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Hip Hop Kitchen

Hip Hop Served Up Here

In this course learn how to create unique beats for your tracks. Instructors will cover basic structure, sound design, and mixing techniques for producing artist-ready beats. Having a collection of personally crafted beats gives any artist a powerful toolbox useful in a variety of situations

Key Topics

Hip Hop served up here.

Kitchens are where beat-makers get their hands dirty. It’s where creatives go to play with their food.

In this course learn how to create unique beats for your tracks. Instructors will cover basic structure, sound design, and mixing techniques for producing artist-ready beats. Having a collection of personally crafted beats gives any artist a powerful toolbox useful in a variety of situations.

Key Topics:

Looping
Sequencing
Mixing Electronic Instruments
Hooks
Designing Drums
Vocal FX
Sample Organization and Maintenance
Hardware Samplers
Pre-Mixing Beats For Studio Sessions

Prerequisites: DAW Core Skills or equivalent proficiency in your platform.

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What students say

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Nathan is Very knowledgeable and passionate about music. he has a ton of experience as an engineer and producer he plays piano and understands all the notes logic pro that is what i will be doing next. .looking forward to the classes

—Don, Vancouver, BC

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Great class! Lots of comparisons and smilies that relate well to the concepts being explained. Getting to see the concepts in-action at the piano was fun!

—Rose, New York, NY

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I recently took a music theory workshop with Nathan. He is super knowledgeable and also a great teacher. Music theory is often confusing and intimidating for me but he used a lot of great analogies to make the concepts more digestible.

—Devynn, Seattle, WA

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I took the “FX, Synthesis, and Mix Primer” class, and it was amazing! This class covers all types of effects, such as EQ, reverb, delay, compression, tremolos, phasers, etc. Not only does the class teach what the effects are and how to use

—Eric, Wisconsin

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Very kind and helpful!

—Izzy

Explore Classes

Office Hours Weekly. Ask questions, get help, and connect. Included with residency. Production Gym Weekly. Production breakdown of your favorite songs. Included with residency. Theory Gym Weekly. Morning music theory workout. Included with residency. Ear Training Weekly. Test your ears and discuss — music, mixing, and more. Included with residency. Instrument Gym Weekly. Practice and workout on instruments. Included with residency. Weekly Beat Review Weekly. Listen to Beat Challenge song ideas together. Included with residency.

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Beat Building Jam Workshop ideas into songs. Peer feedback. Instructor support. Prep for production Mix Incubator Your lab for carrying a track across the finish line — the forcing function that turns a produced or recorded song into … Production Incubator Your lab for turning a song into a finished production — the forcing function that leaves you with a track ready for the … Recording Incubator Your lab for capturing real performances of your song — the forcing function that leaves you with recordings ready for … Songwriting Incubator Your lab for getting a song started and out the door — the forcing function that leaves you with a draft ready for the …

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Beat Kitchen At-A-Glance

Beat Ktichen Calendar

See the full calendar
Recent Resident Gyms
- THEORY-GYM: We explored the jazz "real book" tradition — the corpus of standards, show tunes, and select pop songs that jazz musicians have historically drawn from — and examined why certain non-jazz songs earn a place in that lexicon. Using Michelle (Beatles), Yesterday (Beatles), and a Stevie Wonder song as case studies, we analyzed what harmonic features make a song attractive to jazz interpretation: four-note chord voicings, two-five-one progressions, stand-ins and substitutions for the five chord, and the absence of a dominant chorus structure. We also walked through how to read a lead sheet, including repeat signs, codas, and D.S. al Coda navigation.
- OFFICE HOURS: Worked through a live demo build of a custom synthesizer instrument, exploring string partial modeling, formant locking, and granular playback modes. Covered the acoustics of formants — how resonant peaks define vowel sounds and how locking formants enables pitch-independent vowel shaping. Also explored routing limitations when combining live audio input, sample playback, and the vocoder-style excitation path, identifying a specific bypass architecture needed to resolve the conflict.
- WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE: Reviewed submitted beats from multiple students, including pieces by Paul and John, and spent extended time on detailed feedback for Josephine's track. Also demonstrated formant shifting using a custom-built plugin called Harmonic, walking through how formant sculpting and spectral shifting work in practice.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE: Reviewed a full original song submission from Josephine alongside additional pieces in the beat bucket. Feedback centered on restrained mixing philosophy — vocal leveling without heavy compression, minimal effects processing, and how to approach bringing in a live drummer without pre-loading their ear. Also demonstrated new Harmonic plugin functionality using piano sample scrubbing and inharmonicity modeling, and briefly covered sampler round-robin techniques for vocal sample variation.
- OFFICE HOURS: working with clients, mixing vs production
Learn more about Residency
Upcoming Resident Events
- Theory Gym: Nathan
  Oct. 11,
- Ear Training: Jon Mattox
  Oct. 13,
- Office Hours: Cato Zane
  Oct. 13,
- Theory Gym: Jon Mattox
  Oct. 13,
- Production Gym: Jam
  Oct. 14,
- Weekly Beat Challenge: Nathan
  Oct. 14,
Learn more about Residency
Upcoming Courses
- Apr 27, 2026 DAW Core Skills
- May 23, 2026 Logic Pro 1-Day Intensive
- Jun 8, 2026 Mixing: Effects, Synths & Tools
- Jun 10, 2026 Hardware & Recording Primer
- Jul 8, 2026 Hardware & Recording Primer
- Jul 12, 2026 DAW Core Skills
- Jul 12, 2026 Theory: Musician Basics
- Jul 15, 2026 FL Studio
See All Courses
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