CreativeLive and the Next Generation of Online Audio Education

Producer Steve Evetts, a special guest instructor for CreativeLive’s “Studio Pass” workshop.

Producer Steve Evetts listens intently to the sound of Ben Weinman’s guitar coming through his headphones.

“A little more to the right,” he tells a studio tech adjusting a microphone in front of Weinman’s guitar amp. Evetts’ eyes search the sky as the tone from the mic gradually changes. He frowns slightly. “Can you go back a little in the other direction now?”

The tech obliges as Weinmanbest known as lead guitarist of the band Dillinger Escape Plan—continues to chunk away in drop D tuning. Evetts makes an okay sign when he hears a tone he likes for recording: crisp attack and big body.

Evetts and Weinman have done this dance plenty of times before on records they’ve made together, but this isn’t a standard studio session. The two of them are in the middle of a two-day workshop on guitar recording techniques for CreativeLive, a Seattle-based company that specializes in online teaching in creative fields. Although Evetts and Weinman have only a handful of people in the studio with them, their online classroom contains thousands more.

Evetts asks for a new mic setup, and during the down time, Tony Gavilanez, one of the workshop’s two telegenic hosts, relays a chatroom question about stereo-micing from someone watching online in Australia.

Evetts discusses a few situations in which he might use a stereo mic setup, and by the time he’s done, the tech has arranged two new mics in front of Weinman’s amp. Evetts pulls up a slide showing a diagram of the new setup while cameras get a close-up of the mics. Evetts continues with his prepared lesson plan without missing a beat.

In what seems like less than a decade, the concept of ‘online learning’ has gone from a somewhat laughable way to earn college credit, to a legitimate way of educating oneself in the digital age. YouTube tutorials and chat forums have gained significant ground on the role of static textbooks and exclusive institutes of higher learning as sources of ‘how-to’ information. CreativeLive joins a field that includes respected names like Lynda.com, SAEonline, macProVideo, edX, and Coursera.

CreativeLive Music & Audio channel producer Finn McKenty thinks online learning has grown more from increasing demand for new knowledge than anything else. “People want to learn this stuff and there’s nowhere else to learn it. The technology is just the solution.”

The New School

Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis and business partner Craig Swanson founded CreativeLive in 2010. In the years prior, Jarvis and Swanson produced online photography tutorials out of Jarvis’ personal studio, using nothing more than a stationary webcam.

“They didn’t know if they could move stuff around in the background or if that would make the stream stutter because of the compression,” says Finn McKenty.

Despite their rudimentary nature, Jarvis’ web tutorials grew in popularity, sowing the seeds for CreativeLive.

Today, the company has studios in Seattle and San Francisco, $25 million in venture capital funding, and an ever-growing catalog of online workshops in subjects including “Photo & Video”, “Art & Design”, “Craft & Maker”, “Money & Life”, and “Music & Audio”. McKenty–a friend of Jarvis since 2001–began producing the Music & Audio channel in 2013.

“They brought me on not knowing exactly what my job would be yet—I was just cleaning up random projects and stuff like that. Craig [Swanson] mentioned something about how we should think about doing some music production stuff, and I said, ‘I can help you out with that’. One thing led to another and we had our first class in September of last year with Steve Rennie [manager of the band Incubus] on networking.”

McKenty envisions the Music & Audio channel as a resource for solving musical mysteries. He knows there are thousands of aspiring musicians and producers out there listening to their favorite records, asking ‘How did they get that sound?’ When McKenty first took the job, he was one of them.

“With [producer] Andrew Wade, I got an album he did by this band called These Hearts, and it just sounded perfect to me for that style. The guitar tone on it was just unbelievable—and I’m not that easily impressed. I didn’t know Andrew before that. I just emailed him from the contact form on his website and said, ‘This record sounds perfect. I want you to come here and do a class about guitars.’ So that’s how that one worked.”

Steve Evetts and Ben Weinman talk guitars in their instructional video “Studio Pass”.

Among its offerings, CreativeLive features two workshops from Wade, as well as ‘The Working Musician’s Playbook’ with Bandhappy.com founder Matt Halpern, the guitar-tracking workshop with Steve Evetts and Ben Weinman, and ‘Advanced Bass Production’ with Andrew Glover, which McKenty likens to a “YouTube tutorial on steroids”.

“The problem with music production education is that very few people who know how to do it are taking the time to teach how to do it,” McKenty says.

“I’m not putting down recording schools or YouTube tutorials or anything—those things are great and I’ve learned a ton from them­—but it’s not really how things are done in a real studio. Most of the time, the way we make a record is ‘I want it to sound like that’.

“If you want to know how they got the guitar sound on a Converge record, there’s no real resource out there where you can go find it out. You can guess at it. You can ask someone. You can say ‘Oh I bet it’s this,’ or ‘I heard him say that’. Well, I just brought Kurt Ballou [of Converge] on to tell you how they did it.”

Live From Seattle and San Francisco

After recruiting the talent, McKenty sometimes has to teach his teacher: They work together to form a theme for the workshop and to block out how the instructor will approach it in a way that is personal, relatable, coherent, and that translates over the internet.

“I locked myself in a room with Andrew Wade for four days to create his course. I can’t just say ‘show up on July 10^th’.”

All CreativeLive workshops are free to watch live as they are happening, and when they are made available later as part of the channel’s general programming, they can be downloaded or streamed instantly for a fee. McKenty points out that, given enough time, it’s theoretically possible to watch every single CreativeLive offering for free—a boon for curious young musicians.

Students and coordinators in the studio ask the hosts for further clarification, and relay questions from the live web-streaming audience.

“I’m fortunate enough to have friends who work in studios and I can say to them, ‘I can’t get this to sound right. What do I do?’ and they say ‘Do this, this, this.’ And it’s like: Awesome. Finally. I’ve been beating my head against a wall for a week trying to figure this out. And I want kids at home to have that same kind of feeling, like ‘Thank god, finally someone is teaching me how to do this thing!’”

Currently, CreativeLive’s Music & Audio offerings skew heavily towards metal audiences. McKenty calls this the ‘low-hanging fruit’, thanks to his relationships within a tight-knit metal community. He also says it’s just the tip of the iceberg. McKenty is planning deep dives into EDM and hip-hop production for upcoming workshops. (One workshop on Native Instruments’ “Maschine” with JK Swopes was just broadcast live on June 2^nd and 3^rd).

“It’s very important to me that whatever we do, when we take that first big step, that it’s the right thing,” McKenty says.

“You know how it is in music: If the first thing you put out there is corny and dumb and people can tell it’s not authentic, then you’re through. [If we do that] then we’re no different than any other schmuck who can claim to teach you how to make music…

“It’s got to be the best people teaching the right stuff in the way that’s going to resonate with the people at home sitting in their bedroom. Like the kid at home going, ‘Oh that’s sick. That’s exactly what I needed to know.’ That’s what I always wanted growing up.”

Blake Madden is a musician and author who lives in Seattle.

Samples from CreativeLive’s Music & Audio channel:

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