Previous Semester: Fall 2025
Fall 2026 is a redesign. This page records how MUSC 174 ran the semester before, so the changes in the Course Design document can be read against what they replaced. The complete Fall 2025 course site — calendar, lecture pages, and assignments — is public on Notion: FA25-MUSC-174: Applied Music - Laptop.
How the course ran
Weekly rhythm: Monday lecture/demonstration · Wednesday peer critique and feedback session · Sunday assignment due to Canvas by 11:59 PM. Two sections (04 and 05), Digital Music Lab, Room 201.
Grading: Class preparedness/attendance 40% · Assignments/discussions in Canvas 40% (initial post, then thoughtful responses to at least two peers) · Final project 20% (conceived, developed, and executed by the student; approved and evaluated by the instructor).
The standing weekly assignment — “Rule 7: Work.” Most weeks carried the same prompt, after Sister Corita Kent’s seventh rule for students and teachers: reflect on everything you learned this week from the lectures and your peers, and make something new that integrates the new technical or workflow knowledge. Submit a 48 kHz / 24-bit WAV to Canvas with a few sentences on what you were working on. The repetition was the point: a weekly habit of finishing something small, every week, all semester.
Week by week
| Wk | Monday lecture | Wednesday | Sunday assignment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | (Labor Day) Wed: Welcome, group studio work, presentations | — | Organize your files (Good Digital Hygiene) — bring your laptop to show your system |
| 2 | Syllabus · [[cost-breakdown-of-a-college-class | Cost Breakdown of a College Class]] · [[ten-rules-for-students-and-teachers-sister-corita-kent | Ten Rules for Students and Teachers]] · [[the-three-steps-to-not-failing |
| 3 | Getting started with your DAW (Live 12 and Logic Pro learning paths; quantizing audio and MIDI) | Feedback session — [[how-to-feedback-session | How-To: Feedback Session]] |
| 4 | Getting started with synthesis — [[vital | Vital]] | Feedback session |
| 5 | ”Pre-composition”: getting started, the Library’s hit-songs guide, Ableton’s Catalog of Attributes | Feedback session | Against the Clock: five-minute timed sketches, at least four of them, all shared |
| 6 | [[audio-mixing-the-basic-concepts-workflows | Audio Mixing: The Basic Concepts & Workflows]] | Feedback session |
| 7 | Studio work | Feedback session (feedback form) | Rule 7: Work |
| 8 | Building beats — Vital, SpeedDrum Lite, the free toolkit | Feedback session | Drum Loop Transcription & Recreation: transcribe and recreate a 4–8 bar loop from a real song by ear; submit the source link, a piano-roll screenshot, and the WAV |
| 9 | (No class — instructor at GameSoundCon) | — | Collaboration: work with at least one other student to make something new; each collaborator submits the identical file and describes their contribution |
| 10 | [[audio-effects-explained | Audio Effects — Explained]] | Feedback session |
| 11 | Audio Effects — Explained (continued) | Feedback session | Rule 7: Work |
| 12 | Things you should know before you sample — [[copyright-recorded-sound-key-history-cases-and | Copyright & Recorded Sound]]; sampler how-tos for Logic (Quick Sampler, Drum Machine Designer), Live (Simpler), FL Studio | Feedback session |
| 13 | Studio work | (Thanksgiving) | Rule 7: Work |
| 14 | Audio mixing (continued) · [[mastering-overview | Mastering Overview]] | Feedback session |
| 15 | Final work | Feedback session | Final project: pick something you made this semester that you are proud of, make it a little better, and share it as an audio file |
What changed for Fall 2026, and why
| Fall 2025 | Fall 2026 | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly one-off assignments (“make something new”) | Four two-week sprints, alternating collaborative and solo | A week is long enough to start something; two weeks is long enough to push a piece to “potentially finished.” Four finished pieces become candidates for the final instead of fifteen sketches. |
| Wednesday in-class critique every week | Async feedback in StemShare every sprint, plus four live feedback sessions at the sprint seams | With ~40 students across two sections, live critique couldn’t reach everyone every week. Written, timestamped feedback scales, persists, and mirrors professional collaboration; live sessions are kept for when everyone has just finished something. |
| Topics in a fixed lecture order (synthesis in week 4, mixing in week 6, beats in week 8) | Six domains in build order: signal flow → MIDI → recording → sound creation → arrangement → mixing | You can’t arrange without sounds and can’t mix without an arrangement; each sprint’s domain is the one its deliverable needs. |
| Canvas discussions and uploads | StemShare threads, posts, and player comments; Canvas keeps the syllabus and gradebook | Creative work and feedback belong in a tool built for multitrack listening; the LMS records the outcome. |
| Rubric-graded assignments | Specification grading — a live checklist on every post, pass/fail on sprint finals, one revise-and-resubmit window | Requirements are explicit and visible while the work is in progress, not discovered in the grade. |
| Open-ended final (“make it a little better”) | First Complete Track — mix and finish your strongest sprint piece, with mixing fundamentals taught in the final two weeks | The final has a defined finishing process and material to finish. |
What carried over unchanged: the laptop as the instrument, the DAW-agnostic approach (Live, Logic, Reaper, FL Studio all welcome), the free-toolkit ethic (no assignment requires paid software), the weekly Monday/Wednesday/Sunday rhythm, Sister Corita Kent’s rules, and the habit of making something every week — now inside a sprint rather than instead of one.