Creative Amplify Music lessons for Grades 9 and 10.

The teacher gives a four-chord backing in C major (C, G, A minor, F) and a simple eight-bar melody. Over two lessons each student records the melody, applies gentle pitch correction, then duplicates the take three times and uses Logic Pro's Flex Pitch to move the notes of each copy onto other chord tones, checking every note against the chord underneath. They pan and balance the four voices into a 60-second track and write a short note on where their harmony moves in parallel thirds and where a voice holds a common note across a chord change. Recordings stay in the students' school storage and are played within the class.

Tools: Logic Pro Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher plays an extract from Pierre Schaeffer's 'Étude aux chemins de fer' (1948), built from recordings of trains, and explains that he worked with recordings on discs, changing sounds by slowing them down and repeating fragments in loops. Over two lessons each student records ten sounds around the school site, such as a bell, footsteps on stairs, a running tap and a closing door, without recording anyone's voice, and loads them into GarageBand's Sampler. Playing a sound lower or higher on the keyboard changes its pitch, and the Reverse button plays it backwards; students try each change, listen, undo it if it does not work and layer the results on separate tracks. The finished 90-second piece must follow an arc they can describe, for example quiet to busy to quiet, and they hand it in with a timeline sketch naming each altered sound.

Tools: GarageBand Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 10 have been analysing the ground bass in Purcell's Music for a While for Edexcel GCSE Music. Over two lessons, each student composes a practice piece, not their assessed composition: the teacher sets a BandLab for Education assignment containing a four-bar ground bass in A minor that the teacher wrote, which students loop eight times and then build three variations over, one melodic, one rhythmic and one that changes the texture. Each variation goes on its own track, played in on a MIDI keyboard, so students can hear any variation alone or against the others, retake a phrase, and compare two takes before keeping one. At the end of the first lesson students submit, the teacher listens to every piece that evening and returns each one with a comment on which variation drifts from the harmony of the ground. In the second lesson students revise that variation, listen back against the bass, and resubmit with a two-line note on what they changed.

Tools: BandLab Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

This is a practice piece ahead of the GCSE free composition, not the assessed submission, so peer feedback in the lesson is fine. The teacher plays two trailer cues and draws out how composers build tension: a string ostinato, a rising brass line, a woodwind countermelody. Over two lessons each student writes a 90-second cue in Logic Pro (or GarageBand on Macs without it) using strings, woodwind and brass, with a clear build and release, entering parts on the MIDI keyboard or in the piano roll and trying different instruments and registers for each line. They add reverb to place the ensemble in a hall and set levels so the melody sits above the accompaniment. At the end students swap headphones with a neighbour, who notes one moment where the texture works and one where a part is masked.

Tools: Logic Pro, GarageBand Nine ideas for your own version in Generate