WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE:Covered bass-line thinking and how to approach bass as an instrument versus emulating it on keys, with a walkthrough of walking bass lines, landing chord tones on strong beats, and directional scale motion. Worked through the caterpillar exercise in depth — shell voicings, third-stacking, and chord substitution — as a framework for building keyboard facility in any key. Also addressed producer perspective: the risks of over-producing familiar material, the limits of metrics-based listening, and how perception shapes what we hear versus what is actually there.
OFFICE HOURS:Covered a real-world case study in salvaging a poorly recorded garage demo: stem splitting for drum replacement/triggering, cymbal replacement using personal one-shots, re-amping guitars through virtual amps, high-passing for bleed reduction, and heavy vocal processing including noise removal, tuning, saturation, and slap-back delay. Also discussed audio delivery formats (bit depth, streaming platform requirements), Reaper workflow tips for cross-project plugin copying, mastering consistency across singles and albums, drum programming philosophy for producers, and drum fill construction for non-drummers.
WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE:Reviewed several pieces submitted to the Beat Challenge folder, including works by Christian and Angela, with discussion of chord voicings and song structure. Also heard a work-in-progress song featuring vocals, live instrumentation, and MIDI horn tracks in development. Much of the session involved troubleshooting audio playback issues with uploaded files before pieces could be evaluated.
PRODUCTION-GYM:Worked through a sim mastering session on one of Josephine's productions ("Endlessness"), covering the full workflow from initial gain staging to click removal, drum bus compression, and kick/bass frequency balancing. Also opened the session with reference track listening — analyzing production choices, arrangement credits, and recording technique on a contemporary track.
THEORY-GYM:We used "Our House" by Madness as a lens for analyzing a single recurring chord progression — one chord, one minor five, one minor two, one minor four — and examined how the band built an entire multi-section song from it. We also listened to a second track as a comparison piece, tracing similar techniques: modal borrowing, distant modulations, and fragmentary quoting of familiar progressions broken before resolution.
WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE:Reviewed a full original song submission from Josephine alongside additional pieces in the beat bucket. Feedback centered on restrained mixing philosophy — vocal leveling without heavy compression, minimal effects processing, and how to approach bringing in a live drummer without pre-loading their ear. Also demonstrated new Harmonic plugin functionality using piano sample scrubbing and inharmonicity modeling, and briefly covered sampler round-robin techniques for vocal sample variation.
OFFICE HOURS:working with clients, mixing vs production
WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE:Reviewed beats submitted by Christian and Jon, covering synth architecture, rhythmic analysis, and production technique. Discussed triad pairs, three-two clave, and syncopation as compositional tools applicable to both performance and production. Announced a one-week delay to the upcoming production class, pushing the start date from September 16 to September 23.
OFFICE HOURS:Covered bass guitar EQ fundamentals, including the counterintuitive principle of boosting highs and cutting lows to help bass cut through a mix. Discussed tape emulation in mastering, specifically the Slate Digital Virtual Tape Machine and its use as a subtle glue and saturation tool.
WEEKLY-BEAT-CHALLENGE:Reviewed two submitted works this morning: Paul's "Driftwood," an atmospheric guitar-based piece processed through layered filter effects, and Josephine's newly written vocal-piano song. Discussion centered on restraint in production — specifically, the risk of overproducing early-stage material before the songwriter has fully lived with it. Nathan performed a brief section of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Gonna Rain Today" as a reference point for how orchestral arrangement can serve a simple song without obscuring it, and credited the orchestral arrangement to Van Dyke Parks. A technical thread with Jon on rhythmic displacement and MIDI tempo-slowing techniques rounded out the session, along with a brief discussion on vinyl mastering and audio-video sync.
