In The Harker School's Digital Music Elective, each student gets access to his or her own workstation featuring Propellerhead Reason and the Oxygen8

It seems the days of classroom lectures captured on messy chalkboards and homework assignments scrawled on scraps of notebook paper are rapidly passing us by. At Harker—a premier college-prep school in San Jose, California—students visit the school’s website to confirm homework assignments, soccer practice, and even the day’s lunch menu. From calculus to drama, Harker compels its students to learn and live on the cutting edge of technology. And when it comes to music education, Harker boasts revolutionary software Propellerhead Reason and M-Audio’s Oxygen8 keyboard controllers as the heart of Mark Vail’s 7th and 8th grade Digital Music Elective.

After authoring two acclaimed books and spending 13 years on the editorial staff of “Keyboard” magazine, musician Mark Vail joined Harker’s faculty to share his wealth of experience with tomorrow’s creative geniuses. Designed primarily for students with previous musical training, Vail’s Digital Music class teaches students how to create music for films, video games, commercials, live performances and more with Reason’s virtual rack of mixers, synthesizers, and effects processors.

“Reason is an excellent choice for education because it’s far less expensive than hardware equivalents,” explains Vail. “Since it’s a modular system, students will learn about the individual components and how they can be combined to produce music in many different styles. Students who learn Reason can apply their knowledge toward other software-based music-making solutions, as well as their hardware equivalents.”

The breadth of Vail’s homework assignments and recommended projects underscores Reason’s versatility. In order to stimulate the students’ creative processes, Vail encourages them to try scoring a snippet of a TV show or movie to demonstrate how music can induce different emotions; adopting a children’s story and creating a score with sound effects, a la Peter and the Wolf; writing a commercial jingle; using Reason to create a new version of a 12-bar blues improv, or taking a well-know song such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and coming up with a new version (country, reggae, hip-hop, etc.). As with Reason, the possibilities in Vail’s classrooms are endless.

“I look forward to seeing the reactions of newcomers to Reason,” says Vail. “I also anticipate learning quite a bit about alternative ways of making music with Reason from the students, and discovering the types of music that they listen to. Throughout the semester, they are encouraged to apply the skills they learn to create music in the styles of their choice.”

Vail urges students to collaborate and share their work by posting student music on the Harker website throughout the semester. After students pass through the first semester introductory phase of Digital Music, Vail plans to expand the course’s scope to include even more in-depth Reason training. Upon completing each course, the students receive an audio CD containing the best music created in the class so that their family members and friends can hear their work.

For more information about Mark Vail, Digital Music, and The Harker School, please visit http://www.harker.org.
To hear Vail’s students’ work, visit http://faculty.harker.org/MarkV/dmmusic0304.html.

photos by Mark Tantrum

A Harker student uses M-Audio’s Oxygen8 to control parameters within Reason Vail instructs the class on using Reason with the aid of a LCD projector connected to the teacher computer.

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