The day has finally arrived—Sight Reading Studio, the newest application from MakeMusic, is available now! 

Sight Reading Studio makes it easy to quickly craft automatically-generated sight reading exercises based on a wide variety of options. Musicians can then perform the exercises and receive real-time assessment and feedback as they play.

But creating a sight reading exercise is more than just generating a random collection of notes. What makes Sight Reading Studio truly unique is how tuneful the music is. Whether you’re creating an exercise for a single instrument or an entire ensemble, you can be sure that the music will look and sound great. 

This new app is available as a standalone subscription, and is included with all Teacher, Student, or All Access subscriptions to MakeMusic Cloud (replacing Sight Reading Builder). 

Sight Reading Studio is an affordable tool for individuals and teachers alike. The breakdown of pricing is as follows:

• Individual Sight Reading Studio Subscription: $19.99 per year.
• Student Sight Reading Studio Subscription (Fewer than 20 students): $19.99 per year.
• Student Sight Reading Studio Subscription (20 or more students): $4.99 per year.

Get Started Today

Whether you’re an individual, a music student, or a music teacher, Sight Reading Studio makes sight reading materials easy to create and fun to practice. 

Sight reading for the classroom

For a developing music student, practicing sight reading is a lot like eating vegetables—an important but sometimes unpleasant experience. But it doesn’t have to be.

Sight Reading Studio will spark passion in your students by making practice a fun and interactive experience. Have your students open a sight reading exercise in the Practice app and they’ll get instant feedback on the accuracy of their pitch, tempo, and rhythm. They’ll even receive a score based on how well they played – making grading assignments a breeze.

Sight Reading Studio is also a fantastic tool to use to prep for an upcoming festival, or for the AP exams. The best part? Sight Reading Studio is available for as little as $4.99 when purchased in bulk (20 or more students).

Get Started Today

Sight reading for the individual

Sight reading is a critical skill for musical independence, but as an individual performer, sight reading can be particularly challenging to practice. Constantly finding new materials takes time (and often money), and when you do find exercises, you may not have anyone to tell you if you’re playing correctly.

That’s where Sight Reading Studio comes in. With Sight Reading Studio, you can tailor the music to your needs. You can customize each exercise to be specific for your instrument, and to use particular key and time signatures, rhythmic patterns, and more.

With the built-in practice feature, you can generate an exercise, connect a microphone, and receive real-time feedback on your performance as you play along. You’ll even be able to see which notes you hit perfectly in pitch and rhythm, and which ones you can improve on. 

And at just $19.99 for an entire year, Sight Reading Studio is a budget-friendly option to improve your sight reading skills and overall musicianship.

Get Started Today

The post Sight Reading Studio Available Now appeared first on MakeMusic.

Expansive Music Catalog 

The depth of the MakeMusic Cloud Music Catalog is incredibly comprehensive and covers genres from pop to festival-appropriate and everything in between. Our repertoire development process is second to none and our dedicated team works to ensure that details even as small as line breaks are consistent with the print products that you rely upon.

With more and more titles exclusive to MakeMusic Cloud becoming available all the time, you are sure to find something appropriate, concert ready, and inclusive of many diverse and talented composers. Add in the high-quality professional accompaniments, useful tools, and assessment capabilities in MakeMusic Cloud and you are guaranteed an enriched practice experience that you cannot access anywhere else!

Exclusive methods & series:

Also available in the platform:

Explore our new State Lists Tool to browse contest-ready titles that are available in MakeMusic Cloud and appear on state required lists. 

Browse State Lists

Powerful Teaching Tools 

Teachers, we know you are busy! These updates have been made with YOU in mind to help you streamline your workflow. 

• • • SSO and Rostering functionality—utilize Single Sign-On in conjunction with Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas. You can also quickly roster students in from those supported LMS’s or via a quick CSV upload! 
    • Video recording capabilities in assignments
    • Assignment creation improvements
      • Streamlined assignment creation process 
      • Ungraded assignments 
      • Email notifications for students when they receive a new assignment or are reassigned 
    • MusicProfessor video lessons—learn fundamental instrument skills from master teachers in pedagogically-sound videos 
    • Music Catalog Search improvements—enjoy a streamlined search experience, preview titles before opening, and even listen before loading the Practice app
    • Assessment improvements for low frequency and non-pitched percussion instruments 
    • Gradebook improvements 
      • Grading periods are no longer required when creating standalone assignments but can still be added to help organize your Gradebook 
      • When grading periods are used, the gradebook will default to viewing the current grading period. This filter can be cleared if you prefer to view assignments from all grading periods together

Experience a Free Trial

Subscription Options for All Budgets 

Funding is a universal challenge and we want to help music students everywhere gain access to the powerful music education tools that we believe in. Our Multi-Year Discount program can save education platforms up to 25%! 

Get a Quote

Coming Soon!

Coming soon: Sight Reading Studio, a standalone sight reading tool from MakeMusic that makes it easy to generate unlimited sight reading materials based on a variety of fully-customizable settings. With Sight Reading Studio, you can create, modify, share, and even practice sight reading exercises with instant feedback and assessment. 

Sight Reading Studio is the only sight reading application that can provide immediate assessment feedback—empowering even the youngest musicians to efficiently practice sight reading and improve more quickly. This new and powerful tool will be included with all paid MakeMusic Cloud subscriptions or as a budget friendly standalone option! 

Try the Demo

The post New Features for the New School Year appeared first on MakeMusic.

You are in for a much more streamlined experience next time you create an assignment:

• Page reduction—the number of pages, (quicker loading times and fewer clicks!) to go through when creating a new assignment has been reduced. 
• Improved logic—assignment settings are laid out clearly with succinct explanations.
  • Easily accessible Key Choice—for eligible exercises, choose the key area for the assignment right from the CREATE page. 
• Removed Grading Period requirement—you no longer are required to tether an assignment to a grading period set up with the Gradebook. School calendars are set up in many varied ways and we are glad to offer you this new choice! 
• Simplified Rubric Creation—get to the music faster by using MakeMusic Cloud’s assessment score, an ungraded assignment, or customize a rubric with parameters of your choice. 

Create

Assignments now default to Any tempo and All measures. Communicate details with students in the Instructions space.

Utilizing the MakeMusic Cloud assessment score is a quick way to automatically populate scores into the Gradebook. You can always adjust scores as needed! Ungraded assignments will not have a score in the gradebook, but teachers can still listen to the submitted recordings from students and leave comments. Custom rubrics are useful for teachers who want any combination of rubric elements (even including the MakeMusic Cloud assessment score!).

Make further customizations in the Settings area. Here is where you can make selections on how the student experience will be customized for this particular assignment. You may also notice that the MakeMusic Cloud assessment score levels have been adjusted to Levels 1-4 with 1 being the most lenient. We recommend always starting with Level 1 assessment and then adjusting higher as needed.

Assign

When you finish the first page (Create) and select Next you’ll see the notification that an “Assignment template created”. If you’d like to make any changes to what was already saved, access the template from Recent Assignment Templates on your homepage.

The Assign page is where you can select due dates and define which students should receive this assignment. You can assign immediately or schedule for a future date. Assignments that are assigned immediately will also trigger a “new assignment” email notification to students—learn more about the new helpful assignment email notifications.

We’re excited to roll out these improvements to the assignment creation process just in time for the new school year! Learn more about how to create assignments in MakeMusic Cloud.

Get a Quote

The post Improvements to the Assignment Creation Experience appeared first on MakeMusic.

With this new tool, directors can select contest literature that aligns with their state’s requirements and empowers their students to prepare outside of rehearsal with immediate feedback. Set yourself up for success by choosing your contest and festival literature from titles that are part of MakeMusic Cloud’s impressive library.

We invite you to explore our collection of contest-ready music available at all difficulty levels for concert band, string orchestra, full orchestra, jazz ensemble, choir, solos, and ensembles.

Browse State Lists

The post Browse and Select State Lists in MakeMusic Cloud appeared first on MakeMusic.

With Sight Reading Studio, you will be able to quickly craft automatically-generated sight reading exercises based on a wide variety of options and send them to your musicians, empowering their increased musical independence. The musicians will even get assessment feedback on the sight reading performance in real-time as they play.

Sight Reading Studio will be available as part of the MakeMusic Cloud subscription, as well as a standalone subscription launching on September 6th. Subscriptions to Sight Reading Studio will be available for as little as $4.99 per year, making it the perfect low-cost, high-value tool for any musician.

Preview this new offering through our free demo:

Try the Demo

The demo will give you an idea of what’s to come with this exciting new application. Generate unlimited sight reading exercises based on a restricted set of options including instrumentation, time signatures, and key signatures. While many features are not available in this demo, you will get a sense of the easy-to-use interface, powerful generation engine, and more that will be included with the full release.

This demo is just a small portion of what users can look forward to. So what can teachers, students, and individuals expect when our new sight reading tool launches later this year?

For teachers, this new sight reading tool will:

• • Enable the creation of unlimited randomly-generated sight reading exercises to share or assign to students for individual instruction.
  • Display full-score sight reading exercises for their ensembles to practice during rehearsal.
  • Generate sight reading exercises based on multiple fine-tuned variables, or built–in presets designed for players of a specific skill level.

For students and individuals, this tool will:

• Enable practice of unlimited randomly-generated sight reading exercises shared by a teacher or generated on their own.

• Provide real-time assessment feedback on their sight reading performance.

Try the demo today! No account creation or sign-up required!

Try the Demo

The post Announcing Sight Reading Studio appeared first on MakeMusic.

A tradition of supporting music education 

MakeMusic’s history of partnering with school music programs starts at the beginnings of our company and our Vivace accompaniment software usage in solo contests. The transformation to SmartMusic with assessment and feedback features made our tool even more valuable for young, school-aged, musicians. After serving music education for more than two decades, in 2015, we moved online to improve access (and pricing) for more students and teachers. When COVID shut down the world, we banded together to provide free SmartMusic access to millions of students, teachers, and programs during those tough months of not being able to make music together in the same room. 

Here we are, coming back together, finding what normal feels like again, and music education is now more important than ever. The transition to our new name, MakeMusic Cloud, a few months ago comes alongside some big dreams that our team has—dreams to continue to power music education. 

We’ve heard from you: adopting a technology tool takes some time

Our team has recently been in touch with many MakeMusic Cloud users to investigate when educators see the biggest impact of our tools in the performance of their students. While many of you saw incredible results during COVID times, we are learning that years two and three seem to be particularly impactful times. In the second and third years of MakeMusic Cloud adoption, students retain an institutional memory of what to expect in things like assignment structure, procedures, how to log in, and even how to find a favorite song! Educators grow in those years as well—it takes some time to get into the groove of using a new tool and create updated plans for how to tackle varied concepts with students. 

We are also hearing from established users a resounding “it’s worth it!” when asked about using MakeMusic Cloud with their music programs!

“Actionable and timely feedback coupled with deliberate practice are crucial elements for any musician. MakeMusic Cloud provides me with a clear snapshot each day/week of what my students sound like as individuals, what they are doing well, what they are struggling with and it helps me guide our next lessons, rehearsals and assignments.” – George Andrikokus, Director of Bands and Instrumental Jazz, Hinsdale, IL 

“It is a powerful tool for streamlining in-class instruction and developing practice skills in students.” – Rachel Maxwell, Band Director, Oswego, IL 

“With a variety of sight-reading texts already loaded in to the system, I can just choose what we will sight-read each day and project it for the whole class to work through together…I have noticed quite a few students start very tentatively in their sight-reading skills, and then as the year progresses, they get more confident!” – Patti Eden, Choral Director, Bullard, TX

“This program has helped encourage the students to practice more at home. If the students do not understand a note or rhythm, MakeMusic provides the answer. The students can slow tempos down and isolate sections that need more work. In a class setting, it helps when more than one section is struggling—I can put one section’s part on MakeMusic while I help the other section.” – Kelly Weddington, Orchestra Teacher, El Paso, TX

Financial challenges continue

In our conversations, we have also learned that you are feeling the burden of budget cuts, funding coming to an end, and just general changes to your programs.  

We have cultivated a few helpful resources to guide you through accessing some limited-time federal funding. Explore these posts for more information:

• FAQ’s on Federal Funding for Music Education
• A New Look at Federal Funds for Music Education

While we have always offered a deep education discount, these recent conversations have inspired us to think of an additional solution to provide affordable access to our powerful tools. 

A solution to support music education

To serve both our current loyal customers and encourage newer users to fully adopt MakeMusic Cloud into their programs, we have created a special offer for Fall 2023—Multi-Year Commitment Discounts. 

Here’s how it works: 

In addition to the current Bulk discount for organizations, you can select additional savings by committing to a 2 or 3 year subscription. 

• 2 year commitment – 15% discount per year 
• 3 year commitment – 25% discount per year 

We understand that there can be a lot of red tape when it comes to purchasing something for your school music program, so electing one of these commitment programs will lock in your discount, but still allow you to pay for just one year at a time. 

Inevitably, program numbers will fluctuate over the course of a two or three year commitment, so we will uphold your agreement even with a 10% increase or decrease in subscription seat numbers. Should you need a larger adjustment than that, simply reach out to us at sales@makemusic.com so that we can find the best solution for you. 

Learn more about this offer

We’re excited to serve you 

It’s our hope that this new discount will allow the incredible MakeMusic Cloud tools to serve even more students and music educators in a positive way! 

With a MakeMusic Cloud subscription, students and teachers gain access to: 

• The expansive Music Catalog which is full of educational, state-list approved, and fun pieces! 
• The Video lessons library which features MusicProfessor level 1 videos.
• Sight Reading Builder where you can create unlimited, customizable sight reading exercises.
• Assignments and Gradebook where teachers can create and assign customized assignments by choosing anything from the Music Catalog, a custom .xml file that has been uploaded, or even a Sight Reading Builder template. Our new video assignment feature offers even more powerful possibilities! New ungraded assignments can serve as functional practice guides for students.
• Single Sign-On and Rostering integrations with Schoology, Canvas, and Google Classroom make classroom administration easier than ever.

Power your music program with MakeMusic Cloud

Lock in your discount today!

The post Power Your Music Program with MakeMusic Cloud appeared first on MakeMusic.

Recently, and based on customer feedback, we’ve been working on expanding the options that you have when creating and assigning assignments in MakeMusic Cloud. We are excited to be able to expand these options for you and continue to explore even more ways to level our tools up! 

Video Assignments 

The new video assignments feature allows you to be even more specific with your feedback to students. Students can easily self-analyze their performance with access to their video recording during the practice and recording process. We’ve also heard about educators using video for assessment security, specifically in audition situations using MakeMusic Cloud. These video capabilities have unlocked lots of potential for creative assignments and lessons! 

Ungraded Assignments 

Breaking news: a new option to designate an assignment as “Ungraded” has just been released! 

We heard you—there are times you want to assign a piece of music to your students, but don’t necessarily want to take a grade on it. This solution allows you to select whether you’d like to Use custom rubric or create an Ungraded assignment. Selecting Use custom rubric will take you through the flow that you have used before and will give you the opportunity to select and manage rubric items. Selecting Ungraded will bypass the rubric page completely as you continue on with the assignment creation process. 

When a student opens an assignment that you have designated as Ungraded, they will see instructions similar to these (including the Rubric Points and Assessment Grade of 0).

While there is no grade associated with an assignment like this (and one cannot be added later), students can still submit assignment recordings to you for feedback, review, and more. 

The Gradebook legend has also been updated (and is now visible automatically in the Gradebook). You’ll notice a new color (purple) to indicate that a student has submitted a recording for an Ungraded assignment. There have also been some additional color alterations to make the grid far more accessible to colorblind users.  

Have a great tip that may help other MakeMusic Cloud users? Share it with us here—we would love to hear from you and can accept your thoughts in a variety of ways! 

Inspired to experiment with assignments in MakeMusic Cloud? New users can sign up for a free 30 day trial!

Start your trial today

The post New Assignment Tools to Support Music Educators appeared first on MakeMusic.

Now, when teachers create assignments, they will be able to select if the assignment should be audio only or include student video. Use the new Video option toggle to turn on video for an assignment and then continue through the assignment creation process as normal. Note: this new feature is not available for any sight-reading assignments at this time.

When students open a video assignment, they will be prompted to enable camera access.

Students will also need to enable camera permissions on Chrome or Safari to allow access to the camera.

Within a video assignment, students have the autonomy to turn the camera on and off. If a student fails to submit a recording that a teacher is requiring, the assignment can be reassigned.

Students can also Hide the video during a recording to minimize distractions as desired.

When reviewing a recording, students can slow the tempo down to more clearly hear how they are playing—the video and audio will slow down simultaneously and stay in sync with one another and the music notation! 

Assignment submissions work the same way for students. They can select their best recording and easily submit it to their teacher. When teachers receive a submission, they have access to view the video and can slow the tempo down to better inspect technique while keeping the audio, video, and notation in sync (and with excellent quality!). Teachers can also download student video recordings the same way they can already download audio submissions. Learn more about video download types here. 

What to do with this new feature 

We are looking forward to exploring all of the creative ways that you use this new feature! To get you started here are a few quick ideas: 

• Add a rubric item for posture or hand position that can be assessed with a video assignment 
• Check for appropriate alternate fingering usage 
• Marching Band: this tool is a great way to individually assess student execution of visuals, horn moves, and choreography 
• Create a fun assignment with a theme to dress up to – may the best costume win! 

The post Create Video Assignments in MakeMusic Cloud appeared first on MakeMusic.

Rostering will allow you to invite students into MakeMusic Cloud classes directly from your supported LMS classes—no class code needed! When you invite them, students who have been in your classes before will be automatically enrolled into your selected class. Invited students who have an existing MakeMusic Cloud account will receive an invitation, and students who need to create an account for the first time will be prompted to do so. 

You can also link your existing MakeMusic Cloud classes to your current LMS classes to simplify new student invitations throughout the year. Once a class has been linked to your LMS class, the Update Students menu item will “update” your MakeMusic Cloud roster to match your LMS class by inviting any students who are not already class members (this process will never delete students from your MakeMusic Cloud classes; if they are no longer class members, you can choose to remove them from the Class Details page).

Currently, this feature is compatible with Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas. 

Learn how to connect your Schoology or Canvas account with MakeMusic Cloud: 

Connect with Schoology Connect with Canvas

Learn more about how Rostering works:

Learn More

We hope this new (and highly requested by you!) feature streamlines your workflow and helps you get to the music even faster! 

The post New Feature: Rostering! appeared first on MakeMusic.

How to access

All MakeMusic Cloud paid subscriptions will have access to this entire video library. You can find the videos in the navigation bar by clicking on Video lessons. 

Choose an instrument and you’ll be taken to a page with all available videos for that instrument. 

Choose a video from the instrument page to get started with (they appear in sequential order).

At the top right of each instrument’s page is a Download Course Companion PDF button. This is where you can access the supplementary PDF materials that go alongside each course.

How to share with students

These videos all have a quick-to-copy link at the top right that you can use to share with your students however is easiest for you! Clicking the Copy link button will save the shareable link to your clipboard. Any user with a paid MakeMusic Cloud subscription can view these video lessons!

Users can access the videos on their own through the navigation menu and Video lessons page. 

Mobile Compatible! 

These videos can be easily viewed on mobile devices! Log in and go check them out today!

The post Music Professor Video Lessons Now Available in MakeMusic Cloud appeared first on MakeMusic.