“Introduction”, eh? Doesn’t sound too exciting.
For some reason I signed up anyway and I must admit that my preconceptions was all wrong.
Well, “Introduction to Ableton Live” is a course suitable for people that have never used Ableton Live before, but despite already having had some experience with Live, I did learn quite a few things from this course.
It is a self-paced three-week course which means that you can sign up any time you want, but there will be deadlines for assignments each of the three weeks.
Having deadlines when creating music was a first for me and it made me crank out three songs in three weeks. Some people worked on one and the same song during the three weeks, which is also fine.
One of the really interesting parts of this course is that there are no teachers of any kind involved in grading your assignments – they are graded by fellow students. You are also expected to grade five other assignments for each of your own assignments. I found it really interesting and inspiring to listen to the music of others.
Being ever the code-head, I could not help but wondering what programming courses could benefit from this approach. The obvious (to me) answer is that peer grading to some extend would force students to read code written by other students. You might as well get used to reading code early, since it is something you will do a lot of in this business (software engineering, programming etc).
There is a 30-day demo of Ableton Live, in case you do not own a copy of the program.