Beat Kitchen School

09/10/2026

Ear training gym is free to residents and happens every week along with production gym where we discuss your favorite mixes and techniques, music theory theory gym, where we analyze the songs you love, instrument gym, where we gather to practice basic instrument or vocal skills, and of course office hours where you can come get help with whatever you happen to be working on. I have some new ear training tools coming out for music theory. I also have a songwriting incubator and a production incubator coming up if you want to write a song with us or learn how to produce it. Pick up a class with a residency or just start your residency and find a place to come and work with others on the music you care about.

09/04/2026

The overtone series reveals itself early in the discussions of both engineering and harmony and it informs everything from chords and scales to equalization, frequency masking, even rhythm and arrangement. One lecture kicks off two classes. Musician Basics (theory), and Mixing, Synths & Effects (production tools). Both of these classes start soon and I’m thinking about launching them with one complementary workshop hosted on our Discord. Comment “save me a seat“ and I will follow up next week with details. This workshop will be Live and you will be expected to bring your questions and curiosity. I’ve not settled on a time yet. My classes are not recorded. I don’t like pre-recorded courses. I like meeting people and answering questions. It’s all we do at Beat Kitchen. Also, if this sounds like your jam, a 1 month residency gets you a seat for weekly events like this as well as live help from me and the gang for less than the price of a private lesson.

09/03/2026

What does a multiband compressor do? Well let’s start at the beginning because you can’t understand what a multi band compressor does if you don’t understand compression. But you also need to understand a crossover network, so let’s build our own! Come do this with me in my upcoming class or visit me in office hours to talk about it. It’s included with every Beat Kitchen residency.

08/31/2026

Why all the buttons? Take a deep breath and magine imagine every option required a button or a k**b. The console IS the user interface. DAW or desk, bring your questions and mixes to class or office hours. We are here to talk you through it in person whenever you are ready.

08/29/2026

A brief discussion of the Lissajous figure generated by Beat Kitchen Harmonic synthesizer. A couple things that did not fit in this video: a goniometer typically displays each mono channel as a diagonal line. The leases you display convention tends to be horizontal and vertical. on a traditional stereoscope, a tall narrow signal indicates mono coherence and if it is wide towards the vertical center, it suggests signals are out of phase. I am discussing this and using both conventions which might be a little confusing. Either way, at 180°, two channels – left and right – generate a flat line whereas a quarter, 90° rotation will push two sine waves tuned to the same frequency into the shape of a circle. It’s precisely this type of relationship that a traditional scope can’t show you. the tool I’m using to demonstrate this is the Beat Kitchen harmonic synthesizer which is an interesting twist on additive synthesis with some tricks up at sleeve. In addition to being an extremely flexible and cool sounding synth, it also happens to be a terrific audio visualization tool.

08/28/2026

Few things make me feel simultaneously so small and so large as a lunar eclipse—here, shrouded by wildfire smoke. But that’s my shadow. It’s our shadow, and your shadow too. If you are along the 15°E line where the sun is rising, stick out your hand and make a shadow puppet on the moon for us all to see.

08/25/2026

08/19/2026

Not sure how many of you are interested in this sort of thing, but I guess we will see. A quick lesson on harmonic thinking using Duke Ellington‘s I got it bad and that ain’t good. Some ways to approach filling in simple chords with more color and movement. This was from this week‘s music the gym. I teach these live every week where you can join and ask questions.

08/15/2026

BKS Harmonic now ships with a very unique noise and modulation source: WEATHER. Today is the last day at its introductory price. Grab it now! Then come join us at Beat Kitchen where you can talk to us live about how to use it. Harmonic is our twist on additive synthesis — I’m calling it *harmonic synthesis*. It’s a wildly flexible creative tool, capable of lush, airy pads and glitchy sound design, built on an engine made to visualize and teach how sound works while being aware of scales, harmony, and intonation.

Harmonic synthesis sidesteps traditional filters: you shape the overtone series by hand, folding or drawing each partial’s pitch, level, and place in the stereo field. Folding is a unique technique that turns the harmonic series upside down — moving upper partials below the fundamental so a thin, bright tone gains weight, body, and a sub that wasn’t there before. With nearly limitless modulation and routing and 454 scales and modes to work with, the overtone series becomes a harmonic playground. Add the ability to move formants to create vowels and resynthesize the envelopes of each of those partials, and you have a synth that can operate on samples to mimic vocoder effects as well as granular or even wavetable-type sounds.

In addition to being a wild synthesizer, Harmonic now operates as an audio effect. Feed it an imported sample, a live mic, a guitar, or a track: play chords and hear them resonate inside your own sound, or set moving, panning vectors that turn what you play into harmonies you haven’t heard yet. Fold, Sculpt, Overtone Scan, and Freeze all work on what you feed in. that now includes over 84 years of barometric data that you can load as a source. I will be rolling this out as additional modulation sources and including some new weather adjacent presets in the coming days.

08/13/2026

I ran this back in 2022 and I don’t think it’s seen the light of day since. I saw a discussion of this elsewhere and so I thought this might be a nice reminder to everyone that a music production, the medium is ultimately memory. It’s easy to forget, amidst all the technology and jargon, that we are artists in the canvas is time.