Artists step up to school electronic music fans

If you’ve always dreamt of making your own dubstep drop, don’t miss the tutorials going on Thursday and Saturday as a part of Signal Fest.

And if you’re curious about how the whole dubstep phenomenon got started, don’t miss the U.K.’s Tunnidge kicking off the weekend-long festival Thursday at Players on Franklin Street.

To the right, check out a preview of three of the free workshops Signal Fest is bringing on campus, and then check the schedule below to find out when and where to go.

So you want to be a DJ?
With Billie Blaze and J-Star (Billie and Jenni Berzinskas)

Husband-and-wife techno duo Billie and Jenni Berzinskas will break down the steps it takes to make electronic music in their Signal Fest workshop.

“We’ll be bringing in our own equipment and showing people there how to hook it up and explaining what the elements are,” Jenni Berzinskas said. “Then we’re going to go over the basics of beat matching. It’s getting started with the basics of DJing.”

The Berzinskases will outline what gear aspiring DJs need.

“You don’t want to walk into Guitar Center and not have any idea about what you need,” Billie Berzinskas said. “So they can take it from seasoned professionals — what you need, what you don’t need, what you might need. It will just be a place to get started.”

Intro to music production
With Conrad Greggor (Nathaniel Dorr)

“We’ll be going over what it takes to get a track from concept to label,” Dorr said. “Basically, how does that process work and what tools are brought into that process to affect that.”

Electronic music production starts with beats in the piano roll, moves to melodies made from samples or synths and ends with polish and its release. To get your track recognized, Dorr said it takes a special attention to detail. A sonically well-crafted electronic album is hard to come by in a world of earbuds and laptop speakers.

Dorr cut his teeth playing electronic music in Seattle’s rave scene.

“I think I’ve got a fair amount of experience to share with people to hopefully engage them and help them to understand what it is we do and why we do it.”

The electronic dance music business
With Distal (Mark Rathburn)

“I’ll be talking a lot about the economics of things and about how the whole brostep epidemic is kind of bad for the market, almost an inflation for everybody else,” Rathburn said.

Brostep, for those not keeping count in EDM, is a critical description of that terribly infectious wobble bass that percolated from U.K. clubs into American audiences with artists like Bassnectar and Skrillex. Rathburn describes it as “heavy metal dance music,” provoking the same sort of mechanical anarchy found in bands like Pantera, but with more aggressive bass lines and a simpler rhythm.

Rathburn said he has no disrespect for the club sound, but because it has spent so much time at the forefront, Rathburn argues DJs in peripheral genres are having a harder time finding gigs.