Rehearsal+CDs

Practice CDs = Better Rehearsals
Rehearsal recordings have come in handy for many choirs and bands at local schools. In the case of my choir, I routinely send choir members home with a practice CD that they can use anywhere, even in their cars. The result is that they come to rehearsal more prepared. As the music director, I have enjoyed having fewer note-centric rehearsals.

Great site for examples http://www.hearchoirs.net/

One trick shared with me by a Millard instrumental music teacher is to use Audacity and give them a cd with the accompaniment to practice along with then using Audacity and the change tempo feature, give them 3 versions, starting slow and getting progressively faster until the acc. is up to performance speed. []

The most important tool that every teacher needs to learn right now is iTunes.  If you can use iTunes, you will not only have instant access to files but can drag MIDI files into it, burn CD's, and convert them to MP3 for kids' use or drop them into Web sites.  It doesn't take much training to use, and those people that have iTunes and an iPod are able to play more music for their students in the classroom, and integrate technology into the curriculum, giving students the opportunity to listen and respond to music.  That is huge, along with using whatever software you have to create practice tracks.  Having students practice outside of the rehearsal is music education in action.

It’s a lot of fun to create your own personal music CDs to play in your car or home stereo. All you need is iTunes and a computer with a CD burner. Just make a playlist containing only the songs you want to copy to the CD, arrange them however you want, insert a blank CD-R disc into your computer, and then click the Burn Disc button. It’s that easy. Burn a playlist to a CD. 1. Open iTunes and then insert a blank CD into your computer. 2. If you’re using a Mac, a dialog box appears when you insert a blank disc. Choose iTunes from the Action menu, and click OK. 3. Choose the playlist you want to copy to CD. Before burning your CD, you can rearrange the songs by dragging them up or down in the list. 4. Your CD will be named according to the name of your playlist. If you want your CD to have a different name, double-click your playlist and change the name. 5. At the bottom of the iTunes window, check the size of your playlist to make sure it doesn’t exceed the amount of space on a CD (60 to 74 minutes). 6. Click the Burn Disc button to begin copying the songs from your computer to the CD. You can watch the progress in the iTunes window. 7. When the files are copied, a CD icon will appear in the iTunes Source list. 8. Click the Eject button to eject your CD.
 * Burning Your Music to a CD**
 * Step by Step**