“Be the Signal”

Learning Popular Music Production Skills and Practice

Abstract

Popular music pedagogy has for decades educated students in the foundational skills of music production. Yet the agency of professional practitioners illuminates that music producers also utilise tacit skills in communication and psychology to garnish musical works that target aesthetic intentions. These soft skills take time to develop in young people and so pedagogy in this field must target this at the beginning of a student’s higher education journey. Pedagogy in this field is complex and previous research efforts have highlighted the usefulness of integrated formal and practice-led collaborative educational approaches. This study develops this discourse further by investigating the utility of pedagogical video resources used in a flipped educational framework. The subsequent case study of the course MPP 1 found that students valued this approach and highlighted video length, accessibility and the educator’s embodiment of practitioner traits as integral to their learning more holistic approaches to popular music production.