Today, we worked on our individual songs while preparing for a producer to come and visit the school.
He then talked to us about how the music industry is and the way to navigate through it. He explains through social media and building on your own brand. He shows there is a harder way to be completely independent from the big music companies. It was a very interesting talk and very useful for future striving independent artists.
We started by getting straight to the basics: what is music, and what is music production? We all listed a definition of what music is, such as a storytelling art medium utilizing sound waves. To break the ice, we all talked about what made us fall in love with, as well as our first memory of music. Mine was playing a simple two-person version of “Heart and Soul” with my mom. Next, we differentiated a music engineer, a music producer, and a DJ. A quick video helped us understand the responsibilities of a producer past just giving their opinion on the music. Much of our work was in the afternoon with our teacher, Hiram. He has been DJing for 15 years and producing music for 13. He showed us all how to use his controller, as well as some of the remixes he made and posted to Soundcloud. This was our first opportunity to get hands-on with the equipment. We all had the opportunity to use the controller and transition from song to song. We finished off the day by choosing four or...
The main subject for today’s class was sampling. Sampling is a critical technique in the music industry, in which a clip from a sound recording is reused in a new song. This could involve taking the isolated beat, melody, or vocal of a song and using it in a new song, typically by first augmenting it. I arrived at school today, and we began watching a documentary on people’s differing perspectives on the morality of sampling. There were two extreme perspectives displayed in the documentary: First, was that sampling is morally or legally wrong because it is stealing people’s hard work as a shortcut to producing a song. It is said to be wrong because people are typically not credited or don’t have a royalty when their work is used. This means that even though the artist’s work might be popular when sampled in other songs, the artist could be struggling. The second perspective is that sampling is morally right and that people shouldn’t be sued for it, because it gives those who are not fi...
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