As fun as it is to buy a new piece of gear, don’t forget to invest some of your studio budget into your education. After all, it’s the skills of the engineer (not the gear) that makes for great records!
In this video we discuss where to find some of the best music production courses on the web today. Here’s a link to where you will find access to some of my personal favourites:
http://techmuzeacademy.com/music-production-courses
Also, don’t miss out on one of the best methods of learning to mix that I’ve ever seen (next to MixLessons.com, of course!). It’s called Dueling Mixes and you can check it out here:

Hello again! Dezz Asante here from the TechMuzeAcademy with another MixLessons.com video quick tip. This one comes from a member from the GearSlutz forum once again as you can probably tell by now it’s a place I like to hang out. This is from a member who goes by the name Saurax. He says,
“Hi! I’m a 17-year old newbie in this wonderful and confusing world of music and ofcourse, I’m looking for advice. A little bit about myself and my situation – I have one entire year of freedom ( no obligations) and I want to learn all I possibly can about music production and sound engineering. In short whatever I need to transform the ideas in my mind into something that is real. I bought a mini keyboard and some books and now I wonder if its’s worth it to pay for a full time course to maximize the learnings as I will be redoing my GCSE next year and will not have much free time. So, what do you guys think of these courses? Are they worth it? And he goes on to list a couple of examples. Any recommendations around London? Money should not be a problem as long as it does not go over 8,000 US Dollars. Thanks for reading.”
Well Zoracs I think of course in my opinion education is always a good thing that’s where one should invest in first as far as …as far as dollars and cents go. And ofcourse hardly enough I happen to ran a course that you might find interesting but we’ll talk about that later. There’s a lot that can be glean if you have the time to search through the noise in places like Youtube and things of that nature. And so, that’s always a good place to start. And I’m sure that you’ve already been there and you’ve probably learned a few tricks of the trade already. The challenge with scouring the net and scouring Youtube for your education is that there’s no…you don’t necessarily have a point of direction. So, that’s where it’s good to have some kind of structured course whether that be in a physical location at a school or a college of some type or on-line. There’s a lot of different opportunities on-line to get a structured course that gives you access to an instructor as well. And the idea there is that you’ll have a point of direction. You’ll have …hopefully if the course is well created and the instructor or instructors are good at what they do, they’ll be able to sort of systematically walk through a learning process as opposed to trying to sort of papermache a whole bunch of ideas together…to you know own your own through sources like Youtube.
So, as I did mentioned I do have a course on mixing specifically and most of you know. It’s at MixLessons.com there’s a bunch of free content that’s available. So by all means feel free to check that out. But also at the TechMuzeAcademy I have compiled a list of resources along this very line, of educational resources that you might find of benefit. In fact, I’m going to pull it up on the screen right now and show you what I’m talking about. So, if you go to TechMuzeAcademy.com/resources and I’ll post the link beneath the video. And it’s actually sorry it’s not resources,its slash music production courses hypenated. But this is the page but I’ll put a link and a description. And I’ve compiled what I consider to be some of the best educational programs that are online…they’re available online so that you can work from home and at your own pace that I’ve seen. Ofcourse, I’ve made mention of some of my own opportunities there so feel free to have a look at that. But if if you scroll down the list, one of the biggest challenges that we face in home recording and project studio environment is capturing good sounding drums. So, everybody might put together and form an ebook on drum recording. And if you scroll down a little further, Joe Gilder who runs HomeStudio.com also has a whole sweet of very, very good, very well thought out tutorials as well mostly in the form of video training series. I got a little sample here. You can click on it and have a look a it to get a feel for him and how he communicates. One of the…one of the best things that he’s put together is the Production Club and that is an in-depth training on music production in its entirety. From a song idea in your head through you know arranging pre-production tracking, mixing, mastering all the way through to the final product. So, that’s a fantastic place to begin. And he’s got a bunch of these other tutorials that are on individual components of the music production process. Understanding some of the tools and some of the techniques that are necessary regardless of your genra that you are going to need some understanding of in order to sort of compete with the big boys so to speak.
Below that I got some products…some training products by Gram Crockren who runs Recording Revolution…RecordingRevolution.com. And he also does some very, very good stuff that I highly recommend at the very least having to look at because you’re bound to find something here that is just what the doctor order at the stage that you’re at in your educational journey and they are all of very high quality. The stuff that I promote on this page are of what I consider to be the highest quality standards and that’s very important to me.
So, by all means check out TechMuzeAcademy.com/music-production-courses. And again I’ll put the link in the description below the video that you can …you can have a look here and check it out. And if you just happen to stumble upon any other really high quality on-line training resources. By all means let me know so that I can add them to this list. Okay! Now Gram and Joe together actually have just recently started with another sort of educational training style program that I’m really exited about. In fact, I’m a little envious. I wish I had thought of it first and it’s called “dualling mixes”. Again, I’ll leave a direct link to that in the description as well. And basically what this is, again on the topic of mixing which is the aspect of music production that most people find the most mysterious. So, it’s a good place to really sink your teeth into.
What they do each month is they each take a session, the same session and they each mix it independently on their own and then they present their final mixes, both Joe’s and Gram’s together in the forums and as a member you get to sort of listen to the different styles…mixing styles between these two engineers and it’s a little bit of a …a little bit of sort of friendly competition as well. You can vote for who’s mix you like best. But the really nice thing about it, apart from being able to sort of see or hear two different engineers takes on the same session is that you get to also download the multi-tracks from these session as well and mix it yourself and you can feel free to upload and submit your own mix for critic and feeback as well. So, you’re getting the opportunity to hear to two experience engineers take on the same tracks. You also get to take your own stab at it and sort of compare your results with what these guys have been getting.
And there’s the discussion forum that gives you the opportunity to chit-chat with all of the other community member as well. Really, really good learning resource. It’s a great way to develop your skills and your ear to be able to have a reference, something to compare your work to that is done by a competent engineer. So, duelling mixes gets a very strong recommendation from me and once again I will add a link in the description that you can…that will lead you directly to there so you can check it out for yourself. So, hopefully that helps until next time enjoy and keep mixing. We’ll see you then.
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