People Teaching Music Production

We worked through a full ear training gym this morning covering timbre identification, effects recognition, classic drum machine sounds, and melodic interval training. Students listened to and identified three flavors of electric guitar (dry, amped, and amped with effects), steel-string vs. nylon-string acoustic guitar, reverb vs. delay, and four iconic drum machines — the TR-808, TR-909, LinnDrum, and Prince's LD variant. We closed with a pitch warm-up and interval identification exercise, then applied everything to a brief listening analysis of Herbie Hancock's *Headhunters*.

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 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.