Composing With Free Software: A First Project

Quick answer: Give students a sixteen-bar brief, one scale, and four lessons. MuseScore and Audacity install free with no account. BandLab is free in a browser but every student needs a login, which usually means a teacher-managed class. Constrain the material hard at the start, because unlimited sounds produce eight-second loops and nothing finished.

Which free tools can a school actually install?

MuseScore Studio is free and open source notation software for Windows, macOS and Linux. You download and use it without signing in. An account is only needed to publish scores on the MuseScore website, and you do not need that for a class project. Files are .mscz and open on any machine with the same version.

Audacity is free and open source audio editing. No account, no login, runs offline. It is the right tool if students are recording their own sounds, and the wrong tool if they want to arrange loops.

BandLab runs in a browser, costs nothing, and is the closest thing to a real multitrack studio students can use on a Chromebook. It requires an account. BandLab for Education lets a teacher create classes and invite students with a code, which is the route to take if your district is strict about student sign-ups. Check with your technology office before you announce it.

Chrome Music Lab Song Maker needs no account at all and runs in any browser. It is limited on purpose, which makes it excellent for a first lesson and useless for a final one.

LMMS is a free, open-source pattern-based studio you install locally. Worth knowing about if your machines are offline or your network blocks BandLab.

What brief actually produces finished pieces?

Sixteen bars. One scale. Three layers. Announce all three constraints in the first two minutes and write them on the board where they stay for the whole project.

Use a pentatonic scale for the first project, C D E G A. Every combination of those five notes sounds acceptable together, which removes the failure mode where a student writes something, hears a clash, decides they are not musical, and stops. You can teach why it works later.

The three layers are a bass part that moves slowly, a chord or ostinato layer, and a melody. Assign the order: bass first, then ostinato, then melody last. Students who write the melody first almost always end up with something they cannot harmonize, and rewriting it feels like failure.

The brief is one sentence: sixteen bars, pentatonic, three layers, and one moment where something changes. That last clause is the difference between a loop and a piece.

How do the four lessons run?

Lesson one, twenty minutes of tool and twenty of writing. Show one thing only: how to enter a note and how to play back. Do not show the mixer, the instrument list, or the export dialog. Then set the bass line task and walk the room. Everyone leaves with four bars of bass saved.

Lesson two, the ostinato. Start with two minutes of listening to a piece built on repetition so they hear that repeating is allowed. Then they add a second layer and loop it four times. End the lesson with three students playing their two layers to the class. Three, not ten, and always the same length of time each.

Lesson three, the melody and the change. This is where most of the teaching happens. The change can be a new instrument entering, the bass dropping out for two bars, or the melody repeating a step higher. Give those three options explicitly to anyone who stalls.

Lesson four, export and listen. Budget the whole period. Exporting takes longer than anyone expects, filenames go wrong, and students who have not saved to the right drive lose work. Have them export to audio as well as saving the project file.

How do you differentiate this?

Approaching: give a bass line already written and a rhythm grid with the bar lines marked. Their task is the ostinato and melody only. Reduce the brief to eight bars if the student is anxious about scale.

On level: the full brief as written, with the requirement that they can explain their one moment of change out loud.

Above level: remove the pentatonic constraint and require a modulation or a change of meter. Ask for a second version of the same material with different instrumentation, which teaches arrangement rather than more notes. Students who get interested in how existing material can be reworked will recognize the ideas in Minimal Music: Reich, Glass, Riley and the Power of Repetition.

What goes wrong?

Headphones. Thirty students composing without headphones is unworkable, and school-supplied sets are usually broken. Ask students to bring their own in the letter home, keep ten spares, and accept that two people per lesson will work in silence and check their work at your desk.

Saving. Browser tools autosave to an account; desktop tools do not. Make the first minute of every lesson a save check.

Blocked sites. If BandLab is blocked, do not spend the period fighting it. Have MuseScore installed as the fallback and switch without comment.

Perfectionism. Some students will restart four times and finish nothing. Take their first draft, save a copy yourself, and tell them that copy is the graded one and everything after it is a bonus.

Frequently asked questions

Do students need to read notation for this?

Not for BandLab, which is grid-based. MuseScore does need staff notation, so use it with classes who have had a note reading sequence.

Is MuseScore really free?

Yes. It is open source under the GNU GPL. There is a paid subscription on the MuseScore.com sheet music website, which is a separate product from the notation software.

How long should the finished piece be?

Between thirty and sixty seconds. Longer pieces are not better and they take a whole extra period to listen to as a class.

Can they use loops they did not write?

Decide before the project starts and say it out loud. A reasonable rule is that the bass line and melody must be theirs, and drum loops may come from the library.

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