SmartMusic includes thousands of pre-written technical exercises. On the Find Music screen, under Exercises, you’ll see the eight different types of exercises listed:

Select one of the eight by clicking on it, you’ll see a different view of the program:

On the left side is a descriptive “file tree” view of the exercises, organized by type. It’s a quick way to zip through the different kinds of exercises. When you choose an exercise by number, that exercise is previewed on the right. Once you’ve picked the exercise you’d like to work with you can hide the list and get started in one of three ways:

• Double-click on the number on the left,
• Click Open along the top, or
• Click Play (or Record)

Once you’ve opened a specific exercise, you can use the Prev and Next buttons near the top of the screen to quickly move to adjacent exercises. If you want to make an assignment, click the Assignment button along the bottom of the window, and it’ll take all of your current settings and turn them into a custom assignment: Be sure to specify what key you want it to be in before you finish!

The method books also work in the same way, with a list of all the exercises on the left to pick from. The only difference is that you can’t alter the key of method book assignments (due to copyright agreements with the publishers).

My advice? Make more scale assignments in C# minor. What else do your students have to do on Spring Break?