Introduction to Music Production with Loudon Stearns by Berklee College of Music

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Lowden Sterns I teach at Berkeley College of Music in Boston and I also teach for Berkeley's continuing education division Berkeley music.com my focus at Berkeley and on Berkeley music.com is training independent musicians to create music in their home Studios on a much smaller scale than the big kind of mixing board that we have right here the truth is the industry is moving towards smaller Production Studios and the thing is it just requires us all to know so much there's all these music production tools that you really need to understand to be able to make the most of whatever size uh Studio you're working with and this course is designed to give you that kind of broad overview of all the important music production tools and in studying the tools you learn about the music production process itself so we'll look at the tools necessary to uh record edit mix and even create uh your own music the course is laid out pretty much along the music production process and we studi the tools involved at each one of those stages so after we look at some of the basic fundamentals of sound and tamber we'll move on to the recording process and we'll look at the important tools there including microphones microphone preamps converters interfaces and the computer itself and then finally output to uh your speakers and the idea is to look at every little Link in the chain because it's amazing how many different formats and conversions the sound has to go through uh between the microphone into the computer and back out to your speakers once your music is recorded you're going to have to kind of edit it and sequence it and put it in order and that's what the digital audio workstation or Daw is for there are a wide variety of excellent software packages that allow you to take your music divide it into small pieces and rearrange it um in any way you see fit and we're going to look at the the functions that are available in all Daws including cutting pasting splicing crossfading and automating and then we'll look at that final bounce or kind of mix down to stereo file procedure um that is so important you find that when you know how to use the mixing board it becomes an incredibly creative space and that's kind of the goal with with this lesson in the course is we're going to see how we can use the mixing board in a creative way and we'll cover the major fundamentals of it which is like mute solo panning which seems so simple but really is complex sends and returns and inserts and we'll look at various ways we can try to create depth in a mix and width and create space for all the important elements in your music The Mixing process includes more tools than just a mixing board provides while a mixing board lets us uh change the volume and sum our audio together the audio itself must be manipulated or processed to fit the context of music so we're going to look at the Dynamics processors uh Gates compressors limiters and expanders we're going to look at frequency based devices like eqs and filters and delay devices such as choruses phasers flangers uh stereo delays synchronized delays and reverbs and we're going to look at how they can be used to create space and depth within your mix the last week of this course is a little bit of a departure but I think it's an important one and that we're going to look at one of the major contemporary electronic music tools which is the synthesizer and we'll look at the major modules that form synthesis which is going to be your oscillator filter and amplifier envelope and LFO and yes great music can be created without synthesizers but the great thing about learning synthesis is that it gives you a language to describe sound and a language to describe the evolution of sound the music production process is really about creativity and that creativity will stay in your head until you have the tools and the knowledge to express it to the world and this course will give you the overall concepts of what tools are necessary to create music on any size Studio from the home studio to a large studio and so you're going to bring the creativity you'll bring the dedication we'll bring the knowledge and we're also going to supply an amazing Community where you can go beyond the classwork and talk with thousands of people about music production for the time you're with us so I'm excited to get going and let's make some great music together