PreSonus Education

With the rapid shift to online learning many educators are experiencing due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, many are scrambling to get their home office set up and ready to continue teaching their students. While working from the comfort of your home can seem great, it can often present challenges that you don’t see coming! Today we’ll take a look at a few considerations on setting up your home teaching space, so you can help to provide your students the best education possible!

Whether you already have a defined office space in your home, or you are just setting one up for the first time, there’s a few considerations to keep in mind:

• Does it provide you with enough space to fit all of your essential items?
• Is the space free of distractions to help you increase productivity?
• If you are going to be doing video learning, does area in your background look tidy, clean, and not reveal anything you don’t want your students, administrators, or the public seeing?
• Acoustically speaking, are you in an area that sounds fairly dry with minimal natural echo and in a quiet area of your home?

Once you’ve taken things into consideration and have chosen and refined your space, let’s next consider a couple additional factors:

• If doing video, is your space lit in a way that brings light to your face, allowing you to be the focus and not your background?
  • Consider looking at a simple USB led light panel, or a led “ring” light if you need to brighten up things
• Is your webcam providing good quality video, and at an angle that appears professional?
  • Consider looking at purchasing an external webcam, allowing you better quality video, and a better viewing angle. Options such as the Logitech C920 or Razer Kiyo are great options.
• Most importantly (especially to us at PreSonus!), do you have a high quality audio solution?
  • For flexibility, simple solutions like our AudioBox USB 96 Studio Bundle or AudioBox iTwo Studio Bundle offer high quality, flexible combined audio hardware and software solutions. They include all of the cables and elements you need for capturing, editing, and listening to quality audio.

AudioBox 96 Studio Bundle

Last, let’s focus on your students!

• Are they learning to edit audio as part of their process? If so, did you know there is a FREE resource available to them?
  • It’s Studio One Prime, the version of Studio One that always FREE, and available here: https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One
• Are they getting the most from you as an educator?
  • Ask them how they are doing!
  • Ask them if your video or audio quality is meeting their needs!
  • Most importantly, be their champion and show them what a rockstar educator you are!

Studio One Prime

For more blog content, be sure to check back here at: edu.presonus.com

A longtime staple and early resource of online music education, MusicTheory.net has grown over time to allow teachers to find a myriad of simple and free teaching tools for teaching the basics of music theory. It often ranks in the top 5 online resources for music teachers, and every year sees updates to keep their content relevant to the ever changing environment. From Lesson Plans, to Tools, MusicTheory.net is a great launching pad for many educators across the globe.

A Sample of the Lessons available at MusicTheory.net

Be sure to check them out, and check back next week for another Friday Find!

Sometimes we come across cool things worth sharing, and we felt this was certainly worth sharing!

Check out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Education Page, features TONS of great resources for all ages. With built in search filtering for age groups and decades, an educator is sure to find some great tools for their classroom!

Do you have a cool “find” that you want us to highlight? Shoot us a message at musiced@presonus.com and we’ll check it out!

With the StudioLive AR and ARc mixers being popular with music teachers across the globe, the current shift to online streaming as a means for teaching is rapidly growing due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Our friend Gregor has put together this fantastic video showing you how to put together a simple livestream utilizing OBS and a StudioLive AR or ARc Series Hybrid Mixer/Interface!

If you are a Notion 6 user or educator looking for content to use for your classes, you should totally be taking advantage of a powerful FREE resource available to you. It’s the Notion Score Library! There’s 200 public domain scores to explore, and even to perform in real time using the NTempo tapping feature!

To download the Notion Score Library:

• 1. Login to your my.presonus account
• 2. Navigate to “My Products” and Select the “Software Tab”
• 3. Select Notion 6

• 4. Scroll Down to “Downloads” and Select the “Misc” tab.

• 5. Download the Notion Score Library .zip File, and Enjoy!!!

For more information on Notion 6, visit: https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion

It’s the winter, which means WGI Indoor Marching Percussion season is in full swing! PreSonus Education Market Manager Evan Brown happened to be at the 2020 WGI Dayton Regional Finals, and was able to catch a few Independent World Class Ensembles with their PreSonus equipment in action!

Inov8 Winter Percussion, one of the newest ensembles to be rocking PreSonus gear, showed off their 2020 program, “All I Ever Wanted”, which featured the music of the very popular Billie Eilish. Inov8’s setup consisted of ULT10, ULT15, and ULT18 Loudspeakers coupled with a StudioLive 32R Rack mixer.

Veritas Percussion performed their unique 2020 Program, “The Art of This”, utilizing their wall to wall setup of ULT15 & ULT18 Loudspeakers, and a duo of StudioLive 32R and 24R Rack Mixers.

Perennial Finalist Cap City Percussion from Columbus, Ohio brought their innovative 2020 program, “On the Outside Looking In”, making great use of their massive ULT10, ULT15, and ULT18 Speaker Setup, coupled with a StudioLive 32SX Mixing Console.

Last, Regional Independent World Champion, and longtime PreSonus users Music City Mystique from Nashville, Tennessee brought their CDL speaker rig to play with their 2020 Program: “SOL”.

PreSonus remains a dominant force in the marching arts, stay tuned here to the blog for more WGI 2020 coverage feature a wide range of ensembles using PreSonus!

Situated in Downtown Madison, Wisconsin, the Hamel Music Center is a new and vibrant addition to the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin Madison. This beautiful new space contains state of the art performance and production spaces to show case not only the University’s events, but also plays host to outside events.

With the help of our friends from Full Compass Systems, PreSonus stepped in to help outfit this space with 2 StudioLive Series III mixing consoles, a StudioLive 32 at Front of House, and a StudioLive 24 in the venues recital hall space. Coupled with a series of NSB Network Stageboxes, the Hamel Music Center has a flexible solution that is adaptable for their needs. We hear from facilities manager Brian Heller about what made StudioLive the ultimate fit for their facility.

For More Information of the Hamel Music Center, Click Here.

Here’s at PreSonus, we love creating possibilities. Speaking of possibilities, the recently updated StudioLive ARc series of Hybrid Mixer/Audio Interfaces pack tons of useful features for educational spaces! Whether its the classroom, the studio, or the field, there is a StudioLive ARc for every use case!

From February 12-15th, educators from across Texas and around the globe descended on San Antonio, Texas for the annual Texas Music Educators Association Clinic & Convention. Often regarded to as the largest music education convention of the year, TMEA was bigger than ever, boasting its highest attendance figures to date. Our now annual duo of PreSonus Education Market Manager Evan Brown and PreSonus House of Worship manager were in attendance manning the PreSonus booth, as well as our territory representatives Brandon Bishop and John Fedorko of Cowser Marketing!

The festivities kicked off Wednesday evening at the annual Technology in Music Education (TI:ME) TMEA Pre-Conference Reception. PreSonus is a longtime sponsor and partner of TI:ME and raffled 2 pairs of the ERIS HD10BT Headphones to lucky educators!

The show continued with a very busy exhibit floor from Thursday-Saturday. The PreSonus booth was home to many products, including the brand-new ioStation 24c, Quantum 2626, ARc Series Hybrid Mixer/Interfaces, and of course Studio One 4.6! Other PreSonus products on hand included:

• Studio Series Audio Interfaces
• Faderport Production Controllers
• StudioLive 64S Digital Mixing Console
• NSB16.8 Network Stagebox
• StudioLive 32R Rack Mixer
• SW5E AVB Switch
• Eris Media Reference and Studio Monitors
• AIR Series Loudspeakers
• Notion 6.5 Notation Software

PreSonus remains committed to serving music educators across the globe. For more information, be sure to keep visiting edu.presonus.com

Notion 6.6 is now available! It’s a minor maintenance update that adds compatibility with multi-core Windows machines and fulfils the upcoming security requirements of Apple’s Catalina operating system. Handwriting, MusicXML and MIDI import enhancements that were made for the recent Notion iOS 2.5 update have been inherited too, plus there’s some good news for 5-string banjo players…

This is a free update for Notion 6 owners that can be obtained by clicking “Check for Updates” within Notion.

All Fixes and Enhancements

Operating System Compatibility

• Notion now compatible with dual Xeon / multi-core processors
• [macOS] Notion is now ‘notarized’ as required by macOS10.15 Catalina
• Please note, Notion 6.6.x will be the final version to support Windows 8 and earlier, and macOS 10.12 Sierra and earlier.

Handwriting

• Fix for handwriting engine occasionally stopping during a long session
• Fix for subsequent measures sometimes changing after handwriting recognition on an earlier measure
• Rests on ledger lines no longer cause an issue
• Elements that cross systems (e.g. ties) now supported when using the handwriting area or continuous score view
• Adjacent offset notes on ledger lines now don’t transpose on subsequent notes being entered
• Fix for handwriting recognition problem on systems that have a repeat line

MusicXML

• Now imports grace notes with beaming information
• Better handling of imported beaming information
• [Win] Fix for arco and pizzicato being abbreviated on export
• Fixed occasional duplication of symbols, when exporting legato-accent, and mezzo-staccato
• Chords originally imported into Notion from Studio One’s Chord Track, are now exported as expected from Notion
• Fix for TAB pitches being wrongly transposed by an octave on export, for non-transposing fretted instruments (e.g. banjo, mandolin, ukulele)

Notation

• Lyrics and chord symbols now paste without replacing the notation, after copying a selection that is longer than one measure
• Fix for crash if lyrics melisma is followed by a hidden measure (i.e. hidden empty staff / cut section / multi-measure rest)
• Fix for crash caused by deleting notes in measures with rhythm slashes in another voice
• When in ‘Dark’ theme, note durations are now visible in the cursor if between staves (go to Preferences>Theme>Dark)
• 
• 5-string banjo fret numbers now start at the 5th fret as expected
• 

Audio

• Fix for crash caused by different buffer sizes between Notion and ReWire
• Hi-hat foot splash sample fixed
• Fix plugin test for shell plugins (Was reported by users of RealStrat)
• Fix enabling certain plugins (Was reported by users of Output Movement)

General

• [macOS] Ctrl+mouse click on a loaded insert in the mixer, now brings up the “right-click” context menu as expected
• Language fixes
• User Guide updated

For more about Notion, click here.