Seventh grader Mauricio Armenta traded his 3-foot trombone for some headphones, a keyboard and mouse this school year.
Instead of playing in the band, Mauricio says he wanted to learn a different way to play music.
Teacher Ian Mast helps Mauricio and other Utterback Middle School students deepen their music knowledge and become composers with a music technology curriculum he created — one of the first of its kind for Arizona middle schoolers.
Students create music, sound effects and samples through music production and audio engineering, developing into music composers and producers.
See the curriculum
Mast and former Maxwell Middle School students at an April 2024 Governing Board meeting.
“I like that I can make my own music and get different samples from the Ableton app right here,” Mauricio said, asking a reporter if they want to hear his beats. “So, this is one of my music songs. I’m not really good at doing it yet.”
It’s only week four of the class and from the front of the library — where the computers are and the class meets — Mast takes a vote.
“We started with melody. And now I think something that would work well as we get into the later bits of the song, we’re going into a verse,” Mast tells students. “So, you guys tell me. If we just did our intro and you guys are going into a verse, what instrument should we add now? We have bass, or drums, or chords.”
Drums win out with a show of hands mostly in the back row.
“There’s not a whole lot of education out there for sound design, music production, things like that. And whenever it comes to music education, we tend to only focus on band, choir, orchestra,” said Mast, who is in his third year as a teacher. “And I’m not saying we don’t think they’re great and I do believe that they are necessary for a lot of developmental growth. However, I think there’s a lot of modern technology that is being missed out on in these classes that are not being taught.
“So, for instance, you might have an elementary school that goes to the computer lab sometimes and in that computer lab they’ll use BandLab or GarageBand. And kind of make some like little beats here and there and then they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, I did that for a month for a unit in elementary school.’
And I go, ‘That’s really cool. Do you want to do that all year?” Then the overwhelming answer is usually yes.”
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Three things to know about the program:
- It’s cool. “The coolest thing I learned is that you can like overlayer some of this music,” Mauricio said. “I didn’t even know you could do that, but that sounds super good, like you can move this, you can play with all the doohickeys like that. And you can make it louder and then you can change the tone. That was super cool for me to learn. I like making my own music more than listening to music. I can take examples from other music and put in my own music.”
- It expands the curriculum. The Tucson Unified School District music program continues its tradition of taking chances to see what works in arts classrooms, said Joan Ashcraft, TUSD director of fine arts and the person who hired Mast. “We are trying always to encourage our music students to do some creative music composition. So we start talking about that, and what he had personally done, and I thought ‘my goodness this would be so great,’ particularly for middle school students when we’re trying to get them on fire for learning. And particularly for the contemporary forms of music. He started up at Maxwell K-8 and it was so impressive.”
- It’s multilingual. Mast’s job is layered. “I usually start in a different pattern and I go the opposite direction. As long as you have that ability to organize those different areas, you can make any song very quickly,” he said. “So not only are you not getting kids — almost all of whom do not know how to read music — they don’t know basic computer literacy. You are teaching multiple languages at one time. And that’s not even counting the social-emotional learning that needs to happen.”
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