iPhone & iPad Keyboards are everywhere! Now that I have my iPhone 4 what should I get?  How great would it be to have a bank of them in a classroom for exploring, composing and playing repertoire! But what to choose?

Teaching Music in the 21st Century is a blog and writer I recently came across in my twittering adventures.  His updates and insight into iPhone and iPad apps have been very useful.  Likewise James Morrison presented a demonstration in the Bondi Apple Store Australia, for all things music and iPad.  You can view his apps and ideas here. Find a blog, twitter feed or very tech savvy person and I can guarantee you will come across some amazing keyboard applications and synthesizers.

For example, I received an article in my RSS Reader from The Unofficial Apple Weblog about a particular a program for the iPhone or iPad called Hexaphone.   I teach a unit on Rock Music in Year 8 at my school and this type of textural layering combines knowledge of the 12 bar blues, musical texture and the blues scale beautifully.  I have already used it to demonstrate how the Blues Scale can be used to improvise, create riffs and even record it into Garageband to create my own blues backing loops!  Keep watching for the improvisation at the end of the video.

My Year 8’s learn the blues scale and we improvise over a class arrangement of Hound Dog (Elvis).  This application makes me think, “What else could I do with a bunch of these?”  Pentatonic compositions, record layers for collective improvisation, a unit of work imitating Kraftwerk perhaps?

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