Welcome to music class! In this class we will be using our iPads and computers to create music. This website will be our "virtual textbook" for you to reference throughout the school year, and will be used side-by-side with our in-person classroom time. My main goal is to put you in the drivers seat of music creation, and help you navigate your own world of creativity.
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When we create music on our iPads and computers we use a tool called the Digital Audio Workstation, or the DAW. In our class, we will be using a DAW called Soundtrap. ‍

For the purposes of getting started, we'll be focusing on the two main controls of the Soundtrap DAW. First is the transport:‍

The transport allows us to control time. You're probably familiar with the play, stop, go forward, and go backwards button. They're the same ones we use when we listen to music. The red button on the left hand side is the record button. When you press the record button, time starts moving, and the DAW starts recording audio. When you press stop, the DAW stops recording.

The space where we record our audio is called the track. For now, we’ll define the word track as the number of instruments we want to have in our music. If we want piano and violin in our music, we’ll have two tracks. If we want drums, bass and SFX, we’ll have three tracks. To create tracks on Soundtrap, we’ll press “add new tracks” and select “voice & microphones”. 

On the track we have some new controls:‍

The first one on the left is the trickiest — this is the record enable button. The record enable button is a switch that lets us select which track to record into. Up next we have the volume knob. It turns up or down the volume of the track. Pretty simple.  After that we have the solo, and the mute button. The mute button mutes, or turns off the sound of the track. The word “solo” means “one at a time”, meaning when you press the solo button, all the other tracks except for the soloed tracks are muted. 

The record enable button and the record button are two different things. The record button starts moving time, whereas the record enable button is just an on/off switch.
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Try creating a new track on Soundtrap and recording some audio. Soundtrap may ask if you are using headphones or not, and will ask you for "permission to access the microphone" to which you will select "allow".

Find out where the microphone on your laptop or iPads are. Can you figure out how to use the record enable button? How about the solo and mute button? Try creating more than one track, and try out different volumes using the volume knob.
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All tools are is designed to be learned. You might have found the process of creating a track and recording audio to be tideious and clumsy, but you will gain speed overtime. Explore Soundtrap on your own; turning knobs, flipping switches and exploring different menus.