of other mixing tools.

Meg's Music Room

Meg’s Music Room’s channel has a range of videos with different helpful content. Meg’s got a few different types of content, both for teachers and also talking direct to students.

She is great fun – not afraid to introduce comedy and laughter in to her lessons and shares all sorts of things she’s trying out in her own classroom.

She has a good range of Bucket drumming videos – with count ins and play along scores and useful examples to copy. She uses helpful dynamics reminders and some of her own her own backing tracks. Meg has a real range of levels which are clearly marked to choose or work through and I really like the intro pattern practices before the main play alongs.

Meg has a number of Music minute videos stuffing a large number of facts in one minute about composers, styles, and other topics.

There are also some great fun Read-a-louds to play to students, where her classroom persona come to the forefront.

Meg also makes Karaoke style sing-alongs, often in more comfortable keys, that are well put together.

And a bank of recorder lessons with her demonstrating, describing and then leading the play along for learners.

Meg has some fun ‘How to make’ videos, such as this one where she is working out how to create a pterodactyl  for a display which add further character to her channel.

As I said, Meg’s content is great fun – she is enthusiastic and entertaining, and she’s clearly getting more into making content again so I’m really excited to see what she will come up with in the future.

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Ethan Hein is a doctoral Fellow at New York University amongst other roles and his channel builds on the content of his website, and contains a wide range of different content for educators.

Ethan primarily makes music technology videos using different music packages to visualise and help him explain the complexities of a wide range of classical and contemporary pieces. In this way his content is probably too complex for elementary or primary students, you may find it useful in building your own confidence in understanding and explaining musical forms and progressions.

Ethan uses Ableton Live to create visualisations of some famous and beautiful pieces which he talks through, as well as some entertaining and cleverly crafted remixes that may be useful inspiration for class, if likely not in Ableton at this age.

He has a real reservoir of content about Groove Pizza an online drum machine – with a number of different drum kit styles. As well as explanation videos about aqwertyon from NYU design lab that I mentioned earlier, using it to explain and visualise chords and harmonic relationships.

His website also contains further writing about jazz principles and practices and music theory.

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Ethan Hein is a doctoral Fellow at New York University amongst other roles and his channel builds on the content of his website, and contains a wide range of different content for educators.

Ethan primarily makes music technology videos using different music packages to visualise and help him explain the complexities of a wide range of classical and contemporary pieces. In this way his content is probably too complex for elementary or primary students, you may find it useful in building your own confidence in understanding and explaining musical forms and progressions.

Ethan uses Ableton Live to create visualisations of some famous and beautiful pieces which he talks through, as well as some entertaining and cleverly crafted remixes that may be useful inspiration for class, if likely not in Ableton at this age.

He has a real reservoir of content about Groove Pizza an online drum machine – with a number of different drum kit styles. As well as explanation videos about aqwertyon from NYU design lab that I mentioned earlier, using it to explain and visualise chords and harmonic relationships.

His website also contains further writing about jazz principles and practices and music theory.