Office Hours
Weekly. Ask questions, get help, and connect. Included with residency.
Drop in with questions, get real-time help from an instructor, or just connect with other residents. Office Hours are your open door to the Beat Kitchen community.
Upcoming Sessions
Recent Sessions
-
Covered mastering fundamentals in an office hours context, including peak limiting, LUFS targets, loudness matching across an album, and multiband compression for mid-side and frequency-specific control. Also worked through a specific guitar rhythm challenge — the train beat feel — with Alee, demonstrating how the upstroke placement on beats two and four creates the characteristic gallop pattern, and discussed drum recording pass-by-pass versus full-kit capture. Additional topics included ear health, hearing protection, tape saturation plugins, and professional portfolio practices for mix and mastering engineers.
-
Covered pre-mastering mix preparation, including gain staging, LUFS metering, true peak reading, and strategies for managing dynamic peaks in choruses. Discussed top-down mixing with a mastering chain in place, the value of separating the mix and mastering stages into distinct sessions, and plugin installation troubleshooting on macOS (Ventura and Tahoe), including AAX path resolution, security/privacy settings, and risks associated with unvetted plugins.
-
mixing vocals, listening to a student song and giving feedback, editing mouth sounds and plosives, sidechaining and all the different ways you can use it
-
Covered recent updates to Logic Pro and the friction they introduce for experienced users — specifically the reorganized content library, changes to Drum Kit Designer, and multi-output routing. Also discussed a past project involving a video-sequencing app with a custom scripting language for audio and video, and briefly touched on Ableton's video sampling capabilities.
-
Covered mix feedback and hands-on low-end mixing technique in this office hours session. Worked through frequency balance, kick/bass separation using the boost-and-scoop method, saturation for transient punch, vocal stacking EQ issues, and ear fatigue from monitoring too loud. Also addressed song structure and intro length as it relates to listener retention.
All resident events are included with your Beat Kitchen Residency.
Learn About Residency
