Micro in charge of the class

With their first sortie into the jungle of music teaching programs, Mupados Software are aiming to reach a large but comparatively uncharted area of the market. The huge number of primary school children learning the recorder.

Recorder Tutor is not only one of the few packages specific to the instrument, but is also designed expressly for large group work.

With it, a primary school teacher can more or less leave the BBC Micro to its own devices and be in among the pupils.

Each of the 26 lessons introduces notes by showing their finger positions for the descant or tenor recorder, with the instrument sensibly drawn on the screen as you see it when playing - that is, upside down.

The lessons are accompanied by exercises and melodies, represented in standard notation, which can be sounded at different tempi.

When the tune, and hopefully the pupil, reach the bottom of the screen, the top line moves on to the next "page", an effective way of simulating a printed score and far more natural to read than scrolling.

There are facilities for adjusting volume to suit the size of a class, for repeating given bars and for sounding rhythms. There is a metronome, a bouncing ball and a beat counter.

In fact, every appropriate teaching aid has been provided, except one - an authoring facility.

You're stuck with a rock/pop style made educationally respec table with snippets from the classics. Not every teacher's taste, nor every pupil's, for that matter.

On the other hand the package includes an audio tape containing all the tunes played nicely, with full band backing, then repeated in accompaniment-only versions for pupils to supply the melody.

The scores are also reproduced in the manual, which though too self-congratulatory, is thorough and well laid out.

Duet and ensemble parts are available separately. Few resourceful teachers should fail to see the advantages of such a program.

Indeed, the only real obstacle to its being a successful pioneer is its price: £27 for the disc version and £25 for the cassette. Hardly a good start.

Gabriel Jacobs