Office Hours
Weekly. Ask questions, get help, and connect. Included with residency.
Drop in with questions, get real-time help from an instructor, or just connect with other residents. Office Hours are your open door to the Beat Kitchen community.
Upcoming Sessions
- Oct 13 Cato Zane
- Oct 15 Jam
- Oct 19 Scott Hampton
- Oct 20 Nathan
- Oct 22 Ben Krueger
- Oct 26 Nathan
Recent Sessions
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Covered lead sheet and chart-writing fundamentals — including form notation, repeat signs, segno/coda navigation, and fitting a full arrangement onto a single page — using a Michelle (Beatles/jazz standard) chart as a worked example. Discussed drum kit curation workflows in Logic Pro, specifically how to audition and assemble multiple kits before committing sounds to Drum Machine Designer. Also ran a live vocal review session, listening for pitch offenses in two harmony parts drawn from a live dress rehearsal recording.
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Worked through a song revision with Christian, focusing on song structure, melodic differentiation between sections, harmonic rhythm, and the "cotter pin" problem — the moment where a pre-chorus and chorus share nearly identical chord progressions and melodic contours, making the transition between them feel stagnant rather than like a lift. Also covered a Logic Pro SMPTE-lock technique for safely halving tempo without displacing regions, and addressed a mixer visibility bug.
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Worked through a live demo build of a custom synthesizer instrument, exploring string partial modeling, formant locking, and granular playback modes. Covered the acoustics of formants — how resonant peaks define vowel sounds and how locking formants enables pitch-independent vowel shaping. Also explored routing limitations when combining live audio input, sample playback, and the vocoder-style excitation path, identifying a specific bypass architecture needed to resolve the conflict.
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Covered a real-world case study in salvaging a poorly recorded garage demo: stem splitting for drum replacement/triggering, cymbal replacement using personal one-shots, re-amping guitars through virtual amps, high-passing for bleed reduction, and heavy vocal processing including noise removal, tuning, saturation, and slap-back delay. Also discussed audio delivery formats (bit depth, streaming platform requirements), Reaper workflow tips for cross-project plugin copying, mastering consistency across singles and albums, drum programming philosophy for producers, and drum fill construction for non-drummers.
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working with clients, mixing vs production
All resident events are included with your Beat Kitchen Residency.
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