The best music school? Replicate the masters.

It’s kind of amazing how rare it is that music creators actively listen to the work of others. You can often hear it in their music: the sound of someone trying to sound like something but not quite getting there, of someone trying to break rules they haven’t actually learned. And learning those rules doesn’t need to be a purely academic exercise – it can often be done while listening to the very music you enjoy, and want your own music to sound like most.

Ski Oakenfull at Point Blank Music School reconstructs, step-by-step, popular electronic tracks. Most interesting in each example is that, what starts out as music production forensics, leads to more musical lessons about composition and arrangement, which more often than not remind us of a guiding truth we can tend to forget while creating: “less is more”.

A great entry point is this Ableton case study, Deconstructing SBTRKT – Wildfire:

Another examination of powerful results from deceptively simple beginnings, is Ski’s Deconstruction: Disclosure ft. AlunaGeorge – White Noise:

There’s plenty more to discover in the complete playlist, Track Deconstructions: