Addison Road

It’s that time of year again - another semester finished, and time to grade the final projects. This used to be a bittersweet thing, knowing that just as these students were getting to really understand how to use technology in musical ways, I had to pass them off to the rest of the faculty, and never get to teach them again. Now, though, I get to see them again their final year, when they take the Studio Production course. Instead of being wistful, I start to get excited about what these freshman are going to be capable of in 4 years.

So, here’s this year’s round of “Best Of”. I’m grading all day today, so I’ll keep adding to this post as I go along. Enjoy!

(As a reminder, I’m posting these here just as a “Hey, check out this cool stuff my students are doing,” not as a “Hey, all of my highly talented professional musician friends, please harshly critique these earnest attempts at doing what you do.”)

Intro to Music Tech

“100 Years”, programmed and recorded by Mason Schroder. Mason doesn’t play keyboards so, being stubborn, he inserted every single note in the piano part using the mouse and the matrix grid. Yup. That’s like rebuilding the bay bridge using legos.

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“Drowning in Shallow Love”, by Kenton Fukuda. This is an arrangement of a song performed by his band Twentyfour64. Check the vocals; that kid has pipes.

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Production Techniques

This is the class where the students do absolutely everything - songwriting, arranging, contracting musicians, engineering the session, mixdown, the whole kit. Usually, it involves quite a bit of innovation on their part to get the whole thing done with limited studio resources and no money. This semester was the best to day, in terms of overall quality of the final product. Here are the standouts:

“Tiny Soldiers” by the production team RiCE/BeANS, written by Scott Ryan.

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“Aunque Gigantes” by the team RiCE/BeANS, arranged and produced by Alejandro Martinez, who might be one of the best students I’ve ever had. Smart, humble, eager, and talented. May his tribe increase.

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“Mud In My Eyes” by Production Team 2 (they didn’t come up with a fancy name). This is almost entirely the work of Robbie DeLong (who also sings on it). He spent this last summer interning with Chris Steffen out at Eldorado.

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