Production and Guitar

Gain a vast knowledge of music production and guitar in this wide-ranging certificate program. Berkleemusic’s Production and Guitar Master certificate program provides students with an extensive background in music production, and a guided study path in guitar, which focuses on scales, chords, techniques, and teaching you to use your ears, hands, and the tools of the trade (including AmpliTube 2) to play with a hi-quality, authentic and persuasive tone.

You’ll start by setting up your own studio and learning how to produce great-sounding recordings of your music at home using Reason, Logic, or SONAR in Desktop Music Production. Once you’ve got your home studio together, Critical Listening will teach you how to identify the production elements that contribute to a well balanced, artful and professional-sounding mix, including frequency range, and dynamics; how to tailor your mix to the genre of the music you’re working with; how to optimize your listening setup; how signal processors, EQ and reverb are used in different genres; how to identify different instruments, distortion types, and production tricks by sound alone; and more.

From there, you’ll learn move on to mastering guitar scale and chord fundamentals. In Guitar Scales 101, you’ll develop your technique by learning the pentatonic, blues, major, melodic minor and harmonic minor scales and their modes in most keys. You’ll apply these scales to performance-based weekly musical examples, and open up a world of possibilities within the guitar's fretboard by learning how to play these scales at different positions along the neck. In Guitar Chords 101 you’ll study Berklee’s world-renowned approach to the construction of chords, a method that focuses less on the shape, and more on the individual notes that make up the chord. You’ll gain the ability to visualize chord structures anywhere on the neck of the guitar, and learn to construct and play triads and 7th chords - the basic foundations guitarists use to write or perform in any number of different styles.

Once you have this command of scales, chords, styles and techniques down, and can see the resulting improvements in your playing, Getting Your Guitar Sound provides you with the skills to improve your guitar sound. You’ll build customized rigs using AmpliTube 2 modeling software, and recreate the exact guitar parts from a wide range of landmark recordings by artists including Buddy Guy, Kenny Burrell, Brent Mason, Neil Young, U2, Soundgarden, Pantera and more. By the end of this course, you’ll have gained the ability to best utilize your guitar, amps, effect pedals and rack gear to zero in on the tones you’ll need for the music you’ll play for years to come.

The program wraps up with Producing Music with Reason, where you’ll learn to produce grooves in Reason that provide that platform for you to play and record your new guitar sounds and skills, and learn the real-world production set-ups and techniques used by today's top producers. By the end of this program you’ll have an accomplished knowledge of studio production techniques and software applications used by the pros, as well as a solid background in guitar scales, chords, techniques, as well as the ability to recreate the guitar sounds of landmark players.

The Production and Guitar Master certificate also allows students the flexibility to direct their own studies by allowing the choice of three electives in a variety of different disciplines and software including Pro Tools, Ableton Live MIDI, Digital Performer, and more.

Substitutions may be requested for electives. Please contact our Continuing Education Registrar at registrar@berkleemusic.com or call (617) 747-2146 to see if your request suits the overall academic requirements for your chosen program.