Office Hours

Recent Sessions

• Mon, Jul 13, 2026 Jam Phelps 3 attended

  Covered drum programming fundamentals — anatomy of a drum kit, how to layer kick and snare samples, and how to vary a beat between verse and chorus. Gave detailed feedback on a fully produced hip-hop track, focusing on kick presence, vocal level, stereo width, and multi-band compression on the vocal.

• Tue, Jul 07, 2026 Nathan 3 attended

  Worked on a new feature in the harmonic synth that allows importing a sample, treating it as a set of partials, folding and reconstituting it through quad filters — essentially re-synthesis from a recorded source. Identified and resolved a polyphony bug in the release stage where a stale glide event was causing monophonic behavior on note release. Also scheduled the upcoming Songwriting Incubator session, targeting a Wednesday evening slot approximately two weeks out.

• Thu, Jul 02, 2026 Cato Zane 4 attended

  Covered mic selection and placement for acoustic instruments, gain staging and signal flow through a DAW and hardware mixer, the difference between mic/instrument/line/speaker levels and how DI boxes work, and parallel effects routing using sends and aux tracks instead of in-line plugin mix knobs. Also addressed stem vs. track-out terminology and audio-level distortion management at different points in the signal chain.

• Thu, Jul 02, 2026 Kallie 2 attended

  We worked through melody writing — specifically how to get unstuck when chord progressions are in place but melodies aren't coming. Covered approaches including intuitive exploration without theory constraints, patch tweaking for playability, learning other artists' melodies as vocabulary building, and when and how to break outside the scale. Students also discussed studying specific artists — including Django Reinhardt and George Benson — as a way to internalize melodic phrasing and style. We also talked about different kinds of audio interfaces, and explored potential ways to link up more than one audio interface at a time to maximize inputs.

• Thu, Jul 02, 2026 Jon Mattox 2 attended

  Covered mixing workflow in Logic Pro, focusing on why to avoid placing a limiter on the stereo output during the mixing process. Demonstrated how to use Logic's Summing Stack (Track Stack) feature to group and organize instrument buses, and walked through how to create and use a session template — including how to import tracks from an existing session — to save time when mixing multiple songs that share a similar track layout.