People Teaching Music Production

We set out this evening to explore an ear training exercise built around drum-swap comparisons — taking a recognizable song and replacing its original drum track with drums from other songs to hear how groove and texture shape the feel of a piece. Technical audio-sharing issues prevented the planned playback from happening, so the session shifted into open conversation while troubleshooting was attempted. The drum-swap concept and its creative/educational potential were introduced and will be revisited in a future session once the audio routing is sorted out.

We explored the intersection of sight-reading, improvisation, and musical fluency, using a jazz standard transcription as a springboard for discussing how to build vocabulary on guitar. Covered the language-learning analogy as a framework for understanding immersion versus structured study, and talked through practical approaches like slowing down transcriptions, playing over chord changes with single chord tones, and using cover projects as vehicles for deep musical study. Discussed how to narrow down long-term goals into short-term actionable targets, and previewed a future jam exercise where we'd work on improvising melody over moving changes.

We worked through the Logic Pro signal chain hierarchy — channel strip settings, plugin-level presets, and the lesser-used Performance patch format — clarifying when and why to save at each level. Covered the general philosophy of starting with a blank slate rather than loading full library presets, and discussed field recording as a creative practice including microphone options for capturing real-world ambience.

We talked about how some things work on Dischord, to help Christian get his bearings being new here. We talked about what kinds of things are covered in office hours, and instrument gyms.

David Bowie - Space oddity: Production, songwriting, and recording. We compared three different versions. The original and Demo from the late 60's, and the remade version from 1979.

We talked about producing for other artists and some of the steps required to practice doing so, artist residencies, and going from thinking to doing.