live music production community and classes
Full Week Schedule
- Sun, Apr 12 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect.
- Mon, Apr 13 Weekly Beat Challenge Gather and listen to anyone's Beat Challenge song ideas -- just for fun
- Mon, Apr 13 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect.
- Mon, Apr 13 Production Gym Start your day at the 'gym' with a production breakdown of your favorite songs
- Tue, Apr 14 Instrument Gym Practice and workout on instruments!
- Tue, Apr 14 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect.
- Tue, Apr 14 Ear Training Test your ears and discuss - Music, Mixing and more!
- Wed, Apr 15 Production Gym Start your day at the 'gym' with a production breakdown of your favorite songs
- Wed, Apr 15 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect.
- Thu, Apr 16 Ear Training Test your ears and discuss - Music, Mixing and more!
- Thu, Apr 16 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect.
- Thu, Apr 16 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect.
What We Covered Recently
- 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.