Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming report great success with Ensemble

Saturday 12th December 2020

In the midst of the global pandemic Scotland’s premier forces music school, The Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming, have adopted Ensemble as an integral part of their courses to great effect.

Ensemble is the world’s only dedicated web-based pipe band score authoring and editing tool, featuring realistic playback of all pipe band instruments alongside collaboration tools such as the formation of corps of students or band members and highly effective music sharing facilities.

The School, led by Major Gordon Rowan and based near Redford Barracks in Edinburgh, provides a variety of courses from Pipe Major through to Drum Major. The School sees over 100 students complete courses each year and is the primary source of education and certification for army bagpipe and drumming personnel.

“This software platform for student learning is putting the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming at the forefront of technology developments across the School of Infantry and the civilian piping and drumming community”

The School provides an Ensemble Pro Edition subscription to each of its instructors and students and runs this on a series of school-owned iPad Pros. Ensemble’s unique collaboration tools are used by students to submit composition tasks to their instructors for assessment and additionally instructors share scores to be learned for performance assessment. Due to Ensemble’s highly accessible web browser-based approach students and instructors can easily access their work from their home computers and devices.

Whilst Ensemble was part of the plan for the School from very early in 2020, the distributed nature of the tool has proved invaluable for students during the pandemic due to face-to-face teaching and learning not being possible. This is a trend that has been echoed across the world with the uptake of Ensemble Corps Edition subscriptions accelerating as bands and schools are restricted with face-to-face rehearsal and teaching.

“Since the introduction of Ensemble the interaction between instructor and student has been exceptional”

Senior Drum Major Allan Campbell who heads up the School’s drumming operations commented “Since the introduction of Ensemble at the School, it has had a positive impact on the way the students learn how to write music. From the Class 3 (beginner) course, right up to the more advanced courses (Pipe Major and Drum Major) the interaction between instructor and student has been exceptional.

One of the most recent tasks given to the current Class 1 Drummers Course was to write their version of a drum score, from an MSR previously written by the Pipe Majors' Course. Before now, this exercise would be time consuming with other programs, however they have found Ensemble to be really easy to use with some brilliant features; great playback quality and downloadable audio to name but a few.

I think Ensemble has been a breath of fresh air and I look forward to using it over the coming years.”

Major Rowan and WO2 Campbell are also responsible for music for the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo and make use of Ensemble’s notation facilities to write and distribute music for this very popular event. Despite the Tattoo not taking place in 2020 it is scheduled to take place from 6th to 28th August 2021 on Edinburgh Castle’s spectacular Esplanade.

Major Rowan said “Our adoption of blended learning initiatives are advanced further with the purchase of Ensemble subscriptions for the Army School. This software platform for student learning is putting the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming at the forefront of technology developments across the School of Infantry and the civilian piping and drumming community.”

There’s no doubt that we are all living in very challenging times, but Ensemble has helped maintain healthy teaching and learning programmes across the world.