Reason PBL Creations

This post is all about my Book of Project Based Learning in Music Education using the software of Reason (Mac or PC).

Brief

Developed by Propellerheads.se this virtual recording studio software is an amazing product for the classroom. This software has the ability to engage students (and their teachers), allowing for great music making in moments. There is no obtuse installment or hours of setup required. Reason is an audio and midi workstation that gives your computer professional audio equipment, synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, samplers and more at an excellent price. The downside? Not many music teachers know about it or how great it could be in their classrooms!




As a music educator I love to teach with Project Based Tasks. Furthermore, by integrating the software Reason into my lessons I can provide a visual, easy to navigate environment for demonstrating musical concepts, their analysis and how they can be manipulated to form compositions of various styles and genres.
If you do not know what PBL means I highly recommend you visit PBL Online and watch this great video from the Buck Institute for Education on Project Based Learning Explained.

Reason PBL Creations

As part of my Masters’ final project I developed a text (PDF format), tutorial files and tutorial videos that guide students and teachers through the software Reason for the sole purpose of listening to music, analyzing music, composing music and finally writing music for real-world scenarios. In fact, you would see Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy integrated into every aspect of my resources because Reason makes it so easy to do this.

I encourage you to read my sample booklet below, watch the tutorial videos provided for free here and post a comment on what you think. I would love to hear any feedback as this process can be directly applied to Logic Pro, Garageband, Pro Tools and Ableton Live with some tweaking. My Reason PBL Creations Booklet is here for viewing as a sample. If you would like a copy of it I can run an in-service at your school & provide my resources to you for free. This is more than a years worth of work for any junior to senior music class with multiple extension possibilities, printable listening maps and native Reason exercise files on a thumb drive covering classical to contemporary genres.

As a complete recording studio on your desktop, I believe Reason has the potential to provide the best avenue for PBL music education across multiple learning experiences, genres of music and musical abilities.

The educational pricing for Reason can be found here as well as Propellerheads’ own ‘Teaching Music with Reason‘ resource available as a free download. With this booklet and my tutorials you would have an almost limitless supply of units for teaching music technology.

First PBL Task Tutorial Video

If you would like to know more about Reason visit the Propellerheads website or send me an email to discuss how it could be used in your classroom for the teaching of musical concepts, technology, audio, midi and more.