Last week, Katie Argyle of Midnight Music gave a webinar to her community members titled, “😎 5 Must-Know Free Tech Tools for Music Teachers” where she covered topics that ranged from creating karaoke videos to play-along videos.

The tool of choice for the play-along video was Soundslice. Soundslice.com is an innovative platform that invigorates the way musicians learn and teach music. Created by Adrian Holovaty and PJ Macklin, Soundslice combines sheet music and audio/video recordings into an interactive experience, providing a comprehensive tool for music education and performance. With its intuitive platforms (free and paid), Soundslice is a great choice to create notation play-along videos for boomwhackers, private lessons, classroom instruments, and more.

Soundslice.com has gained popularity among music educators as well. With its comprehensive tools, teachers can create interactive music lessons, combining notation, recordings, and annotations, and share them with their students. This enables students to have a more engaging and immersive learning experience, as they can see and hear the music being taught in real-time.

Boomwhacker Play-Along Videos

Once Katie texted me about Soundslice, I jumped down the rabbit hole and immediately tried it. I was skeptical as I used Flat.io for notation and it has the capability to synch a video with the notation file. But, the video appears very small on the screen. In Soundslice, there were numerous options and variations for creating a boomwhacker play-along video.

The Two Play-Along Videos (Diatonic and Advanced) are below. To begin using Soundslice to create your own play-along video, continue reading or play the “How To” video at the end.

To Begin Using Soundslice…

I started my journey by creating a free Soundslice plan. The free plan is very good as it has a lot of items included in it. I ended up upgrading to the Plus version since I needed to create noteheads with boomwhacker colors.

Once I created the account, I wanted to import or link to the video I created in Canva. This video is “A Tribute to Kenough - Boomwhacker Play-Along (Diatonic)” and it includes pictures of various Kens from the Barbie movie. It also includes their trailer version of “I’m Just Ken”, a song performed by Canadian actor Ryan Gosling for Barbie: The Album, the soundtrack of the 2023 film Barbie. It was written and produced by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt.

Creating a New Slice

A slice is an interactive song or video that you create. In this example, I am creating a boomwhacker play-along video.

Click on “New slice…” and you can then upload an image, a notation file (MusicXML, Guitar Pro, PowerTab, or TuxGuitar formats), start with a recording from YouTube, an mp3, or upload a video, or start from scratch using Soundslice’s notation editor. Yes, Soundslice has a notation editor built into the web-based program.

I chose to upload the video I created and exported from Canva. But, you could add a link to a YouTube video or upload an mp3 file. If you upgrade to the Teacher Plan, you can also link a video from Wistla or Vimeo.

Adding Notation

Now that I have the video recording, I want to add the notation file. I created the boomwhacker notation file in Flat.io and exported it as a MusicXML file. MusicXML is a flexible format using text to represent musical elements. This means that many items like dynamics, text, tempo, title, and more come along with the file to be read and opened in another program. Unfortunately, the note names and the boomwhacker colors did not transport with the MusicXML file.

Synch the Video with the Notation

In Soundslice, synching the video with the notation is surprisingly intuitive.

1. Place the cursor at the beginning and tap the letter “t” on the device’s keyboard. This creates your first syncpoint.

2. Press the play button.

3. On the first beat of each bar, tap the letter “t”. The video is now synching up to the notation with every first beat of each bar. 🤯

4. Katie suggests closing your eyes so you can feel the downbeat as opposed to watching it on the screen.

5. If you make mistakes, you can delete the syncpoint and re-record that portion until you are satisfied.

6. When you are finished, click save and then view to watch the video.

7. But, there’s more!

8. Click Edit and let’s continue…

View Settings

On the bottom right-hand side of the screen, you will see the ellipses (three dots). Click on those dots and you can set up the view and layout for your video.

• Zoom Level - This gives you the opportunity to zoom in and out of the notation on the screen.

• Layout

  • Scrollable - The notation file will allow you to scroll up and down.

  • Paged - This displays the notation by page on the screen.

    • Stave Width - You can vary how many measures per system, even if you set it up one way in Flat and decide to change it here in Soundslice.

    • Horizontal notation: I liked using this for my video as I had the notation running on the bottom of the screen and the horizontal notation allowed it to be a scrolling view to make it easier for the students to read and perform.

    • Since I want the horizontal notation, I am going to click on “Move video to the top” found on the video controls.

• Transposition: Yes! Soundslice can transpose the notation by half steps. Since it is not playing back the notation on the screen (your video is doing that), it will not transpose the sound, just the notation itself.

• Theme: Choose between light, dark, and auto.

• Playhead Style:

  • First, click More… to see additional items.

  • Choose between Line, Small rectangle, Wide rectangle, and Hidden during playback. This helps you pick the ideal cursor (or no cursor) that moves across the screen for your students to follow.

  • The cursor can be orange, subtle, blue, or yellow.

  • You can choose to highlight the notes as they play. However, if you are using Boomwhacker colors, then the highlight cancels out the colors. Therefore, I do not have the notes box checked

  • You can also highlight the bar which helps the students follow along well.

  • You can keep the playhead at the top of the screen, middle of the screen, only scroll when necessary, or disable it.

• Auto-save settings: This is on so your settings are there the next time you login.

• Print: You can enable printing and choose what can be printed such as instrument names, the title, notation, and more. You can also edit the title and add an artist and description.

  • If you want to display note names, you have to upgrade to the Teacher Account.

• Waveform: Adds the waveform onto the screen. I did not opt to do this as it took up the screen and I want the students to focus on the notation.

• Full Screen: Display in full screen.

• English: Choose the language you need to be displayed.

• Advanced: You can expand the repeats and hide empty staves.

• Save: When finished, click save at the top right-hand side of the screen to save your settings.

Other Tools:

• …: This gives you options to import a notation file or another slice, and export as MusicXML, GLX, or MIDI.

• Help: Displays Help Menu

• Settings: See Print above.

• Recordings: This gives you the option of adding a recording.

• Sync: This brings up the sync timeline.

• Private: Gives you ways to share your video.

  • Share privately…: This requires a Teacher Plan.

  • Enable secret link…: If enabled, anyone with the secret link can view this slice, without needing to log in. It won’t appear on your channel, in site search, or anywhere else.

  • Share with community…: Share with the Soundslice community by publishing this slice to your channel.

  • Embed this slice…: Run a music education website? Give it the power of Soundslice. With the Plus plan, you can embed one slice for free. Upgrade to the Licensing plan for unlimited embeds.

• Save: Save your slice.

• Versions: Shows you the updates you have been making on your slice.

• Instruments: Add instruments to your score. You can also duplicate an instrument and generate a tablature.

• 1234 - Voices in the score.

Notation Tools

On the left side of the screen, you will find the notation tools from note values to menus where you can edit bars, notes, repeats, tabs, dynamics, performance tools like piano fingerings, text, and formats, like adding the boomwhacker colors.

When I did need to edit the note entry, I found their website to be most helpful. When I needed to add boomwhacker colors, I would highlight the notehead (I could use control or right-click to select more than one notehead), then click on Format, and then select the color. If the color was not there, for example, the light yellow color for the note E, I would look up the hex color number and input it in.

View

When you click on the video, you will see a menu that gives you options on how to view a video.

• Video Quality: You can choose from 1 (lowest) to 4 (highest) quality for your video.

• Moving the video: You can move the video to the top so the music displays underneath or you can move the video to the left so the music displays on the right.

• Arrows: This will flip the video horizontally.

• Eighth notes: This shows and hides the notation.

Controls at the Bottom of the Screen

There are some great controls on the bottom of the screen to assist your students when practicing or performing with the video.

• %: You can vary the tempo of the video so your students can practice successfully at their preferred tempo.

• Video/Synth: Toggle between showing the video or showing a synth that plays the music on the screen. Therefore, if you do use the transpose function, this will play it in the new key!

• Clips: Create a clip that needs practice by adding the measure numbers to the clip menu.

• Loop: Create a practice loop. If you click on the three dots, you can choose to add a count-in, and if you only want the loop to perform it once.

• Keyboard: Have piano students? Add the keyboard to see the music being played.

• Volume: You can adjust the overall volume or the volume of individual instruments.

• Metronome: You can turn on the metronome, add a count in, and choose where the metronome starts and if it runs for 1, 2, or 3 bars.

Sharing Your Video

As noted above, you can share the link to the video. However, I wanted to upload my video to my YouTube channel. Therefore, I screen-recorded the video so that I could upload it to my YouTube Channel.

Come back soon to see more play-along videos, webinars, and tech tips for elementary music!