Looking back at Building Blocks
2025-09-20
I have previously written about the Building Blocks music production course. I have now finished it and in this post I want to reflect on what I learned and how it went.
What was the course like?
Building Blocks is a self-study course that runs in your browser. It consists of short video lectures followed by exercises. There are roughly three types of exercises: (1) recreating a short piece of music you can't see the notes of, (2) quizzes that test if you paid attention during the video lectures, and (3) open-ended composition assignments. The first two get graded by the computer but the third does not: you do not get feedback on your compositions.
I found the quizzes boring but I understand why they are there; probably to help undisciplined students keep paying attention. The open-ended composition assignments were OK but sometimes frustrating because they used a restricted set of notes. My ear would often be drawn to notes I wasn't allowed to play. I didn't write any music I really loved in those exercises, but that also wasn't the point.
The analysis/recreation exercises were the heart of the course for me. These required intense focused listening and were quite exhausting. I never did more than an hour of studying a day.
Building Blocks is split in two parts with a total of 197 lessons. It took me about 40 hours to complete the entire curriculum. In my previous blog post I remarked that I was moving through the lessons faster than I had expected but that stopped when I got further along in the curriculum. I'm still glad I did the course from the ground up, starting with Building Blocks 1. Even though that was in some ways too easy, I still learned a lot and I would have struggled in Building Blocks 2 had I skipped part 1.
What did you learn?
Some of what I learned is practical or technical, like the fact that "tom fills" also use the kick and snare drum. Or that different elements of a drum beat work together and reinforce each other. I never approached writing beats like that, I just played notes or put them on the grid without knowing what I'm doing.
The more important thing though is that I got better at hearing individual instruments in a wall of sound. Or notes in a chord. Even though I finished the course only just last week, I can already tell when writing music that I'm better able to hear in my head what I want to happen, and then focus on and pick out the notes I need to put into the sequencer.
The other day I was making a Youtube video where I recreated a synthesizer sound from a particular song. I had been focusing on the sound timbre while figuring out how to make it, but when the time came to record a video I realized I should be able to play the melody the original song uses. In the past I would have figured out something 80% correct and left it at that. But now I could hear that some notes used legato, which revealed something about the synthesizer settings. So I went back to sound designing to incorporate that. Listening closer I also realized that what feels like two repetitions of the same two bars, with a variation at the very end, also has a variation in the middle. I would have missed that in the past.
What's next?
Now that I've finished the course I feel much more confident, and probably overconfident, about my ability to put music in my head into sequencers.
Modern sequencers are flexible and forgiving. You can record notes you play live, then change them and move them around. You get a nice visualization to look at while you're editing the notes. In contrast, early digital sequencers were very unforgiving and expected you to decide what you want to program before you started programming.
On the TB-303 for instance you must separate the melody you want to program into a series of pitches and a rhythm and enter the two separately. This only works if you know beforehand what you want the machine to play. Another example is the Yamaha RX5 drum machine. You cannot see the notes you have entered, not graphically, and if you put a drum hit in the wrong spot you have to delete it and reenter it: you can't move it.
I am now curiously excited about using these "difficult" sequencers to see how fluent I can become at using them. Will that lead to cool music? I don't know but it's fun to experiment with it anyway.
Conclusion
In case it is not apparent, I am very enthusiastic about the Building Blocks courses (1 and 2), just like I was about Syntorial earlier. I think these courses are amazing and incredibly good value. I don't know if they are good for everybody but they have been great for me.
Tags: music