Reaching The Other 80%

It started with COVID. Joe Reynolds bought Soundtrap as an emergency response so his students could keep making music while school was remote. "That was horrible," he says of the period. "And we got Soundtrap for that. And I just keep buying it." What began as a stopgap became the strategic shift.

Joe had been in education for over 20 years when he did the math. Traditional band and choir programs reach roughly 20% of the student body. He calls the rest the "other 80%". Kids who loved music, listened to it constantly, had real taste and ear, and had nowhere to go with that.

The math wasn't just about students. Each of his district's seven music teachers needed five full sections to hold their position. If a program didn't grow, it didn't survive. Joe needed pathways for the other 80% or the district was going to lose teachers.

Reynolds built three new pathways using Soundtrap. An electronic music course structured around Shed the Music's Elements curriculum for students who wanted to produce without prior instrument training. A guitar program that started with fretboard fundamentals rather than notation. A music theory course that used dice exercises and audio demonstrations to make abstract concepts concrete.

For nonverbal students in special education, he set them up on iPads. Beat-making became a way to communicate, create, and participate that traditional performance never offered. Students could work on Chromebooks at home. No expensive software. No desktop-only tools. No reason to stop when the school day ended.

Students who had been labeled as troublemakers found their niche. Not because the bar was lowered, but because the door was opened. Half the theory students went on to succeed in AP Music Theory, the most academically rigorous music course in the building.

Nonverbal students, who had limited options for meaningful creative expression, found something that fit. For them, making a beat wasn't a workaround. It was the actual thing. Enrollment grew. The seven music teachers stayed. The program that nearly contracted instead expanded.

For music teachers eyeing the same problem in their own districts, Joe's advice is direct: "You already have the music skills. You're a music teacher, you're good. You just have to be a couple days ahead of the kids, and it's really not that hard."