Becoming.

This is a growing collection of free music education tools: interactive fingering charts, theory games, practice aids, and listening guides across the woodwinds. All of it is free, and meant to stay that way — here’s everything we’ve made.

Parker and Will

It exists because of what I kept running into as a teacher. Through grad school I was teaching in three places at once, a graduate assistantship at Ohio University, a studio at Athens Community Music School, and a year of adjunct saxophone at Marietta College, and I’m now going into my second year at a community music charter school here in New York.

Different ages, different budgets, but the same problem every time: the tools that actually help usually cost money. A $40 method book, a subscription, software the school can’t license. The students who would get the most out of them are often the least likely to have them.

So this is my attempt at the other version, one place where my students and my music-teacher friends alike can find what they need, and one that keeps growing.

None of it is built alone. I’m not a web developer by trade. My partner, Sam Spencer (iOS software engineer), helped me find my footing well enough to build this, and the two of us are slowly putting together an iOS app for the site as well.

On the music side, Will Nelson (hagb.art) — musicologist, my closest friend, and the person I send things to when I’m not sure I’ve got them right — works with me on the Music History, Music Theory and Bassoon pages. Professor Austin Smith (oboe, University of Mississippi) went through every fingering with me for the Interactive Oboe Fingering Chart. Across the woodwind pages, tools I built from scratch sit next to videos from YouTube educators and resources from organizations doing this work at a bigger scale, all of it credited. And if there’s a tool you wish existed, or you’ve made something you’d want other people to use, I’d like to hear about it. That’s how this keeps growing.

Happy practicing, and onward to music education anyone can reach.

My understanding of pedagogy, practice, and intentionality comes from the teachers who shaped me: