Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Get that song on tape! Errr... disk?
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nanamour
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Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by nanamour » Tue Oct 30, 2018 11:32 am

A bit of background:

I've recently been doing a lot of volunteer work with a local elementary/middle school geared toward refugee/asylee/forced migrant children largely from Central America, Afghanistan, and Subsaharan Africa. Along with English language immersion and acculturation, one of the school's focuses is SEL, or social and emotional learning--focusing on relationship skills, social awareness, self-awareness and emotional awareness, and self-management. Many of these kids have witnessed or directly experienced unspeakable horrors fleeing conflict and violence in their home countries, so trauma-sensitive exploration of self-awareness, emotions and means of healthy expression/outlets for often difficult feelings is extremely important for many.

I've been working with a social worker at the school and a psychologist to develop a loose curriculum (if you can even call it that) for music-based SEL: basically using music as an outlet for exploring emotions, self-awareness and self-esteem, respect for one's own culture as well as that of others--and most of all, fun---regardless of one's language or national origin.

We plan on incorporating loosely guided listening sessions, sharing and discussing music from the kids' own countries, and free exploration with range of cheapo drum machines, keyboards, percussion, and hopefully a couple Loogs and some fun pedals if funding should allow--twisting knobs, banging on things, whatever the kids want to do with them.

Anyway, I thought a fun end goal could be recording some bits and editing them into some kind of song(/s) that everyone can listen to and share with family/friends (most of the kids have phones), and maybe even take some pride in having been a part of.

While my expectations on kid involvement in actually editing things together are certainly tempered by reality (many have had precious little formal education and even fewer have much familiarity with computers), I was wondering if anyone knows of a (VERY) stripped down kid-friendly DAW/recording/editing program or app that we might be able to play around with--I'd obviously go back and clean things up later.

Perhaps something iPad based that might be a little bit more tactile? I've done a bit of looking around and haven't come up with much thus far, but maybe some of the recording/parenting gurus of SS OSG have some ideas.

Thanks in advance!

Edited to add: the kids are between 5th and 7th grade, so ~10-13 yo.

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rumfoord
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by rumfoord » Tue Oct 30, 2018 4:31 pm

AWESOME!!


So, no idea :mellow:

But the first thing I'm thinking of is this music sequencer that plays paths
https://boingboing.net/2018/10/29/music ... by-tu.html
not what you're looking for, but this makes me think of other html5 music tools,
https://html5drummachine.com/
https://io808.com/
and there is an html5 DAW (an alpha version) https://gridsound.github.io/

Hope you find something!

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Larry Mal
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Oct 30, 2018 5:02 pm

Reaper? Reaper costs money but they might have an education discount for people like yourself, they are a nice company, and it's a full featured DAW that you could load any number of free plugins into.

Audacity? No MIDI in Audacity, but it's a great recorder and editor.
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by Dok » Tue Oct 30, 2018 5:11 pm

Garageband comes to mind immediately, especially for iPads. It can't get much simpler or easier to build loops. Is that the too obvious answer? ;)
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by Embenny » Tue Oct 30, 2018 5:13 pm

Dok wrote:
Tue Oct 30, 2018 5:11 pm
Garageband comes to mind immediately, especially for iPads. It can't get much simpler or easier to build loops. Is that the too obvious answer? ;)
That was my immediate thought as well. iPad-based, highly graphical, can accept inputs from touchscreen instrument apps/plugins.
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Larry Mal
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by Larry Mal » Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:02 pm

I was assuming there was no money for Apple products, but sure, Garage Band.
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by shadowplay » Tue Oct 30, 2018 11:49 pm

GarageBand is all I can think of.

However I have to say what you are doing is incredibly admirable, you're a good man.

D
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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by jvin248 » Wed Oct 31, 2018 2:03 am

.

Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org/
Free, runs on multiple platforms, easy to use, multi-channel, effects available.

Hydrogen Drum machine kit http://hydrogen-music.org/
Free, runs on multiple platforms, easy to use

More advanced is Ubuntu Studio -- you can repurpose old 'too slow' Windows pcs into Linux boxes this way.
http://ubuntustudio.org/tour/audio/

.

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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by nanamour » Sun Nov 04, 2018 4:27 pm

Huge thanks for weighing in everyone.

Yeah, GarageBand did seem the obvious choice initially, and is probably what I'll stick with. I guess I was holding a candle for the possibility of there being something even simpler out there in cyberland, but I suppose stripping things down past a certain point would snuff out any useful functionality.

It's looking (fingers, toes, and eyes crossed) like we will indeed have a few iPads at our disposal, so any recommendations on free/cheapo iPad-based instruments/sequencers/etc--ideally something toward the graphical and touch-friendly end of the spectrum--warmly welcomed as well!

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Re: Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?

Post by pacemaker » Mon Nov 05, 2018 12:36 pm

I've been very curious about the Spire all-in-one dealie; it's around $350. I don't know anyone who has used one as most of my musician friends are way down the recording rabbithole, but I've thought about getting one for my daughter and I to record with – it looks simple enough.

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