Music Students Learn Real-World Skills: Collaboration Week in NZ Music Month

May 23rd 2017
MAINZ music and audio students are living the dream this week, as the tertiary school's real-world pilot programme rolls out.

Students will get a taste of real-world production and recording as the entire institute comes together to write, record, produce and distribute a new album.

MAINZ Programme Manager Kingsley Melhuish says the week aims to encourage students to work together to achieve a final product, as they would have to do in the real world.

"We want to encourage those collaboration skills that are essential to working in the music industry. You can't work in isolation, particularly here in New Zealand. You need to be able to draw on all the resources you have and create the best end result," he says.

Collaboration Week will see teams of student from across the MAINZ disciplines (performance, production, audio engineering and business) come together to deliver a new album in just one week. They will have to write and perform the songs, plan and book recording sessions and coordinate the album release. The albums will then be release on YouTube, SoundCloud and MAINZ's own Radio Teapot.

The concept is inspired by a model used by partner school the Pop Akademie in Germany, which runs a similar programme for its summer school students. Mr Melhuish says it's a "hot-housing of creativity" that seeks to get students to work with each other and develop essential work skills.

"With new developments in technology, it's becoming increasingly easy for musicians to work autonomously. Than can sit at home and write, record and release music, with very little outside assistance, which is great, but there are limits to this isolated approach, making it harder to create networks and collaborate with others across the industry. Collaboration Week is all about encouraging that essential skill of networking with colleagues; drawing on the best you have available to you to create a really great outcome.

"Collaboration is essential for artists and here at MAINZ we want to help foster those skills to set people up for success in their careers. All disciplines will be working together and we're really excited to see it roll out," Mr Melhuish says.

MAINZ Collaboration Week will be held week of 22 May and will culminate in the release of the students' albums at the MAINZstage gig on the Friday 6pm, 26 May. Visit the Facebook event page for more info.

Find out more about MAINZ at www.mainz.ac.nz

 

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