When SmartMusic was introduced to us, I figured (and I deeply regret thinking this but)

“It’s just another thing I have to do for Band.” However, after exploring the program and looking
at everything that it had to offer, I realized just how helpful it is. Personally, I love Christmas
music at any time of the year (it is a bizarre obsession I am aware), and when I found out that
SmartMusic was filled with Christmas songs, I was so excited to try them out. It also has a wide
variety of pop music which I equally love listening to. As I was working on my composition
assignment for Part A of the Culminating Task, I found that you can even create songs or import
them through MIDI. I imported the MIDI file and made a flute part to make it easier for my
partner to record music.

I did enjoy using SmartMusic and I thought it was a smart way to still play music during
quarantine, but Technology is Technology and it has its share of bugs and glitches and lag. For
example, the infamous bug that made it impossible to play and get a good score, being the
delay of recording. Some days I would be able to get 100% effortlessly, and other days I would
get less than 50% no matter how hard I tried. This became sort of frustrating and it led to me
sort of thinking like “is it going to work today or is it going to be delayed again?”

That said, on the days that it did work, I was definitely better at timing my notes correctly
and counting correctly. Normally I would have had to guess whether or not I was counting right,
or I had a struggle where I was focusing on the timing so much that I forgot the notes, but with
SmartMusic, since I was able to play it over and over as many times as I wanted, I did not see
myself having that problem. Although this wasn’t exactly because of SmartMusic, I got better at
articulation because of the notes that you left on my submissions, which I found was a very
helpful feature.

I mostly listened to my part because I felt pressured due to the fact that we had to submit
them before the end of class, but on my own time, I found myself listening to the Christmas
songs that I like to hear and some pop songs. I also listened to the accompaniment as I played
because I feel like that sort of made me get in the mood of being in a band, more than just
listening to the clarinet part as I was playing.

Often times I would get 100% as the score, but when I heard it back I would hear small
details like I missed the tonguing or I got the timing wrong, or other little things that if I did not
care about getting better, I would ignore.

At first, I did not use the program very much because; A. We didn’t get any assignments
yet, and B. SmartMusic was a new tool and I didn’t really know much about how to use it. Now
that we have learned more about it over the course of these past few weeks, I know how useful
SmartMusic is, whether you are creating or playing the music.