Anytune

Anytune is a wonderful iPhone app that you can also get on a mac or iPad. It is an amazing app to use for practicing, and I can see myself sharing it with older students, because it just has so many little features. Also, I think the best use for it would be at home for practicing songs, or in little section rehearsals, so the students would need to have either an iPhone or iPad, which older students may be more likely to have already.

What the app does is connect to the music you have on your phone and allows you to slow down, speed up, and change the key up or down at any point in the song. It's helpful when trying to decide the best key to sing an existing song in, and perhaps the most helpful when practicing a difficult part of a song, because you are able to slow the song way down.

The main features are available in the free version of the app, and that version is shown above. It would be easy for high school students to figure out how to use it on their own, if they just spend a little time playing around with it. 

There is a $15 pro version of the app. In that version, you are able to isolate certain instruments and/or vocals in the song. This allows for very specialized practicing, and a musician friend said it has been a really helpful tool! If students wanted to use this, it would be worth putting on school iPads or computers if the funding was there. If not, the free version is still very useful and helpful.

Out of the classroom, this would benefit student practice time and make it very effective. In the classroom, I could see using this if groups of students are practicing their part of a piece. The groups could each go in a room and isolate the song so that the other instruments or vocals besides theirs are playing to practice along with. Sectional rehearsals are very effective, and change up the rehearsal time and style for the traditional high school band/choir model.