As I mentioned in last’s week blog, we’re starting to look beyond SmartMusic 2010: SmartMusic 2011 is coming soon. As you will soon see, it offers some exciting changes and makes both SmartMusic and the gradebook feature easier to use.

Although SmartMusic 2011 is currently still in development, I thought you might enjoy a preview of some of the new features.

Here’s the new Performance screen:

As you can see, all the same controls still exist, but with a different look and feel – and with some additions to make SmartMusic even easier to use.

Take a look at the “Start Take” button on the left. When you and your students press this button, SmartMusic automatically begins playing the music and recording your performance.

When you’re done playing, and have clicked the “Stop Take” button (or your spacebar or footpedal) you can choose to listen to what you just played, keep it for future use, or save it as an .MP3. If you’ve ever said, “I wish I had recorded that,” you’ll enjoy this feature as much as I will. No one will ever have to choose between “Play” and “Record” again.

Other practice tools are more easily accessed than before because they appear, in one form or another, on every screen:

SmartMusic 2011 also makes it easier than ever to send customized assignments, track each student’s progress, and build a portfolio of their work. Among the related improvements is the addition of “My Home,” a personalized screen for you and your students. Here is what the student screen looks like:

Want to see a little more of SmartMusic 2011? Check out the new overview video just added to the coming soon page.

There are also three new videos here that feature teachers talking about SmartMusic and how they use it. These videos are brief (the longest is under four minutes) yet they do a great job of communicating the SmartMusic message. Please feel free to share them with others.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak preview of SmartMusic 2011. Please let us know what you think by clicking on the “Comments” button below.

SmartMusic includes thousands of pre-written technical exercises. On the Find Music screen, under Exercises, you'll see the eight different types of exercises listed:

Select one of the eight by clicking on it, you'll see a different view of the program:

On the left side is a descriptive "file tree" view of the exercises, organized by type. It's a quick way to zip through the different kinds of exercises. When you choose an exercise by number, that exercise is previewed on the right. Once you've picked the exercise you'd like to work with you can hide the list and get started in one of three ways:

• Double-click on the number on the left,
• Click Open along the top, or
• Click Play (or Record)

Once you've opened a specific exercise, you can use the Prev and Next buttons near the top of the screen to quickly move to adjacent exercises. If you want to make an assignment, click the Assignment button along the bottom of the window, and it'll take all of your current settings and turn them into a custom assignment: Be sure to specify what key you want it to be in before you finish!

The method books also work in the same way, with a list of all the exercises on the left to pick from. The only difference is that you can't alter the key of method book assignments (due to copyright agreements with the publishers).

My advice? Make more scale assignments in C# minor. What else do your students have to do on Spring Break?