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Newsletter April 2007 IN THIS EDITION OF THE NEWSLETTER 1. A greeting from Audrey Podmore, the face behind The Full Pitcher.
2. MIDIgrid Creative Music Software
3. Our Composers
4. New PDF Downloads
5. Flexible Ensembles 1. GREETINGS FROM DIRECTOR, AUDREY PODMO RE Welcome to the April edition of The Full Pitcher Newsletter. We’ve had another very busy period since the last issue, in January/February! We’re absolutely delighted to have recently acquired the publishing and distribution rights to York University’s "MIDIgrid for Windows" software and, I’m afraid, everything else has ‘gone out of the window’ in the past few weeks, as we have worked on developing the website at www.midigrid.com and preparing our first edition of the software. Our work on the "Get Creative" area of the site and community development have had to wait a little longer, but we are strongly committed to these activites. In the meantime, I am publishing short articles in the "Making Music Matters!" blog and some items, like the improvisation ideas for beginners, will be developed later onsite. Audrey’s Blog The more versatile -and, by the same token, useful - a resource is, the more difficult it is to 'market'. This makes problems for us because we are committed to flexiblility and responsiveness to individual needs. One of the ways in which we express this commitment is through publishing truly flexible arrangements for groups of mixed instruments and abilities and you can read a little about these arrangements, below. I have, personally, used every one of these ensembles with extremely diverse groups and hope they will make life a little easier for fellow musicians! 2. MIDIgrid Creative Music Software MIDIgrid and The Full Pitcher go together "like peaches and cream"! The idea for this most unusual software grew out of York University’s work with the Composers’ Desktop Project. Because it is completely open-ended, a kind of musical paint-box, it can be used to create, play and record music in any style and can be used at all ages and levels of ability. Composers have used it to assemble and experiment with the building blocks of new compositions; creative musicians have used it as a virtual instrument on which to improvise; teachers have created interactive learning resources and, with it, therapists have provided access to performance for people with severe disabilities. MIDIgrid can be used without any additional hardware, playing back through the computer’s internal soundcard but, as it has a full MIDI specification, it is highly desirable to add a MIDI interface in order to make full use of its more advanced facilities. Its modest £55 price tag places it within reach of those making their first acquaintance with computer-based music, as well of those equipped with other MIDI-based hardware. more..... 3. Our Composers We have recently added pages to the website with biographical material about some of our composers. A founding principle of our publishing company was to facilitate the distribution of resources from creative musicians who share our aims. You can find out about the work of some of these musicians in the "Get Creative" section of the site. We have now added information about some of the composers whose sheet music features in our catalogue. You can access these biographies from the "About Us" page. About Us 4. New PDF Downloads We have added a number of new easy piano scores for you: 1.We have converted several of Natalia Kouznetsova’s compositions and her arrangements of favourite classical themes to the new formats, so the PDF scores are now available from the store and you can listen to all these pieces, in Flash audio. Easy Piano 2.We have added to the catalogue nine easy jazzy piano pieces by Johan Hugosson, which are sure to go down well with young ‘jazzers’, grades 1-3. Easy Piano 3. As promised last time, the "Clarinet for Beginners" scores have now been converted to the new formats. These provide PDF downloads for use from the very first lesson to about the standard of a UK Grade 1 exam. Clarinet for Beginners 5. Flexible Ensembles Teachers, and other music leaders, seldom have the luxury of conducting standard ensembles of evenly matched abilities. Finding music to accommodate their ad-hoc groups of instruments and players can be a real challenge! It can also prove very expensive if it means buying packs with lots of parts irrelevant to the needs of the ensemble. The Full Pitcher's Flexible Ensembles and Easy Ensembles can solve this problem. The scores are available as PDF downloads ((£2.50 each). This gives teachers the opportunity to check out the individual parts and determine how they would like to assign them and any transpositions desirable. Parts can usually be mixed and matched to create duets, trios, quartets, etc. and include musically interesting music but non-essential music for less able players. In some situations, this printable score is all that a teacher requires. You can listen to the arrangements online and individual players can use the online playback as a practice aid. The printed sheet music can be ordered as a custom pack for each title, consisting of a score and twelve instrumental parts (7.95). Each instrumental part can be supplied in any transposition. On receipt of your order, we will email you a checklist to select the instruments/transpositions you require. We are very happy to answer any queries you may have, by email or telephone.
Newsletter, January 2007 IN THIS EDITION OF THE NEWSLETTER 1. A greeting from Audrey Podmore, the face behind The Full Pitcher. 2. Sacred music 3. Flexible ensemble packs 4. Easy Piano Music 5. Music for Beginners 1. GREETINGS FROM DIRECTOR, AUDREY PODMORE Welcome to this edition of The Full Pitcher Newsletter. Well, we’ve certainly hit the ground running in 2007! This month, we’ve added lots of new products to the store and have a whole lot more waiting to be catalogued. Now that things are settling down a bit after all the upheaval, we want to develop the community side of the site. This newsletter is being sent to two separate mailing lists - one for people who have checked the newsletter option when setting up their store account and one for people who have subscribed via the website. As we develop the site, we have a great need of feedback, in order to give you more of what you really want. In future, we may send different newsletters to each group. Do you think this is a good idea? As a first step in community development, I’ve started a blog in which I’ll be sharing with you discoveries that encourage and inspire me to make music and reports of ways in which creative musicians, in all genres, are changing lives by widening opportunities for musical creation and involvement. A blog invites a response and I hope that it will encourage more communication which, in spite of the great tide of information washing around the internet, seems to be very rare! Audrey’s blog We have noticed that some people are still accessing the site from cached pages which are very out of date. We update our pages very frequently, so it is a good idea to refresh the page in your browser, so that you always see the most recent information. 2. SACRED MUSIC Now that Christmas is over, we’ve managed to get round to converting our other sacred music scores to the new formats. A major part of this section is the work of Tim Hopkins, poet and Christian songwriter. We love Tim’s songs, which are so fresh and tuneful, and we’re delighted to be able to introduce our visitors to them. You can listen to synthesized versions of the music online, in Flash format, and we will shortly be adding the lyrics. You can purchase the scores, as PDF downloads, from the store. Sacred Music 3. JAZZY FLEXIBLE ENSEMBLES Some of you may have purchased downloads of Simon Cunliffe’s, very flexible, jazzy ensembles. Unfortunately, with the new system, we do not have download space for lots of instrumental parts but we have made a virtue of necessity by developing flexible ensemble packs for mail order distribution. Information about some of these can be found on the website, where you can listen to the music. More to follow! Flexible Jazzy Ensembles 4. EASY PIANO MUSIC We have lots of new scores for you in the Easy Piano section and we will be adding these PDF scores, along with onsite information and Flash playback in the next few days. Easy Piano Music 5. MUSIC FOR BEGINNERS This month, we also converted our Clarinet for Beginners repertoire and added them to the store BUT the deadly computer jinx fouled everything up and we had to take them all off again! Rest assured, dear clarinet teachers, that your interests are very dear to our heart and we will get them back on line asap. Music for beginners, all of which is suitable for first-year players, is currently available in the following sections: Piano for Beginners Flute for Beginners Recorder for Beginners Violin for Beginners Cello for Beginners You can listen to all of this music online. We would greatly welcome your comments on the new site and any suggestions/requests you may have. Wishing you all the very best for 2007!
Newsletter, December 2006 IN THIS EDITION OF THE NEWSLETTER 1. A greeting from Audrey Podmore, the face behind The Full Pitcher Music Resources. 2. Our new online store. 3. PDF sheet music 4. Flash audio 5. Creative music software to share with young children 1. GREETINGS FROM DIRECTOR, AUDREY PODMORE Welcome to this edition of The Full Pitcher Newsletter and apologies to those of you who subscribed ages ago and are wondering if you're ever going to get a newsletter! If you haven't visited the website for a while, your next visit will give you some clue as to the delay: we've been busy changing just about everything except the content of the site. It's been a mammoth undertaking and has left little time for the newsletter. I launched www.fullpitcher.co.uk in September, 2002, as a channel through which teachers and community musicians committed to creative and inclusive music-making could disseminate their ideas and resources. In 2002, the options open to a small company wishing to set up an interactive website were few and costly but I have a long history of pioneering endeavours in the educational applications of music technology and could not be deterred by rational argument! The site has gone on to earn an excellent reputation amongst the online educational community, with an amazing 76,970 people book-marking us last year. This has been achieved with only a small number of contributors, though, and we urgently need other colleagues to participate in order to develop more and better resources. In 2006, the possibilities for interactive web publishing have increased exponentially and there are new and cheaper ways of achieving our aims, so we have set in motion a process of change. Since July, we have - redesigned the site
- moved to a new web-host, where we have more space and bandwidth
- taken on a new ecommerce system, separate from our other resources
- changed our method of delivering sheet music downloads
- converted our music playback facilities to Flash audio
...and that's just the start! We do need your feedback, though, so that we can provide you with what you really want. With your help, I hope we will create many new, and even better, resources over the next four years. 
2. OUR NEW ONLINE STORE Our new online store has lots of marvellous features that make for greater customer convenience and easier management. Users can now log into their account to check the status of an order, review their order history and download their PDF purchases. They can also arrange for delivery to addresses other than the one at which they are billed - great for sending music as presents! The only real bugbear with it is that we don't seem to be able to link to an individual product or category from the main site. To speed up location of the desired product, we have added a link to the store's ‘Advanced Search' form from the sidebar of all the pages. If the option "search in product descriptions" is checked, this does a pretty quick job. Our Store
3. OUR PDF SHEET MUSIC The most significant change for many of you is the new format for our sheet music downloads. These are now sold as PDF files. Adobe's Reader for this ‘Portable Document Format' is now found on the majority of computers, as a good many software packages install it with their support documentation. This means that most people no longer have to install another plugin in order to display our music notation. You now have a file to download and display on your computer, not just a printout. This will be particularly useful to teachers who can display the score on a large monitor or electronic whiteboard to act as a visual focus for the class, allowing the teacher to draw attention to specific teaching points. We now have PDF products in the following categories: Beginners Christmas Easy Ensembles Flexible Ensembles Miscellaneous Piano (Easy) Strings
4. FLASH AUDIO In the ‘Online Music' section of our website resources, visitors can listen to nearly all the PDF scores as Flash audio. Like the PDF Reader', ‘Flash' is already installed in the vast majority of browsers. The music is streamed at settings appropriate for 56k modems. In addition to allowing customers to listen to the music before purchasing a download, the Flash audio is a very useful resource with which to support pupils' practice of the music purchased and can be used as backing tracks for family or classroom music-making. The Flash- player is in a very small pop-up window which can be displayed on screen simultaneously with a downloaded PDF or with online lyrics. Online Music
5. CREATIVE MUSIC SOFTWARE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN Last time, we suggested our new GridPlay software as a way into improvisation for people of all ages. Here, we'd like to introduce you to our GridPlay: Creative Explorations Level 1 package. This is intended for teachers or parents to share with young children aged 3-7. The 15 grids, each a mini-program providing onscreen ‘instruments' to play with a mouse or trackball and various backing tracks & sound effects, are supported by a 26-page creative activity guide. There are songs to sing, games to play, stories to share, all encouraging maximum interactivity and creativity. To see a full description of the contents and Flash ‘movies' of someof the grids, visit: http://www.fullpitcher.co.uk/gridplay_level_1.htm
We would greatly welcome your comments on the new site and any suggestions/requests you may have. Comment
We wish you all A Very Happy Christmas and New Year!
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