Multi-Platinum.com
One of the first online training companies in music production. More than fifty courses on recording, editing and mixing, taught by the Nashville engineers who were actually doing it that week. Still online.
- 50+ courses produced
- Co-founder
- Nashville working engineers
Why it existed
In Nashville in the 2000s, the knowledge of how records actually got made lived in about two hundred people’s heads and in a handful of rooms on Music Row. You got it by being in the room, which meant you got it by already knowing somebody. That is a fine system for the people already inside it and a closed door for everybody else.
Multi-Platinum.com was built in 2006 to open the door. More than fifty courses on recording, editing and mixing, not taught by presenters, but by the engineers doing those sessions, using the sessions they had just finished that week.
I started it with Brady Barnett, the same year the two of us put the first book out, and for the same reason. He had the sessions and the standing. I had the conviction that none of it had ever been written down or filmed, and that this was a fixable problem.
What came out of it
The book came out of it, the same year. Multi-Platinum Pro Tools was published by Focal Press in 2006 and carried the same name for the same reason. It is the same material, in the format a publisher could distribute internationally at a time when a website could not.
So did most of what I have done since. Every curriculum I have written for the GRAMMY Foundation, and the graduate programme built so working people do not have to quit their jobs, is the same instinct: the person who most needs the training is usually the person who cannot get to where it is being given.
Where it is now
Still up, still selling, running on Thinkific. The catalogue is smaller than it was, since plenty of the older courses have been retired over twenty years, and I haven’t added a new one in several.
Ok, that sounds worse than it is. Nothing went wrong. The thing it was built to fix largely got fixed: the knowledge that used to live only on Music Row is on YouTube now, for free, and running a paid course library against free is a different business than the one we started. So the teaching went where it was more useful. The library stays up because the material still works.
Related
Gibson’s Learn & Master Guitar is where the instructional production started. The book is where this went next.
Wondering which half of your own work is at risk?
Ten questions about how you actually get paid, and my honest read on what's exposed and what isn't. No score, because a score would be a number I made up.