Music Production Mentoring

Covered mic selection and placement for acoustic instruments, gain staging and signal flow through a DAW and hardware mixer, the difference between mic/instrument/line/speaker levels and how DI boxes work, and parallel effects routing using sends and aux tracks instead of in-line plugin mix knobs. Also addressed stem vs. track-out terminology and audio-level distortion management at different points in the signal chain.

We worked through melody writing — specifically how to get unstuck when chord progressions are in place but melodies aren't coming. Covered approaches including intuitive exploration without theory constraints, patch tweaking for playability, learning other artists' melodies as vocabulary building, and when and how to break outside the scale. Students also discussed studying specific artists — including Django Reinhardt and George Benson — as a way to internalize melodic phrasing and style. We also talked about different kinds of audio interfaces, and explored potential ways to link up more than one audio interface at a time to maximize inputs.

Covered mixing workflow in Logic Pro, focusing on why to avoid placing a limiter on the stereo output during the mixing process. Demonstrated how to use Logic's Summing Stack (Track Stack) feature to group and organize instrument buses, and walked through how to create and use a session template — including how to import tracks from an existing session — to save time when mixing multiple songs that share a similar track layout.

Covered top-down vs. bottom-up mixing philosophy and how to find the workflow that fits your process. Walked through a full vocal chain demonstration — EQ, stacked compression, de-essing, saturation, vocal doubling, ping-pong delay, and reverb bussing — with live examples on a vocal-and-guitar arrangement. Discussed automation as the final step that separates a functional mix from a finished one, along with mic selection, plosive control, and the value of low-stakes practice projects.

We worked on extracting chord progressions from electronic tracks purely by ear — no instruments allowed during the listening phase. The exercise focused on using the voice as an analytical tool: singing bass notes, tracing scale direction, identifying the tonic, and then doing a final instrument check to confirm. We worked through three tracks, identified their key centers and progressions, and connected the process to harmonic series concepts to explain why certain note relationships are so easy to hear.

We explored secondary dominants using a real-world example: the chord progression from "Hush" by The Marias (A minor 9 – D7 – G major 7 – G7). The central question was how to identify and label non-diatonic dominant seventh chords in a progression whose key center is itself ambiguous. Discussion moved through multiple analytical lenses — five-of-five, five-of-four, modal interchange, and 2-5-1 in a relative major — without settling on a single definitive answer, which itself became part of the lesson.