Teaching the basics of recording: Back to the future

‘Get students to wire up the desk, experience feedback and physically move the fader’

Technology progresses faster than any school curriculum or budget ever will. So how can teachers deliver a curriculum using recording technology that won’t be outdated in a matter of months? Is it truly possible to future-proof your delivery of recording and music technology lessons?

By the time those Year 7s you taught about recording are moving into the real world, almost a decade will have passed and a lot will have changed.

To put that into context the iPod was released in the year 2000, causing a seismic shift in how people consumed music. By 2007, the iPhone was on the market and music consumption looked to be shifting to our phones. Then, in 2011, GarageBand was added to the iPhone. In the space of 10 years listening to music had gone digital and the idea of having to have a studio to make music was being challenged by anyone with a smart phone.

These examples of massive cultural changes in music technology within short timeframes are the norm. The decade timeframe is often familiar, too. Spotify, for example, was launched in 2008, and iTunes closed its digital doors a little over 10 years later. With this timeframe mirroring a student's journey from starting secondary school to entering the world of work, the pressure is on for you as educator to make sure the knowledge we pass on still holds value down the line.

In this article I will be looking at how teaching some of the fundamentals to recording can be the key to future-proofing a recording lesson. I will be calling upon the enlightening conversation I had with James Prosser, studio owner and course leader of Music Production at the BIMM Institute Birmingham. If you want to hear the full conversation, then delve into the accompanying episode of The Music Education Podcast.

‘In the box’ recording

Describing a recent conversation with his students on the BIMM Music Production course, Prosser found that more and more say they prefer to work ‘in the box’.’ ‘Inside the box’ or ‘in the box’, for those of you who don’t know, is when working with a DAW (a piece of software for recording) on a computer, laptop or even a phone. The computer – or similar – is the box.

This is not hugely surprising. Aside from the deep relationship we all now have with our phones, laptops and devices, there is also an increasing trend more broadly among music-making stars to create ‘in the box’. As Prosser points out in the podcast chat, ‘Now more and more artists are using “in the box” kind of recording. Look at artists like Billie Eilish for example – all of her albums have been done in a bedroom.’ We can also go further back than Eilish and see a shift away from working with a traditional studio with impressive rack units and gigantic mixing desks. The studio we knew before is not quite a thing of the past, but it's certainly not where most recording or music-making now happens.

Teachers will want to follow this development. All teachers strive to be relevant, and especially in music tech there will be a desire to provide current technology. Working with DAWs and ‘in the box’ in lessons is a logical step to being current and relevant. This choice, however, creates challenges for future-proofing.

Pros and cons of DAWs

While I would be surprised if the big DAWs like Logic or Pro Tools weren’t still the big players in 10 years they will have at the very least changed, and of course there will be new DAWs, and they might well be even more popular. Therein lies the problem: if we are dedicating our time teaching with a particular DAW will this information be of any use in five to 10 years? In fact, is it of much use when transferred to another DAW in the same period of time?

The answers to these questions are not completely binary. There are benefits to learning how to record in one DAW, but there is without question an amount of energy and time that would have gone into learning something with limited transferability. Even when switching between Pro Tools and Logic right now, there will be a degree of skill loss. Magnify that by a decade and we might be teetering on the edge of irrelevance.

There is also a further problem: if we exclusively work within DAWs, we can miss out on understanding the fundamentals of recording. These fundamentals, if learnt, can be translated into any setting. If they aren’t studied, that can be hugely limiting.

Traditional principles

We are witnessing nothing short of a revolution of students being able to access DAWs or recording ‘in the box’. However, it is not necessarily the best choice to focus on DAWs from a teaching perspective. As Prosser says to me, ‘Yeah, they know how to use a DAW, they know how to use Logic, but if they don’t know the key terminology that can really hold them back.’

I’m not a fan of using unnecessary or confusing terminology with students, however when it comes to music technology some of this terminology relates to a fundamental understanding. Without it, students can find themselves at a disadvantage.

‘What's being lost now with students working more “in the box” is that they lose the understanding of signal flow. If you open Logic or Pro Tools, you can’t see that signal flow. You don’t see where it goes behind the scenes. Whereas on a physical desk, you can see it,’ says Prosser.

Why is it important to understand signal flow? The answer is twofold. From a workplace perspective, music tech language is used universally within the creative industry, says Prosser. ‘Teaching students the fundamentals of that technology is still really important to future-proof them. Because when they come into the industry, they need to know these basic things about signal flow, gain structure and so on.’

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Music production using laptops has become increasingly popular

So there is a need to grasp this fundamental terminology. Not just knowing a collection of words but truly understanding it, if a student wants to enter the industry. But most crucial, as Prosser agrees, is the need to learn the fundamentals in order to be applied in any DAW, even one that hasn’t been invented yet. That is possible since these DAWs are built on some fundamental ideas. ‘I think it's really key, especially for students of younger age, to see it physically and to then be able to translate that to a digital realm,’ says Prosser.

When planning your curriculum or lesson, think about dusting off that old mixer. Get students to set up a microphone and wire up the desk. They can experience feedback, adjust the gain and physically move a fader. These lessons will be transferable into the future, and the tactile and multi-dimensional element will help them be remembered for a long time. Of course, much like Prosser I am most definitely not a traditionalist, and I think working with the latest advances in tech is a wonderful thing. Please don’t throw away that shiny new laptop you ordered for the music department, and please use DAWs widely. What I hope I have expressed here is how you can support students by providing some key foundations using more traditional technology which will help students navigate anything the future throws at them.

Listen to this article's accompanying episode of The Music Education Podcast, hosted by Chris Woods: themusiceducationpodcast.buzzsprout.com

Music Teacher is media partner of The Music Education Podcast.