PE4_uJam

Back to uJam's home

For my upcoming Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS) project, I'll be revisiting uJam, a Web 2.0 tool you may remember from one of my previous reviews and my commercial project.  Although the process of creating the previous projects was a good introduction, uJam's online mixer houses a number of reasonably complex music creation and editing tools that I'd like to explore further, and implement an activity using uJam in my classroom.

uJam's Melody Editor

One remarkably useful tool I found was uJam's melody editor.  Although it is unable to edit the pitch of your original recording, it can convert the melody into a wide variety of synthesized instrument voices that can be personalized or corrected in the melody editor.  After analyzing the melody, uJam produces a simple visual representation of the song that is easily editable by clicking and dragging the size and position of notes laid out in a timeline.  When changing the pitch of a note, uJam even gives you recommendations for notes that will sound best with your current chord progression.  As well, notes can be inserted, allowing you to create new parts of the melody in the mixer without having recorded them originally.  This simple and intuitive melody editing feature gives musical novices the assistance they need while allowing more experienced musicians the flexibility and control to compose a song from scratch.

Since I teach band in an elementary school, I appreciate the simplicity of uJam's music editing tool, but at the same time am impressed with what it can offer to more advanced musicians.  Tomorrow, I plan to explore the options for editing the style of the accompaniment tracks that uJam generates, so check back for another post and a few samples of the music that uJam can create.