I am sharing the Band in a Box joy with my 17 year old son Kilian and his 12 year old sister Ava who live in Germany and are just getting into music creation and production. As I mentioned, I bought them Band in a Box 2025 yesterday so we could begin our odyssey as a musical family!
Band in a Box has been brightening my life going back to my first uses of it as an inner city high school teacher for "at-risk youth" in 1990. I have you and mister PG to thank for much of my success in being that science teacher who successfully integrated music and the arts into his instruction to bring the content to life!
Here are some of the materials that the Band in A Box team has helped me to create through their amazing software that has had such an impact on my life and that of students around the world:
First:
Early media on our work in the L.A. Inner City schools with "Melodic-Mnemonics, Science Education through Music and Video:
KCET television: Sprocket Science from 1989 to 1997, when I then headed to music school at Musicians Institute of Technology in Hollywood and then from 1998 to 2010 to UCLA and the American University in Cairo to get my Masters and PhD in "Regional and International Development":
CBS Television: How'd they Do That
NBC television: Save our Streets
Here is a self made video from 1989/90 explaining how we believed science and music and art could transform education now that we had the right kind of user accessible creation, composition and production technology:
"The Bored of Education Blues"
Student and teacher created videos of songs we co-wrote in BIAB and then recorded on an early MacIICX and a 4 track cassette recorder:
"Reform School"
"Impact Teachers"
And here are songs created initially with Band in a Box that became part of our education outreach efforts with NASA, recorded in a professional gospel studio in South LA originally owned by the legendary Sam Cooke and video taped in Beverly Hills TV Studios:
NASA Challenger Center education program:
"Taking on the Challenge to Improve Education"
"Marsville"
"Biosphere"
"Earthwatch Bug Holiday"
And here is a documentary film on how we took our "Melodic-Mnemonics Science Education through Music and Video" education ideas overseas from 2002 to 2006 with the US State Department "Changing Hearts and Minds" Program through an "Environmental Circus" in Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, Cyprus, Bahrain and Morocco:
This resulted in me teaching in Cairo and using BIAB to help teach kids to compose environmental songs in Arabic at the Wadi Environmental Science Center like this one called "Protect the Nile":
Here is last year's introduction video for the Sustainable Design Laboratory course here in Florida that garnered me the "Innovative Education Teacher of the Year" award, with music created in Band-in-a-Box and Cakewalk:
And here is the latest song concept sketch I created with Band-in-A-Box and Cakewalk, done for the upcoming "Navigating the Food/Energy/Water/Ecology Nexus" course at USF Tampa that we will be producing in InEd studios this semester:
As you can no doubt see, without Band in a Box I never would have been able to be the international songster science teacher I've become, encouraging students to invest in all of their creative and critical thinking skills so that they could truly liberate their ideas. And it keeps getting better — with our new Bellini Talent Center and AI program at USF and our Innovative Education production team we now see ways to use the latest version of Band in a Box with its integrated AI to truly democratize the creative process, creating content "of the learning community, by the community, for the learning community".
Thank you for helping us "take the challenge to improve education" to its highest levels over the past 35 years of my teaching career, from high school to college to graduate school and beyond.
Band in A Box, PG Music, you're the best!
I recommend Band in a Box to ALL my students, friends and family.
Here is how you can get involved:
https://www.pgmusic.com/bbwin.packages.htm
I recommend Band in a Box to ALL my students, friends and family.
Here is how you can get involved:
https://www.pgmusic.com/bbwin.packages.htm
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