These flashcards have been such a delight to use with my students, because they are both beautiful and versatile!Īfter creating all the flashcards and making them available as reproducible/printable sets for music teachers I set my heart on creating the perfect fingering chart for each instrument. I also gave each card a number which organizes them by Concert Pitch across the entire band or orchestra and created an amazing Teacher's Guide which allows the director to get all students working on whichever notes they need to study and memorize over the entire range of each instrument. These sub-sets can be created by using the little icons on the fronts of the cards.Smiley Face, Triangle, Star, etc.
I decided to create different groups of flashcards so that students could pull out certain cards from the whole deck into useful sub-sets, such as 1) The first 5 notes, 2) The first 12 notes, 3) A one-octave chromatic scale, and 4) Other major scales. I chose to show only the most common enharmonic so that beginners would not be confused or so the graphics would not be too cluttered. I carefully crafted each instrument's graphic representation to be attractive, functional, and as intuitive as possible. Like Steve Jobs of Apple Computers I care deeply about beauty and function. Instead, I got to work on Photoshop and began to make my own! Call me OCD, but those four issues were enough to discourage me from using them enthusiastically. These are good flashcards, but I was disappointed with FOUR things: 1) The graphics were angular and pixelated, 2) The set included only 18 notes for each instrument - which meant that each instrument was missing 8-12 notes, 3) When I printed them double-sided the cutting lines would be slightly uneven, causing the cards to be slightly different sizes, and 4) The note names and certain instrument parts are tiny and hard to see, while other elements are proportionally too big. Now it appears that they no longer sell a reproducible set, and only provide individual instrument cards through other dealers (no online store). So I bought them - a reproducible set of flashcards for every band instrument from Berets Publications - click HERE to see them. I found a grand total of.ONE such set of flashcards. I figured I could find a good set of flashcards for each instrument's notes and fingerings it would be a tremendous help for many of them, and provide a powerful learning activity in my classes. This website is dedicated to helping every music student succeed! After many years of teaching beginning band and beginning orchestra I had become increasingly frustrated with my inability to help each and every young musician grasp the basic concepts of note reading and fingering their instruments.