01
Start with what you have
Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, even GarageBand on a phone. The best DAW is the one you already use. Conor works across all of them and shapes the lessons around your setup.
Digital Music Production
Songs that didn’t exist until you made them.
Production is access to every instrument and every sound, made on a computer or a keyboard. Very little to get started, and a whole different world of what’s possible with your music once you’re in.
Production is access to every sound.
A computer, a keyboard, a few good ideas. The same craft opens into beatmaking, producing, recording engineering, mixing or mastering, songwriting, releasing your own music. Different roles. Same underlying skills.
How production lessons tend to unfold here
Lessons run for 60 minutes in the recording studio with Conor, Resonate’s lead engineer and producer. The first sessions are about figuring out what you want to make and finding the path that gets you there fastest.
02
The studio is where the practice happens
Lessons take place inside the working studio, with the same gear and workflow Conor uses with the artists who record here. You’re learning the craft from inside the craft.
03
Keep going between sessions
Production rewards repetition. A laptop, a desktop, an iPhone with GarageBand. Anywhere you can keep working on what you’re learning until the next session.
A good fit often looks like this.
Production tends to draw people who are hearing music in their head and want to start getting it out. Songwriters who want to record themselves. Beatmakers building their own instrumentals. Players of other instruments who want to start producing what they’re playing. Anyone curious about where their music could go on a computer.
Lessons are open to ages 12 and up. There is no instrument prerequisite, but rhythm tends to be a useful foundation for production work. If you’ve spent time with a rhythm instrument or piano, that often makes the early production work click faster. If not, it is something Conor commonly helps shape from the start.
Lessons here are taught by Resonate’s lead engineer and producer.
Conor Wharton, known to most as Conch, is Resonate’s lead engineer and producer, and the teacher for digital music production lessons. He has been working in the Edmonton music scene for over a decade as a solo artist, producer, and recording engineer. Conor came up at Resonate himself, mentored by Resonate’s founding recording studio director, Justin “Dunna” McDonough, before taking over the studio seven years ago. He has been a full-time engineer and producer here ever since, building a deep catalogue of recordings across genres with artists from across the Edmonton scene.
Conor’s approach starts with getting to know what each artist or student wants their sound to feel like, then working backward into the tools and decisions that get there. The line he comes back to most often: you have to make music to get good at making music. Don’t wait for the perfect idea or the perfect setup. Get into the studio, start recording, and figure out what works.
Click the portrait to hear more about how Conor teaches.
Starting is simple
Tell us a little about who lessons are for and what you have in mind.
You do not need everything figured out first.