Office Hours

Recent Sessions

• Thu, Apr 23, 2026 Jam Phelps 2 attended

  So many audio questions today. alot about recording and mixing with busses

• Thu, Apr 23, 2026 Jon Mattox 2 attended

  We welcomed a new resident, Hind, who shared a compelling a cappella vocal work-in-progress featuring layered harmonies and an unconventional phrase structure (alternating bars of three, four, and five). The session became a wide-ranging conversation about developing a production ear — listening deeply to music you love, building shared vocabulary with collaborators, and honoring the raw energy of first ideas. We also touched on the unique perspective drummers bring to production, and how to communicate effectively with musicians when your vocabulary is still developing.

• Thu, Apr 23, 2026 Cato Zane 2 attended

  We spent this afternoon's office hours digging into shoegaze guitar production — specifically how to build dense, washy reverb textures without washing out the mix — alongside a chord progression puzzle a student is working through. Covered the Abbey Road reverb bussing technique, compressor attack as a front-to-back placement tool, layering multiple reverb buses with different characters, and the Temperance reverb plugin's pitch-aware reverb capabilities. Also touched on AI vocal/instrument generation tools (Ace Studio, Cantai) and notation workflow in the context of large-scale music publishing.

• Thu, Apr 23, 2026 Nathan 7 attended

  Worked through a range of student questions during open office hours, covering song transcription and chord analysis (using "Let" by Pine Grove as a live example), arrangement strategy for building and sustaining interest over time, the physics of consonance and dissonance, the harmonic series, equal temperament vs. just intonation, and the phenomenon of inharmonicity in piano strings. Also explored found sound and percussion identification, the relationship between rhythm and harmony across the frequency spectrum, and a demonstration of barometric data sonified as audio.

• Wed, Apr 22, 2026 Jon Mattox 5 attended

  We used this afternoon's office hours to orient new and returning students, answer questions about course placement, and revisit the core ideas from the first Music Theory class. The central demonstration walked through the harmonic series on a live synthesizer with an equalizer, showing how a single note already contains the building blocks of a chord — and why certain inversions feel more stable than others due to physics, not convention. We also talked broadly about what music theory actually is: a language for shared experience, not a rulebook.