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Gear Wears Out

April 13, 2023 · Beat Kitchen · Recording Engineering

Hardware & Recording

This is a public service announcement from the people who like to sell you microphone stands. Please, please continue to adjust the stands without loosening the clutch, so that the clutch will wear out and they can keep selling you more microphone stands. Thanks again!

Tags: recording, microphone

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Recent Resident Gyms
- OFFICE HOURS: Worked through practical signal chain troubleshooting for electric guitar in a DAW environment — covering gain staging from interface input through amp and cabinet modeling, and how to identify where level issues are actually originating. Also touched on a music theory question around tonal gravity and key center, exploring why a chord progression built in A tends to pull toward D when it starts on the IV chord, and what techniques can help establish the intended tonic. Discord audio-sharing and screen-sharing workflows came up briefly as well.
- PRODUCTION-GYM: We used Tom Petty's *Wildflowers* as a production study, comparing the original home demo recordings to the final album to explore what restraint and omission look like as intentional production choices. The central question was: when a song arrives nearly fully formed, what is the producer's job — and why did they choose to leave certain things out? We also touched on the folk and blues traditions of shared musical vocabulary, the placeholder nature of demo sections, and the producer's role in helping an artist gain objectivity on their own work.
- PRODUCTION-GYM: We did a deep-dive breakdown of "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)" by Talking Heads, from the 1980 album *Remain in Light*, using Logic Pro's AI stem splitter to pull apart the drums, bass, and "other" elements. The session traced the song's Afrobeat DNA through Fela Kuti and James Brown, examined how the album was recorded (live jamming in the Caribbean, vocals overdubbed separately at Sigma Sound Studios in New York), and used the track as a jumping-off point for discussions about genre, rhythmic feel, copyright, and the creative value of loose, imprecise playing.
- EAR-TRAINING-GYM: We worked through a series of ear training exercises covering chord identification (including interval isolation, inversions, and dissonance), tempo recognition, DI vs. amp source identification, LFO waveform recognition by ear, and EQ analysis — specifically distinguishing a high shelf from a high-pass/low-pass cut and estimating its frequency and depth. The through-line across all exercises was the same core skill: isolating individual elements from a complex sound and naming them with increasing precision.
- THEORY-GYM: We took a deep dive into David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" (from *Scary Monsters*, 1980), tracing the song's unusual harmonic journey across multiple tonal centers — A-flat, B-flat, D-flat, and beyond. Rather than a single-key analysis, we mapped out the song's distinct vignettes, each with its own harmonic logic, and examined how Bowie's asymmetric phrasing, modal interchange, and tendency to lead with lyric over convention makes the song almost impossible to fake. We also touched on Tony Visconti's production approach and the value of combining active listening with formal harmonic analysis.
- OFFICE HOURS: We talked about how some things work on Dischord, to help Christian get his bearings being new here. We talked about what kinds of things are covered in office hours, and instrument gyms.
- WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE: We reviewed a handful of submitted beats this morning, with conversations ranging from the mechanics of guitar string maintenance to some genuinely deep territory around creative process, objectivity, and why the Beat Challenge works the way it does. Central themes included the danger of over-familiarizing yourself with your own work, the liberating power of removing naming pressure from your pieces, and the idea that making music is closer to journaling than to monument-building — a snapshot of who you were, not a permanent statement of who you are.
- THEORY-GYM: Breakdown of the Beatles' She's Leaving Home. Use of B Dorian, implication of different chords and cadences compared to B minor. Use of tension chords- Dominant 7th, Diminished and Sus chords. Analysis of chord and scale tones used in melody.
- EAR-TRAINING-GYM: This morning's gym was a keyboard practice exercise that focused on both the drop to voicing and the Barry. Harris diminished bebop scale system. This not only reinforces harmonic thinking within every scale, but cord identification and finger dexterity.
- THEORY-GYM: We explored Strawberry Fields Forever as a deep-dive analysis piece, working through its psychedelic production choices, unusual metric structure, and striking harmonic language — including line clichés, modal interchange, chromatic mediants, chord inversions, and figured bass. I also gave a live walkthrough of the Harmonic Synth tool, demonstrating how it visualizes the harmonic series, partials-based synthesis, and harmonic-aware tuning systems as a companion lens to the theory work.
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  Apr. 12, 1pm (PT) | 4pm (ET) | 9pm (UK)
- Weekly Beat Challenge: Nathan
  Apr. 13, 7am (PT) | 10am (ET) | 3pm (UK)
- Office Hours: Nathan
  Apr. 13, 9am (PT) | 12pm (ET) | 5pm (UK)
- Production Gym: Jon Mattox
  Apr. 13, 9pm (PT) | 12am (ET) | 5am (UK)
- Instrument Gym: Scott Hampton
  Apr. 14, 7am (PT) | 10am (ET) | 3pm (UK)
- Office Hours: Cinnamontal
  Apr. 14, 10am (PT) | 1pm (ET) | 6pm (UK)
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Upcoming Courses
- Apr 19, 2026 Theory: Musician Basics
- Apr 22, 2026 Mixing: Effects, Synths & Tools
- Apr 27, 2026 DAW Core Skills
- Apr 27, 2026 FL Studio
- May 23, 2026 Logic Pro 1-Day Intensive
- Jun 10, 2026 Hardware & Recording Primer
- Jul 8, 2026 Hardware & Recording Primer
- Jul 12, 2026 DAW Core Skills
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