Electronic Music Academy

Students will get to grips with this revolutionary DAW within weeks of starting class. Through our hands-on instruction, students will discover the key concepts that Ableton Live offers, and discover why it is the DAW of choice for getting ideas together for electronic music producers. All GMP learners qualify for a 40% discount on Ableton.

Overlooked by many, but so useful in the long run, our electronic music composition section will save students hours of hitting and hoping! We will provide you with tools that show which chords go well together for your style and show you how to program chords that work, bass lines that groove, and lead lines that are catchy.

The EMP course teaches students the science of audio engineering and recording. The course is full of recording techniques, tips, and tricks, with special emphasis placed on recording and producing vocals. Even if we don’t sing ourselves, we still need to be able to encourage, coach, and produce artists and session vocalists. The more we know about singing, vocal production, and recording vocals, the better the main part of our song – the lead vocal – is going to sound! Of course, even though we cover vocal technique, actual singing in class is not mandatory – it is OK just to listen!

Many electronic music producers use Logic Pro X in the later stages of their production process because of the sound quality and its suitability for finishing (arranging and mixing) tracks compared to Ableton. This is why we think it’s useful to learn how to use Logic Pro X in addition to Ableton. As the only Apple Authorized Training Center in Los Angeles, we put students through official training and an examination to become an Apple Certified in Logic Pro X, so they walk away with another string to their bow at the end of their program. Students choose when they take this class from our production course schedule, and can take it during, or after they are finished with their Academy program.

“I switched to Ableton from Logic many years ago, but after some A/Bing in my studio recently, I could hear that Logic sounded better than Ableton so I decided I needed to brush up in Logic to get the best of both worlds. I called Garnish who are best known in the industry and, of course the guys were great and got me back up to speed in no time” Jamie Jones

We start by students how to acoustically treat and set up their home studio, then it’s on to in-depth EQ, filling the frequency spectrum, dynamic controllers, mixing vocals, generating a huge sound from few elements, and making all their parts sound as one, exploring all the amazing plugins used by world-class mix engineers.

Many professional electronic music producers never move beyond subtractive synthesis in their entire careers, but in our program, we will cover subtractive, wavetable, granular, additive, and frequency modulated synthesis. We will also cover sampling, resampling, glitch, and more advanced beat-making techniques in this section, as students develop their sound.

By this point in the program, students will have gone deeper than many professional producers with their sound design skills. We take it even further by introducing students to additive, wavetable, and Max4Live devices. We will also cover advanced sampling, advanced warping, and Racks & Chains. At the end of the module, students will learn how to apply their skills to music for media (film and TV).

In the Live Performance section of this course, instruction will focus on finishing students’ projects, offering bespoke advice in a concentrated blast of mentoring sessions, and on introducing Ableton Live for performance using Push 2. If students are capable DJs, who play music we can incorporate into our club night, we will invite them to join our DJ roster to play at our club night, without having to take our DJ program if they’re experienced enough.

Students will enjoy hands-on training recording a band at Clear Lake Recording Studios, where students often find one of the studio’s many notable clients working in the room next door! We also make use of a pre-production studio, where students can experiment and program in a room full of vintage analog synths and processors to find some real analog sounds for their tracks.

To finish off the program, students will learn all about EPKs, branding, digital distribution, and social media for artists. Please be mindful that our programs are designed for personal enrichment – to explore the limits of students’ creativity, create their own path to fulfillment and gain new skills by learning the aspects of music production. As we are not a US-accredited trade school, we do not provide instruction in career planning, interviewing techniques, resume preparation or completing job applications.