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Photo: Class Trailer, Masterclass
Many artists are using their personal brand and influence to educate artists, from beginners to fellow professionals. Timbaland has partnered with Masterclass to teach musicians how to make unique beats while showing his personal style of making music. Timbaland’s course is a pre-recorded set of 15 videos that run just over 3 hours and promises to teach about beat making, working with vocal recording, collaboration in the studio, and the layering musical sections. He demonstrates his creative process and teaches the students with some of his hits, like “Dirt Off My Shoulder”.
Many people have taken this course because of Timbaland’s extensive library of hits.
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Photo: Crypto Times
Positive aspects:
This course offers an in-depth review of how Timbaland creates music and taps into the feeling of creating a song from beatboxed vocals to a track. His presence in the videos is quite infectious and demonstrates how going with what feels good can make a great track. The course is fantastic for beginners because it lets the student watch a musician create and learn alongside their creative process. In the course, Timbaland goes over many of his hits, which allows for the student to connect and follow along intently with him much easier than making a new track. Timbaland’s course also shows the process of beat making in a way that even non-beatmakers find inviting and enticing.
Like many of the Masterclass courses there is also the community section, which many of the reviewers said was very helpful in creating connections with fellow artists they can create with and get feedback from.
Negative aspects:
This course is not for someone who is looking for technical instruction in DAWs and other musical equipment. As Timbaland improvised beats at the mic, his co-producers were busy inputting drum sounds and structuring them to keep the flow going. If someone would like an in-depth review into the process of working in a DAW and the technical process of arranging music, this course may not be a good fit.
Throughout the improvisational and creative portions there isn’t much verbal instruction from Timbaland since his co-producers and himself are in the creative zone. Timbaland is focused primarily on showing over telling, so during the creation of a track they show his dynamic creation process, but the verbal description of why the beats and sounds work together is a bit lacking.
Timbaland’s creative process is quite particular to how he makes a track— from beatboxing, to the addition of drums, to vocals, to completion. This course is focused on Timbaland’s specific way of creating, so for someone who may want to try multiple different ways, this may not be the best fit.
Masterclass does not let you pay for an individual class, so at $240 annually, the course may not be worth the student’s time if they don’t intend on taking any other courses.
Final Thoughts:
Overall, this course is best for a student who knows what they will be learning from it. They won’t be learning the specifics of DAWs or technical precision, but they will learn to lean into the feeling and process of making a beat from scratch, and collaborating to make a full track from a leading industry professional. The course is primarily for beginners but more knowledgeable musicians can also learn and be inspired by the alluring process that Timbaland uses in this course.
