LearnPads come preloaded with a series of fantastic music-specific resources; these enable you to meet many of the Curriculum requirements, whilst providing a very enjoyable mixture of musical resources. Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity – so, to enable this creativity, we have created three different lesson profiles for you and your pupils to choose from.

Two of the lesson profiles – Music for Workbook KS1 and Music for Workbook KS2 – provide superb resources for composition and performance, such as ‘My Beat Creator’, ‘Blip Synthesiser’ and ‘Best Composer’. These resources provide a great learning environment to enable pupils to ‘play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts’, ‘improvise and compose music’ and ‘use and understand musical notations’ – all National Curriculum requirements. Let’s explore a couple of these apps:

My Beat Creator is a free programmable beat maker/drum machine which provides your pupils the opportunity to create 16-beat songs, rhythms and tunes in various tempos and with a range of different instruments.

Blip Synthesizer instantly makes you a musical artist; it is a simple, fun and addictive music toy. Each row of buttons represents a note in one octave. Each column represents notes in a pair of 4-beat pattern in a loop. Each column is eight sound polyphonic tones. The slider below the buttons controls the playback speed and you can add and remove notes, change scales and tones, all while music is playing.

With Best Composer, you can create your own unique samples by selecting from over 100 sounds in categories: dubstep, guitars (acoustic and classical), electric guitars (electric bass), drums, saxophone and fiddle. you can set the playback rate and mix the sounds as you wish.

Another excellent lesson profile is ‘Primary – Music and Sound’, which hosts a wide range of apps and links to explore sound creation, support recording and mixing, and provides links to listen to appropriate music.

A multi touch piano with ‘follow me’ style songs to play and learn. This resource is fantastic for younger pupils, or those who are less familiar with musical instruments. The guided ‘follow me’ mode allows pupils to begin exploring the piano and then, if you wish, they can independently create their own music in the ‘free’ mode.

A simple set of virtual drums to practise your drumming skills on. This drum kit provides pupils with a range of different drum types and will allow them to create a varied final piece of music.

A touch xylophone with labelled and coloured notes; this resource would be superb to introduce younger children to the concept of reading music and creating songs through notations.

Andrew Shelton
Avantis Educational Specialist (UK)