The past year I have been going to a music school: De Producer Academie.
By the time of writing this it’s been a couple of weeks ago; but I have finished it and graduated! Finishing school I was very busy with arranging things like changing my artist name, updating accounts and finding a distributor. Let me tell you a little bit about this school year.

A New Beginning

It’s September 2024, done with my spiritual workshops, ending the job I was tired of, I really wanted to do something I truly like. And it was actually by scrolling through Instagram that I encountered a post from this school. (Yes, good things can come from scrolling on social media, if you decide to take action). Although expensive, I immediately felt this is what I wanted to do. I saved their profile on my phone and started letting it go through my mind.

I wasn’t sure how to make it a reality, at least not at that moment. But if you want something bad enough (and you’re not worrying about it), life has a way of supporting you. So I ended up being able to go! I went to the intake interview with a few of my tracks (‘Cultureshock’, ‘no words’, ‘Sweet Lonelyness’ and ‘Tenacity’). I was told my music had a lot of potential and my motivation was very strong, so I was admitted to “DPAC”.

First Impressions

The reasons I wanted to go were the topics of synthesis, mixing and mastering, business and of course socializing. I regularly made it a point to try to show up about half an hour too early so I could talk to the other students. Seeing as I almost haven’t been able to at all in my life; it was great to be able to talk about common interests with other people.

We started the year with sampling and I enjoyed it a lot. We discussed a lot of different sampling techniques in addition to the need for using high quality samples for your instruments, especially drums. I didn’t feel it was a particular issue for me, but still I finished the sampling lessons using Splice. And it did improve the quality of some of my works.

One thing that frustrated me at this point was the apparent necessity of owning Ableton to go through the school year – especially since they stated on their website you needed to own either Logic, Ableton or FL Studio. Since I was using FL Studio, I thought; “great, I don’t need to worry about that”. Then suddenly at school we heard owning Logic or FL wasn’t enough and we needed to buy Ableton because “that’s the program we use”. That was a bit strange to say the least. But I didn’t make a big problem about it because I wanted to participate in the same way with everyone else and I thought owning another program bought with an educational discount couldn’t hurt.

Honest thoughts on Ableton Live

When using Ableton, two thoughts went through my mind.
1: I love the way you can use samples with this program. If I remember correctly I haven’t seen an option to change the formant natively in the program, but other than that I got the feeling working with samples is more advanced than in FL Studio.
2: I hate the layout. The constant need for switching between the piano roll and effects tab is incredibly inefficient. We were initially explained by the teacher that “the strength of Ableton is that everything is on the same screen”. While I get that may be true for people who only use one small screen, for example in the case of a laptop, I use a desktop with two screens stacked on top of each other: that means combined with FL Studio I can see every single piece of the DAW at the same time and use it without switching anything.

Note with this screenshot below the piano roll isn’t active at the moment. Sometimes I may activate or deactivate it, sometimes it is on screen at the place where SPAN is now.

So going to a DAW which forces you to do everything on one screen, already felt like a downgrade to me.
And then there’s the fact the starting position of the playlist marker isn’t recorded when clicking in the piano roll. I found that super annoying. Because of this, I have lost count of how many times the track started playing at a completely different point than I intended. As a result I slowly started disliking Ableton more in its totality and used it only for those school- and homework assignments when it was absolutely necessary. Even though I could use it today for specific sound design cases, the idea of needing to go through it’s layout and programming is unpalatable to me, so I won’t. As a result its purchase feels like wasted money, even though I love to work with samples in it.

The Challenging Bits

Generally speaking this school year went very well and was easy enough for me. But there were a few challenging points.

One of them was the topic of harmony. I always was very musical, but being a drummer originally I never payed much attention to harmony and chord progressions. Of course knowing the correct names for all chords and intervals is simply a matter of repeating until you know it, but being able to actually identify them from hearing them is a whole other game. One of the first things we learned was the correct way of playing the keyboard, especially in the keys of C and C minor. It took a bit of effort, but it went pretty well. I have since bought the Novation FLKEY 61 for myself, learned the F minor scale as well and it has sped up my production time greatly!

One other challenge was collaboration. We needed to form groups to make a track together. Our group originally consisted of 3 members including myself. Unfortunately after all the groups were made, one member couldn’t participate – leaving us two to work on it. The assignment stated we needed to choose known music as a reference track and then recreate the form of it using our own sounds, chords, melodies, ideas etc. The genre of the track we chose is known by most people these days as “UK Garage”. To me, being older than literally everyone else (including the teachers), it sounded more like “Tech House”. If I were to be asked to provide an example of UK Garage music it would sound totally different. That difference between us wasn’t that big of a deal, but it didn’t exactly help either.

Another issue was that I’m not exactly a team player – sure I can do it, but my best work without a doubt comes when I’m working alone. We both had great ideas and I honestly thought we wouldn’t have any problems. Judging from the score we got on the end result however, it leaved something to be desired. When working together you need to make compromises. And the experience I always get when working with others, unfortunately, is that those compromises end up compromising the end result. If we were with all three maybe the result would have been different. Alas, we will never know.

Synthesis

One of the reasons I went to this school, synthesis. The creation of sounds from scratch. Extremely important to learn as a producer, if you ask me, so you can be as original with your music as possible. The basics I already knew, because I already made a lot of my own sounds for years. But I wanted to learn more because there were some instances where I tried to make a sound but did not succeed. Or I wanted to make a sound, but did not know how in the first place. Over the years I watched a lot of videos about it, which helped, but having an actual real live teacher in front of you really makes a difference.

One of the assignments we got was to recreate the lead of our favorite music. I chose the lead of ‘Perfume – ∞ループ’ (Infinity Loop). The end result was shown in class and was very close to the original. That was fun.

There are still other cases which are difficult to recreate for me though. Such as the lead from ‘Ron Van Den Beuken – Endless‘. I can create supersaws, however I got nowhere near the sound of this track. One good thing however is that supersaws aren’t really a necessity for the genres I make. Regarding drums, I can make my own synthesized snares and hihats, as well as my own kicks. Although the latter can be difficult to make it sound exactly right on all sound systems.

Quirky AI services

So we got to the topics of mixing and mastering, which went very well. Especially when we were busy with mixing, the sound quality of my productions improved. My own track “Highway To Luxembourg” was used during this period and it got good feedback.

Eventually, one of the more quirky things we talked about was the use of AI services. Specifically Creative AI. After some examples, including some intentional funny ones, the entire class started experimenting with it themselves. Even though it would be a lie if I said I wasn’t tempted to try it myself, I didn’t. Because I knew these Creative AI services are all trained on copyrighted works… in most cases without permission. And contributing it to “fair use” doesn’t cut it. Because the big question in that case would be: Is it transformative? And the answer is: No it is not; because it is creating a direct competing product to the original. That’s why it goes against my principles and I haven’t touched it.

There has been only one time I used a Creative AI service that was specialized in creating lyrics, but only because I wanted to test something. I wrote a prompt telling it to create lyrics about an AI service which is infringing on copyright: And in stead of getting the lyrics, I got an error message saying it couldn’t write about that topic. Then I couldn’t help but smile because it was rather telling to me. I didn’t tell it to write the truth, I merely told it to write some lyrics, to make up a story. But of course that subject is off-limits…

The final topic of the year; business. There was much to tell, so much information. And we had only two lessons to cover it. So everything was explained as concise as possible. From selling and streaming to copyright, from collaboration to sync deals, from independent musicians to labels and publishers… Was the school successful in explaining everything? I think they were. Although there was one assignment in the synthesis part which we weren’t able to finish. But without going into the details, it couldn’t really be helped.

Graduation

Light Bringer is out on the 28th of August 2025 on all streaming platforms. You can find the link to them on my contact page.