VIDEOS AND MEDIA
Hear from our beat makers, producers, and instructors. Learn about our people and our programs.
Music Production Overview
We are putting together a class. It's limited to eight people.
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You'll start in Ableton Live... or Logic Pro.
Your choice.
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It doesn't matter where you are. We are going to teach you on your own screen.
Live.
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It doesn't matter who you are. If you are creative, there is a seat for you at our table.
Welcome to Beat Kitchen
a message from the founder
Beat Kitchen was created to be a place where creatives go to play with their food. We teach music production, live, in small classes. We don't give you a recipe; we teach you the foundation so that you can go out on your own and cook.
This is your school, it's not ours. It's about you learning the skills so that you can do what you want to do, and it's about you staying connected with the things that make you feel creative and inspired.
So why 'Beat Kitchen'? Well, it's not exactly a school — it's not exactly a residency. A kitchen is someplace special. Pretty much every home has one. It's a place where you can go and make a mess. You roll up your sleeves, you get your hands dirty, you iterate until you come away with something amazing.
We'll be introducing you to some of our instructors here and our programs. We hope you'll check it out and please get in touch if you'd like to be a part. Thanks!
Ableton Live: Core Skill
Ableton Certified Trainer, Charles Noel
Greetings! I'm Charles Noel. I am a certified Ableton trainer and specialist.
I like to play around with things like this Push. Ableton is my tool of choice in all of my music endeavors that involve recording inside the box.
You may know me as Archetype, a techno producer from 90s. I'm a bit old school as you can see in the background.
Throughout my travels around the world, not only was I a long-term DJ and producer, but i've also been a teacher and mentor in all that time as well — spreading the lovely gospel of Ableton and good music in general. See you around!
Synthesist's Masterclass
Intro by Marshall Moran
Hi. I'm Marshall Moran. I'm a synthesist, composer, sound-designer, producer, and an educator, now teaching at Beat Kitchen. At Beat Kitchen we keep the class sizes small and we don't pre-record any classes because we really want to take time to answer the questions that you might have. It's an exploratory space that functions kind of like a lab for your ideas.
The people that teach here are really excited to do it, and they're really passionate about what they do — myself included. It makes it a really enjoyable place to learn about something, but also really enjoyable place to teach about something because we have this constant dialogue going and we're kind of always learning from each other.
One way that you can learn from me is you can take a course in advanced synthesis where we go beyond basic subtractive and move out into the world of wavetable and granular synthesis and all sorts of advanced digital sampling. We talk about different types of physical modeling and get into some really cool stuff like analog frequency modulation and conceptual things like vector synthesis.
So if that's something that you think you'll be interested in — if you like bleeps and bloops and you want to be able to program your own sounds easily so that you don't have to rely on presets from any any other keyboard or anything specific and you can just walk into any studio and get the sound that you want — yeah this is definitely the class for you. I would totally recommend it if you want to be able to make your own kick drum sounds and bass sounds — this is the class for you. If you want to learn about how to enhance your acoustic drum sounds this is also kind of the class for you.
So I hope I see you there and welcome to Beat Kitchen!
Songwriting Masterclass
Intro by Mary Jennings
Hi. I'm Mary Jennings and I am a musician, a songwriter, a piano player, and a teacher!
I have been playing music and writing songs for over 20 years now and have toured and recorded and produced like ten albums now. I've worked with a lot of different artists and co-written. I've had songs placed in tv and film I've really enjoyed it and I still do it all the time.
Why do I want to teach? Because I want to create a community and I want people to know that no matter what stage you're in with music — maybe you've been playing music for a while, maybe you just like music and never touched an instrument — you can be a musician.
I think that as George Elliot was quoted saying, "it's never too late to be what you might have been", and if you just woke up one day and decided, "You know what? I want to be a musician!", I want to help you get to that.
If that's just writing songs, if that's playing songs, if it's just for yourself, for therapy, if it's because you want to go do an open mic, or if it's because you think you want to be the next mega star, I want to help you achieve that.
For me, there have been so many mentors and teachers along the way that have really changed my life and have made a huge impact to me, and it would mean a lot to me to be able to do the same thing for somebody else. That's why I want to teach.
Electronic Musician Kitchen
Intro by Alex Poselski
Hi. I'm Alex. I'm an electronic music producer and an instructor here at Beat Kitchen.
Electronic music is a vast world. If you were to ask somebody to imagine an electronic music track, they wouldn't really be able to point to any specific sound. It's unexpected. It's vast.
What really separates electronic music from all other music is... the electronics. And in this world of technology that we have, there's just so much that you can do. There's limitless possibilities.
In the audio world, I think of it as sculptor. You are able to sculpt audio waveforms exactly as you want them to be at exact moments in time so that they're replicated exactly every single time. This is something that hasn't been possible before in music, so it's a very interesting field to work in. It's almost a mixture of science and art.
I think electronic music needs more people in it and more people experimenting and more people exploring. I'm hoping that you'll join me in that exploration of the field.
Logic Pro: Core Skills
Intro by Nathan Rosenberg
Hello. Today I'd like to talk about Logic. Like all of our DAW labs, the Logic class opens the door to a whole world of music production. It's a really important class.
Our goal is to get you up and running as quickly as possible so that you can start learning things like mixing, sound design, and beat making. But this class isn't exactly about that.
Your DAW, and in this case Logic, is going to be your everyday tool — the one that you interact with constantly as you explore the craft of music production — so it's essential that you not only know it inside and out, but that you're comfortable enough to know what you can and can't do. It's like you need to have this feeling — like even if you don't know exactly how to do something, you need to know that you can do it and that it can be done, and then we want you to have a pretty good idea of how to go about doing it. You can't always know every single thing about every platform, so we want you to be able to intuit a lot of this stuff. So much of what we do in these classes is about workflow because that's going to really open up the door to everything that comes after.
I'm Nathan. I'm the the founder of the company and you'll see me all over this this website, i'm sure. But this is a class that I'm also probably likely to teach fairly often. I've been using Logic for over 20 years. I know it really, really well.
I love all of the DAWs that we teach, but Logic is close to my heart. It's really second nature to me. There are a few things I really like about it.
First of all, it's really, really flexible. It doesn't really matter if i want to sketch out a song idea or record a live band, or if I want to create some crazy sound design, Logic handles all those tasks. It also allows me to customize my workflow however I want. I really really appreciate that.
The second thing is that it comes with an astonishing amount of stuff. It's got really good content: whether it's effects and instruments or loops and and samples. I'm not saying you're never ever going to want to look outside or you're not going to want something fancier some day — maybe something more special, but my my personal feeling is that right out of the box, if you can't make a really really smoking track that's ready for prime time — and if you can't do that in whatever style you want to do it in — don't blame your tool. Logic comes with enough stuff that you should be able to do it. So either way we can help you with that. That's what this course is about (as you continue on), but the place you start is in understanding the workflow and capabilities of, in this case, Logic, and that's what you'll learn in my class.
FL Studio: Core Skills
Intro by Alex Poselski
Hi, I'm Alex. I'm an FL Studio instructor here at Beat Kitchen.
In your career as a music producer, there will be one tool which you go back to daily, and that is your digital audio workstation or DAW. FL Studio is one of the primary DAWs that people use in the music production world.
Despite its humble beginnings, FL Studio has grown over the years — and especially recently — to become toe to toe with major DAWs which were considered more professional (such as Ableton or Logic).
One of the primary strengths of FL Studio is its songwriting and arrangement workflow. It's less restrictive than other DAWs tend to be. It's more like having a sketch pad to jot ideas down quickly.
Now, the purpose of this course is to make you fluent in FL Studio so that you're not fighting with it in order to get those ideas down. Ideally, at the end of the course, you won't need to look into the manual unless you're doing something complex or niche.
Mastering a DAW is an exciting step in your journey as a music producer. I hope to see you there.
Guess what! You already KNOW music theory!
Intro by Nathan Rosenberg
You're here to learn about music theory and you're waiting for me to use words like locrian and neapolitan sixth. I've got some good news for you. You already know music theory! Because music theory is just the names for the things that sound right and wrong to you anyway. Like if i were to sing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and i went "mary had a little laaamb..." and you said that sounded terrible (which it did), music theory would just be the name for why.
So the bad news is that music theory is not going to be your get out of jail free card. This is not a tool that's going to write your next hit song for you, but what it will do is allow you to hear things more clearly and to identify patterns. And those patterns might be things like your favorite song on the radio or the thing you're humming while you're walking down the street — and that actually might be your next hit song. So it is a very very powerful tool.
What it isn't is a set of rules that i'm gonna make you follow. You're already following them!
It would be like grammar. If I didn't know how to read or write it wouldn't mean I didn't know how to speak. I could still express myself and string sentences together with nouns and verbs and make myself understood even if i didn't know which ones were the nouns and which ones were the verbs . So this is more about creating a dialogue we can use to express ourselves and describe the things we're hearing.
Now my approach might be a little unorthodox in this. I mean I'm certainly a musician and a music theory geek, but I come at this as a producer and an engineer, so my understanding of theory is also couched in my my understanding of acoustics, the harmonic series, and getting my ideas into my recording platform as quickly as possible. So that's what we're after here.
I'm hoping that in the coming classes we can explore what some of these words are and maybe we can even talk about the Neapolitan sixth... which is a first inversion of a flat two chord... but whatever. Let's dig into that one another time. Until then i'll see you around!