Kid friendly ultrasimple DAW?
Posted: 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.
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.
