2021-09-19 Fall Objectives

So much has happened over the past 18 months, right? Truly the world will never be the same.

We have all endured tremendous stress, sadness and hardships. It's been off-the-hook freaking global crazy insanity.

As we enter the new academic year in Fall 2021, there are a number of new things I want to explore and improve in my classes.

1) Communication

As the saying goes "it's not what you know, but WHO you know." The collective of our music tech community is incredibly valuable. We have a huge, and very diverse, group of talent in these classes!

I'm looking forward to meeting and getting to know ALL of you!

We really want to facilitate connecting everyone in our Music Tech community. This will include exploring some new tools and workflows. For example, I really want to help facilitate students interacting and collaborating on projects. Collaboration is one of my greatest passions areas of expertise - making records, building studios, writing music for films, and now even producing YouTube videos! So, we're going to be creating activities and assignments that include student group collaborations for various projects.

I've also been upgrading my Student Support Tools with the goal of making is as easy as possible to contact me, and our support team. I'd like to have as many channels available as possible including text, chat, voice etc. so that students can choose their favorite way to communicate and get help.

I'm pretty much available 7 days a week, including weekends, from about 11AM-11PM. Once I have your phone number programed into my Contact List, I will know it's you when calling. Sometimes a 5 minute phone call is more efficient than dozens of emails back and forth.

2) Collaboration

One of the positive aspects of the whole COVID pandemic has been the acceleration of technology. For example, remote collaboration is something we have been doing in the music industry for decades, even before the Internet. And music producers have been collaborating in the cloud for over 20 years. Now, the rest of the world is catching up with us.

Some of the new tools we plan to use this quarter include:

Just to name a few!

3) (Slightly) Increased Workload

During the onset of the pandemic back in March 2020, I really toned down my classes because I wanted to help minimize stress for students and not overwhelm everyone with too many assignments and work. For this quarter, Im going to turn up the heat a little bit and bring back some more activities.

The good news is:

All of my classes are still hella easy and the assignments can be done quickly
All of our Music Tech assignments are FUN!
My grading rubrics and due date policies are super easy
You will do FINE in this class!

3) PureMix Pro

I've been close friends with the founders of Pure Mix for almost 20 years. We've even produced records together. I've known "Fabulous" Fab Dupont since he was a kid, way before he became famous.

This quarter, in Fall 2021, we have decided to make subscribing with PureMix Pro required for most of my classes. This is VERY exciting to me because I believe PureMix Pro is the best online Music Technology educational resource in the world. PureMix has created a very special discount for our Foothill Music Tech students of only $14.99/month. In turn, I have eliminated all required textbooks. So, please consider PureMix Pro like a 'textbook expense.' And, if you are in more than one of my classes, you are set with PureMix Pro.

For a few other of my classes, like 49 History of Music Tech and the 70 Pro Toolers Certification courses, PureMix Mix Pro is NOT required. But we still need you to register for a PureMix FREE account.

We are paving new ground with PureMix and Foothill College. It's already working out better than I expected, and classes haven't even started yet ;) This is going to be amazing.

Syllabi

If you don't yet have access to Canvas, or were curious about other classes find the syllabus here:

Foothill Music Tech Syllabi 2021