Full Week Schedule

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  Sun, Oct 4 Theory Gym Start your day at the 'gym' with a morning music theory workout w/ Nathan ·
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  Mon, Oct 5 Weekly Beat Challenge Gather and listen to anyone's Beat Challenge song ideas -- just for fun w/ Nathan ·
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  Mon, Oct 5 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect. w/ Nathan ·
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  Mon, Oct 5 Production Gym Start your day at the 'gym' with a production breakdown of your favorite songs w/ Cinnamon ·
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  Tue, Oct 6 Instrument Gym Practice and workout on instruments! w/ Nathan ·
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  Tue, Oct 6 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect. w/ Nathan ·
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  Tue, Oct 6 Ear Training Test your ears and discuss - Music, Mixing and more! w/ Nathan ·
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  Wed, Oct 7 Theory Gym Start your day at the 'gym' with a morning music theory workout w/ Nathan ·
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  Wed, Oct 7 Weekly Beat Challenge Gather and listen to anyone's Beat Challenge song ideas -- just for fun w/ Nathan ·
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  Thu, Oct 8 Office Hours Ask questions, get help, and connect. w/ Nathan ·

What We Covered Recently

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  WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE Covered bass-line thinking and how to approach bass as an instrument versus emulating it on keys, with a walkthrough of walking bass lines, landing chord tones on strong beats, and directional scale motion. Worked through the caterpillar exercise in depth — shell voicings, third-stacking, and chord substitution — as a framework for building keyboard facility in any key. Also addressed producer perspective: the risks of over-producing familiar material, the limits of metrics-based listening, and how perception shapes what we hear versus what is actually there.
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  OFFICE HOURS Covered a real-world case study in salvaging a poorly recorded garage demo: stem splitting for drum replacement/triggering, cymbal replacement using personal one-shots, re-amping guitars through virtual amps, high-passing for bleed reduction, and heavy vocal processing including noise removal, tuning, saturation, and slap-back delay. Also discussed audio delivery formats (bit depth, streaming platform requirements), Reaper workflow tips for cross-project plugin copying, mastering consistency across singles and albums, drum programming philosophy for producers, and drum fill construction for non-drummers.
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  WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE Reviewed several pieces submitted to the Beat Challenge folder, including works by Christian and Angela, with discussion of chord voicings and song structure. Also heard a work-in-progress song featuring vocals, live instrumentation, and MIDI horn tracks in development. Much of the session involved troubleshooting audio playback issues with uploaded files before pieces could be evaluated.
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  PRODUCTION-GYM Worked through a sim mastering session on one of Josephine's productions ("Endlessness"), covering the full workflow from initial gain staging to click removal, drum bus compression, and kick/bass frequency balancing. Also opened the session with reference track listening — analyzing production choices, arrangement credits, and recording technique on a contemporary track.
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  THEORY-GYM We used "Our House" by Madness as a lens for analyzing a single recurring chord progression — one chord, one minor five, one minor two, one minor four — and examined how the band built an entire multi-section song from it. We also listened to a second track as a comparison piece, tracing similar techniques: modal borrowing, distant modulations, and fragmentary quoting of familiar progressions broken before resolution.

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