IO Music Academy is an LA based music production school that has in person courses that teach you the fundamentals and advanced techniques to become a music producer. Due to Coronavirus, they pivoted to providing online courses featuring prominent producers and engineers with a flexible payment system. These courses are five days long and done through Zoom with recordings available for viewing on Vimeo afterwards.
The first course I signed up for was with legendary producer BOT that went over a lot of his techniques and workflow for producing tracks. The first day I encountered audio issues. This was due to the use of a third party plugin to handle the audio streaming from Ableton as it wasn’t yet determined that Zoom’s audio quality was sufficient. This software imposed a 40 user limit on connections without informing anyone and so it made the first day of my experience pretty lame as I only heard the Zoom audio and was unable to get the Ableton audio. The following days Zoom was used for all audio and it was perfect. At first, unmuting your microphone to ask the question was being encouraged but it seemed to flow better when questions were asked in the chat and the instructor goes back and answers them after explaining the thought process/technique they were exhibiting. This has seemed to be the norm for the other courses as well and I do enjoy it. We covered a lot of mixing techniques, sound design, and arranging over the course of the week and dissected forthcoming and already released BOT tunes and collaborations. Based on my experience with this course I immediately signed up for the Sampling in Ableton course.
The Sampling in Ableton Course I kind of forgot about and had a lot going on that week during the time it was scheduled, however I was able to download the provided Ableton files and used a video downloader site to download the videos to watch later if the Vimeo links are ever removed. I’ll update this review once I’ve gone over this course, however it was more geared towards just general Sampling and not tech house production specific.
The other day I saw GAWP post something on Twitter about his own course coming to IO Music Academy. Based on my experience with the BOT course I immediately signed up and shared the news on Reddit where a couple others signed up. I missed out on Day 1 but caught Day 2 where we covered a lot of techniques in Logic but they were applicable to Ableton as well. Days 3 and 4 focused on getting sounds to sit right and getting your mix fine tuned. Day 5 covered a load of information regarding self mastering your own music. This course taught me a ton of new tricks for improving my mix downs and getting tracks playable. This was a massive wealth of information that I’m already able to apply to my tunes.
Overall, I highly recommend checking out IO Music Academy for production courses. They are constantly adding new courses and for a modest price of $45 I think it’s worth every penny if you see a course you think would be beneficial to you.
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