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 drum phase alignment during mixing — specifically how to check and correct phase on kick and snare channels using an EQ phase flip, and how to prioritize which drum elements to address when full phase correction isn't achievable. Also addressed questions about music industry structure for independent artists, including the practical and legal considerations around registering music and setting up a record label entity.
-
Covered the Neapolitan sixth cadence in depth, tracing its relationship to the Andalusian cadence, the circle of fourths, Picardy thirds, and secondary subdominants. Walked through a tempo change workflow in Logic Pro, demonstrating how to insert and verify a BPM change on a MIDI session. Also reviewed a student's first mixing attempt on a vocal track, addressing EQ gain staging, high-frequency rolloff, low-end management, and the principle of using faders before EQ before compression.
-
Covered Logic Pro workflow strategies for multi-take recording, including take folders, track alternatives, and building a manual comp from copied regions. Demonstrated key Logic settings that are off by default — right-click tool assignment, marquee tool click zones, and fade tool click zones — and showed how the cycle/loop region combined with undo can serve as a lightweight punch-and-repeat workflow. Also addressed mapping control surface triggers to transport commands so a foot pedal can stand in for keyboard shortcuts during live recording.
-
Worked through mixing challenges on a live tracking session recorded in Ecuador — a 16-song project with guitars, bass, and drums. Covered fader-setting fundamentals before compression and EQ, sidechain compression between kick and bass, region gain as an alternative to volume automation, and parallel distortion as an approach to recovering sub-bass content from an extended-range bass instrument. Also discussed multing as an organizational strategy for handling tonal variation across a bass performance.
-
Listened to David's new tracks. He is experimenting with Ableton. Went over some new stuff in his studio, and talked about distribution. I recommended one of the songs as something that caught my ear to develop more. Standish came in with 15-20 minutes left. We talked about his new studio setup, and listened to David's tracks. He suggested another song idea to develop that caught his ear. We talked about distribution a little more, and goals for releasing music. We recommended Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Distrokid as three places to look based on his goals.
All resident events are included with your Beat Kitchen Residency.
Learn About Residency
