Faculty

"One of the things that I’m interested in exploring with my students is the concept and implementation of group practice sessions. Like improvising chord changes, but instead of a backing track, improvising with someone else who is working on bass lines, and combining all the different components of music so that people can practice together and make practicing itself a social experience. There’s a lot of technical practice that you need to learn how to do in order to learn to play an instrument, and when you’re playing, a lot of these styles, you need to learn how to improvise over chord progressions.  There’s a certain abstraction that happens, where you’re not playing any specific piece of music, but you’re practicing something very focused. The musician, student or professional, generally exists by yourself in a room working on something, and I think there are ways to actually get more out of practice sessions in certain contexts if you have somebody to practice with."

“Music production is almost like creative writing: You can’t teach someone exactly how to do it. You can give overall guidelines, but you have to let students learn by experience. I teach the philosophy behind good producing and the aesthetics of production—how to balance art and commerce. I particularly enjoy talking about the history of recording, which is really the history of 20th-century music—just a blip in the whole history of music. Recordings, and changes in the way we record music, affect the way we listen to and play music."