The beat and beyond: UNC students learn how to create and produce their own beats in a new class

On the third floor of Kenan Music Building, next to classrooms filled with rows of digital pianos, students in Introduction to Music Technology meet with their laptops and headphones to compose a new type of music with a different type of piano.

When students write in “beat making lab,” (students’ name for the class) their notations aren’t made on sheet music, but on what is known as the piano roll, a graphical representation of note data used to render music in digital audio workstations.

Composer Earle Brown, on his avant-garde score, “December 1952,” used graphic notation to instruct performers to abstractly interpret seemingly randomly spaced vertical and horizontal lines on a piece of paper. In the modern programs that electronic artists use to construct instrumentals and backing tracks, the performer is a computer protocol, and its interpretation of a piece is based on a left-to-right reading of Cartesian coordinates.

A beat maker, called a producer, picks the pitch of his sample along the y-axis, the ever-ascending notes of a piano, and its place in time along the x-axis, the beats that make up bars or measures of a composition.

“Put a bass drum on beats 1 and 3, add a snare drum on beats 2 and 4, run a high hat on every 8th note and you have a beat — it’s very simple,” said Mark Katz, UNC associate professor.

“But that’s just like learning the alphabet. It’s not literature.”

Katz co-teaches the course with Stephen Levitin, a producer that has made beats for hip-hop artists like Wale and Mos Def under the stage name Apple Juice Kid.

In their class, Katz brings the academic side of beat-making, while Levitin provides his perspective on the business side of being an electronic musician, teaching students how to brand themselves, secure rights to digital samples and avoid getting ripped off.

Assignments range from making a beat every week as a part of building a music portfolio, to writing papers on seminal producers.

As the director for Carolina Creates Music and a student in Katz’ and Levitin’s class, junior David August organized a showcase of his classmates’ beats to practice presentation and satisfy Carolina Creates’ initiative to highlight music created on-campus.

“Our job, as the music portion, is to bring music out of the dorm rooms and classrooms and make it more available to students,” August said. “And to just make Chapel Hill a more vibrant music school and help student musicians get more experience performing and help them out and get them gigs.”

The showcase, featuring beat demonstrations and battles, a turntablist and a student breakdancing group will take place today at 5 p.m. at Rams Head Plaza on South Campus.

Carson Koenig, a communications major, took the course with the intention of propelling his career as a producer. His goal is to be a full-time musician on the national level.

Koenig will be presenting “Flockamenco,” a mash-up of Flamenco music he learned about while studying abroad in Spain and the “frenetic, infectious, slow bounce-mosh inducing beats” of Lex Luger, producer of Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard in da Paint.”

“It’s going to be cool just to be able to play my beat and see how people react to it,” Koenig said. “If we’re playing over loud speakers and see people that are coming past the dining hall, past the gym in that little the area, if they stop by, just see what their reaction is. Because the more people that I can get reactions from, the better I can judge how good my beats are.”

Levitin, a UNC graduate, started his career as Apple Juice Kid competing in weekly beat battles at Local 506.

“At a very basic level, what I thought was a good beat in my bedroom, when I got it to a public stage, it was not good at all,” he said. “Once I saw the crowds reaction, I was like, ‘oh, okay.’”

Katz said that a common critique of generated music like beats is that live, there is little activity between the artist and his or her music.

“Since beats are recorded, they are simply playing,” Katz said. “But there is a performative element. I’ve seen videos of (Levitin) in beat battles and he actually dances to his own music, almost conducting and dancing to it, sort of giving a physical element to the presentation. They’ve already created the music, basically they’re playing their compositions.”