Berklee Online Faculty

"We are a cutting-edge department with a frontier kind of presence in the industry. All of the faculty are well informed on current developments. We bring that into the classroom and mix that with the content you need to know if you want to work in the business. You need to know about legal aspects, business start-ups, and have a very keen eye on where technology change is taking the business."

"The best thing about teaching or learning how to play music is the balance between technical information and whatever your heart and soul feels. Hopefully the technical information is only the vehicle for what you're really trying to do. I want my students to stay focused through the ups and downs, and to trust in what they believe in. I try to reinforce that they should learn as much as they can and be as versatile as possible, because the competition is very high. I also tell them to respect and learn from the past as they're trying to go forward."

"I try to teach the way I learned how to play. I use more ear-type training than music and hand-out sheets. In the real world, on gigs, 90 percent of the time you just get a CD to learn tunes. I have the students transcribe songs, not necessarily writing them down, but a lot of learning by ear, a lot of call and response stuff, transcriptions off records and CDs."

"I developed an elective called Sound Design for Animation. . . . Mass Art students studying animation pair off with Berklee students and collaborate on developing sound design for their projects. It's interesting to watch Berklee students negotiate with Mass Art students, not just about what the music and sound is going to be—there's also timetables and scheduling meetings and the whole idea of the interpersonal relationship you have. How do you talk to a visual artist? How do you listen to what he's saying and parse that into specific musical ideas? That's the kind of stuff I could go into a classroom and do a lecture on, but you really don't learn it until you start doing it with people."

"What draws students to my private lesson studio are the instrumental labs that I develop, which deal with acoustic blues, slide guitar, and bottleneck guitar. An important goal of mine has been to expand on what would be the typical blues education—trying to round out the blues students we have playing modern electric blues style by imparting some historical perspective along with traditional blues skills that are still viable in today's music, when you look at Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, Taj Mahal, or people like Keb' Mo'."

"Writing and singing, singing and writing—these are things I've done since I was very young. Now I teach vocal writing in the Contemporary Writing and Production Department. Here is the perfect place to give my students, many of whom are primarily instrumentalists, the inside scoop on writing and arranging for vocalists and vocal ensembles."

"Ear training is a tool that allows you to express what you hear, what you want to play, and what you want to sound like. It allows you to interact with other musicians. If you're in a group that has any element of improvisation or surprise in it—which most popular contemporary music, jazz, and all sorts of world music have—ear training is what allows you to hear what somebody else is doing and respond to it with something that fits and isn't an accident, but is intentional and meaningful, and has feeling and confidence behind it. When you have a good ear it makes your rhythm better, because you're not hesitant, you're confident."

"One of the roles of a teacher is to help students gain a panoramic awareness of music, and what to work on. I try to expand my students' awareness of being part of a rhythm section, which is like the shaman's drum. It's important to develop a rhythmic quality and robustness of sound that ignites the imagination of the performers and listeners, and a groove that has a transformative effect. A common pitfall is to play too busily, instead of understanding one's role within the group. I tell my students that we need to listen beyond our own performances in order to clearly hear and identify with the sound of the whole group."

"My job as a faculty member is to teach students new skills and how to access resources that will help them find their own voices. Through exposure to new musics, and through modeling and experimentation, students experience which materials, styles, and techniques resonate within them and they then 'make it their own.' I think Berklee students have more of an opportunity to do that than students of other schools where they may be exposed to less varied styles of music."

"It's a nice spot to be in, to be able to draw back on some of the things in the analog world, some of the physical tools we've had post-World War to now, but also to have this whole digital tool set. It's pretty incredible. We've realized how crucial it is for the student to get exposed to this, even the ones who aren't synth majors. Part of what we do is to make sure those students get exposure and learn how to use what's on their laptop, which is pretty extensive."

"If a course is working, my students are going to learn more about how their brains work, their instincts, their strengths, what's compelling to them, and what they gravitate towards. Students are required to articulate their goals and plans, then critique their own and each other's work. It sounds easy enough, but is often quite a challenge. Trying to describe what we're doing and why, and attempting to understand other students' motivations, often reveals biases and discontinuities in our own perspectives and assumptions. 'Why?' is often the hardest question."

"A good singer has beautiful tone quality, a good sense of pitch, rhythm, phrasing, and stylistic interpretation. A good singer also has a clear understanding of how to deliver the meaning of the song and an emotional connection to the music. Singers must be sensitive to what is going on around them harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. Things aren't just going to happen by osmosis. And of course, they must have tenacity, the willingness to work to become better."