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
- Aug 04 Kallie
- Aug 06 Cato Zane
- Aug 06 Ben Krueger
- Aug 10 Jam
- Aug 11 Scott Hampton
- Aug 13 Scott Hampton
Recent Sessions
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Covered an overview of the upcoming songwriting class format — six weeks of generative writing exercises, peer feedback, and working toward a completed piece. Walked through the Chordal ear training app in a live demo, including the interval identification game, chord density exercises, and a new harmony wheel mode in development. Discussed interval ambiguity, specifically why major and minor sixths are consistently the most misidentified intervals, with reference to tournament data collected from recent playtesting.
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Covered a range of topics including video editing workflows in Logic Pro, stereo microphone technique for acoustic guitar, microphone selection philosophy (bright vs. dark mics, large vs. small diaphragm), and a live walkthrough of the Cordal app's multiplayer chord-identification game. Also worked through chord voicing options for a student's song project, including a Montuno-style bass line demonstration.
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Covered the songwriting process from multiple angles, including working from musical ideas versus lyrics-first approaches, and how to treat early lyric fragments as rhythmic and melodic raw material rather than finished writing. Demonstrated a harmonic resynthesizer plugin — showing its partial manipulation, re-synthesis from audio input, and LFO-driven freeze/playback mechanics. Also reviewed a student's original recording and discussed vocal doubling in the style of Elliott Smith.
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Covered video export workflows in DaVinci Resolve for social media, focusing on resolving resolution mismatches between vertical and horizontal footage when posting to Instagram. Also discussed project organization strategies and ADHD-related focus and productivity resources, including a task management app demo and a book recommendation.
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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.
All resident events are included with your Beat Kitchen Residency.
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