Have you heard of pBuzz? It’s an important musical tool that your elementary students can play! Learning pBuzz checks off nearly every learning style – including aural, visual, and kinesthetic – and does it in fun and engaging ways.
pBuzz is a wind instrument but, unlike the recorder, allows your students to use air like you would when playing a band instruments, singing or projecting in a theatre. It teaches how a sound is made and how to create tone and pitch. With just six notes on one partial, pBuzz shows how changing the length of the tube affects notes, and it’s easy for students to learn together.
Until pBuzz, elementary music included percussion, vocal, strings, and a bit of woodwind. No brass instrument experience was available. pBuzz provides a terrific and easy learning experience that includes lessons from the use of air to making a tone to playing in an ensemble for an audience.
Lessons developed by actual pBuzz teachers in the U.S. have been put into a new method book so that more teachers can provide the full musical impact that learning pBuzz provides.
Introduced in 2014, pBuzz has found its place in thousands of schools across North America and around the world, where teachers are using pBuzz to inspire students to engage in music:
“Almost all students are successful with making a buzz. They have learned the song Hot Cross Buns on pBuzz and Jaws on pBuzz. I really want to get them actually reading music by the end of the year. Right now, we are learning through solfege, and I want to continue with that for the first semester.”
“I saw it as a great way to introduce the brass instrument embouchure, note reading, and even improvisation to my students. The reaction to the instruments was positive and engaging students with music in a non-traditional way was really successful.
“I also realized that many additional skills were being learned.
- As students lengthened and shortened the instrument using the slide, they were able to see that the longer an instrument gets, the lower the pitch is.
- They also had to learn to auditate notes — anticipating the sound of the pitch in their inner ear before blowing into the instrument.
- Pitch awareness and air support were conversations that naturally occurred with the pBuzz which doesn’t naturally happen when playing the recorder or percussion instruments.
- By introducing an instrument that requires real breath support and pitch differentiation, the students grew their musicianship beyond my expectations.
“To better prepare elementary students in this circumstance, I have been recommending the inclusion of the pBuzz as an essential part of every elementary student’s experience. It is very affordable for a school district to purchase a set, offers a fun performance-based tool that supports basic music literacy, and promotes fundamental aspects of wind music education such as buzzing, use of air, how higher and lower pitches are produced by the lengthening or shortening of a tube, and so on.”
