My newest music student is a gentleman named Rob Precht. As is increasingly the case with people I teach privately, Rob lives many time zones away, and he and I have never met face to face. Instead, we’ve been conducting lessons via a combination of Skype and Splice. It’s the first really practical remote music teaching method I’ve used, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Rob came to me via this very blog. He’s a semi-retired lawyer who took some piano lessons as a kid but doesn’t have much other music training or experience. He approached me because he wanted to compose original music, and he thought (correctly) that computer-based production would be the best way to go about it. He had made a few tracks with GarageBand, but quickly switched over to Ableton Live after hearing me rave about it. We decided that the best approach would be to have him just continue to stumble through making original tracks, and I would help him refine and develop them.
As a devout constructivist, I believe that making original work is the best way to learn music (or any other creative skill.) Music is fun, but it requires repetitive practice and the mastery of a lot of technical details. If you have a personal stake in the music you’re working on, you’ll be better motivated to push through, especially during the difficult early stages. Even if you have no ambition to create original material, real-life creative music-making is still an excellent way to learn because of the way it engages your entire self.
Rob wants to tackle the full stack of music theory, composition, and audio production. I would have a terrible time trying to structure all of that material into a sequential curriculum. Fortunately, I don’t have to. We can just address concepts as we come to them in the natural course of working on tracks. Rob doesn’t need to absorb a lot of decontextualized information whose value he has to take on faith. Every new concept he learns solves a specific creative or practical problem, so its value is obvious.
During our weekly lessons, I open up a track that Rob has been working on, and remix it for him in real time, explaining what I’m doing and why. I share my screen so he can see what I’m doing. Unfortunately, I can’t send my system sound to him directly; I just blast my speakers into the computer mic. It would be nice if this workaround wasn’t necessary, especially because of the poor sound quality. But screen sharing with audio seems to be a difficult problem, and I’ve never been able to find a better solution.
Here’s how the lessons actually go. Because Rob has had no trouble getting the hang of Ableton, he’s confidently plowed ahead with making full songs, drawing mainly on the loops and samples that came with the program. So far, he’s made a new track for each lesson. I listen through the full mix once, and then listen to each track in isolation, starting with the drums. I make changes to the patterns, mostly removing beats and notes to create some space, or moving events from strong beats to weak ones to create more of the syncopation that suits Rob’s jazzy sensibility. Then we address the track’s structure. Rob has a better instinct for musical form than most beginners, probably due to his lifetime of listening. Rather than trying to build a structure from scratch, I mostly helping Rob tighten things up, and to find smoother transitions and more graceful intros and endings. Finally, we listen back to the full track with an ear for mix, EQ, and other timbral considerations.
Splice is the key to this pedagogical remix process. It’s like Github for electronic music production, a way to work on files without having to manually keep track of which version is which. Rob stores his Ableton sessions on the site, and I access them as a collaborator. Storing files in the cloud isn’t particularly special; we could just as easily send session files back and forth using Dropbox or Google Drive. What sets Splice apart is version control. Every time I hit Save, a new version of the session is backed up to the cloud. Rob can see and open any version. He can step through the evolution of the track forwards and backwards at his leisure. We don’t have to worry about documentation or note-taking because the whole process is neatly represented in the versions. Most interestingly, if Rob likes some of the changes I’ve made but not others, he can fork off a particular version and use it as the basis for a new work.
Version control as a concept is not new to music, though few musicians refer to it by that name. Usually we just call it “being organized.” Managing the files in a big collaborative project like an album or film score is a major task. Studios and producers commonly hire people whose sole job is keeping everything organized. The highest-level professionals develope meticulous file management systems. If this all doesn’t sound like it would come naturally to musicians, well, it doesn’t. The kind of personality that’s good at coming up with musical ideas is generally not the kind that is good at managing spreadsheets. Anything we can do to automate the housekeeping aspects of music production is a blessing.
The remix is my preferred method of compositional critique. What better vocabulary is there for discussing music than music itself? I’m excited by the ability to preserve each step in the remix process, not just the end result. Networked collaboration with version control has enormous potential for the classroom, not just one-on-one lessons. An exercise called Musical Shares was a smash hit with my Music Tech 101 students at Montclair State University last semester. I could imagine longer and deeper collaborative composition and remixing projects using groups of varying sizes. I’m tempted to spend the entire semester doing nothing else. I certainly plan to conduct all of my future private lessons this way.
By the way, if you’d like to take some lessons, get in touch.