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Udemy or Mike Verta?

I have watched and read a lot of different tutorials. Never done any Udemy but some Verta-Classes (love it), Evenant and many stuff on Youtube.

Just wanna to tell you the 3 biggest things that I have learnt, no matter which tutorial I have watched.

1) Write it down.
I write down all the important information into a small book. Your brain can better save new things if you use more than just one of your five sense (e.g. watch and write, read and write). I write it with a pen and not on the computer. This way, I can also easy repeat the information, which is helpfull (maybe needed) to remember it.

2) Do it! (and accept "hard" work)
I have watched hundrets of tutorials without doing the things talked about. This way, I forgot it very quick and in the end watching the tutorial was just a waste of time. If you watch/read something new and you come to the conclusion that it is good and helpfull, do it right away. While watching a tutorial by a wise composer I most times have the feelings like "Oh yeah...that is awesome" "Oh..I wish I have knewn about it before" or "Oh, that is really so easy". This ist fun and it feels like "Yea, I am also much wiser now". But sitting down and doing the things they talk about can be boring, hard work, and maybe not work with the first try.

3) First make music and after that watch/read a tutorial
I have spend much time watching tutorials and forgot making music. I still have to/want to learn a lot, but the first thing I do is make some music and than learn something new.

This is just my own point of view and no universal wisdom. Mybe it helps.
 
The one I'd bought was some course about orchestration that they kinda branded as being one of their most popular.

It was just so basic from start to finish, and catered to the lowest-common-denominator of music. How they felt this is worth 200 bucks is beyond me.

That was one course I dropped also. From memory, it was a bit average in presentation, in the sense that it had lots of power point style slides etc. I was expecting more real world examples. Every course I bought was a 'best seller'!

A negative for me was that you can't download most of the courses, so you need to stream. Also, some courses implied that little or no prerequisites were required, but then they did actually require you to have certain things if you wanted to participate in activities e.g like software for computer coding or design etc, which wasn't always free. A positive was that a lot of the courses I chose have had new or extra content added over the years.
 
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I've signed up to 5-ish courses from Udemy now, which includes a guitar and a Ukulele one. Forgetting about $200 price tag that never actually is on (is it?), I think they are great value at $12 or so. I mean you can't compare them to something like Scoreclub which costs a lot more.
The Trailer one for example is just as good as the Evenant one, which is about x 20 the cost.

I've done a handful of Mike's courses, and while they are great, I feel he's just too polar opposite of me musically that there's no point of me going further.
But if you're an orchestral film composer I'd highly recommend his courses.
 
I've signed up to 5-ish courses from Udemy now, which includes a guitar and a Ukulele one. Forgetting about $200 price tag that never actually is on (is it?), I think they are great value at $12 or so. I mean you can't compare them to something like Scoreclub which costs a lot more.
The Trailer one for example is just as good as the Evenant one, which is about x 20 the cost.

I've done a handful of Mike's courses, and while they are great, I feel he's just too polar opposite of me musically that there's no point of me going further.
But if you're an orchestral film composer I'd highly recommend his courses.
The trailer course is really good yeah! I am so glad that i found it before i signed up for the evanente one, because with everything i've learned from it, i highly doubt i would get 20x its worth from evanente.
 
I've signed up to 5-ish courses from Udemy now, which includes a guitar and a Ukulele one. Forgetting about $200 price tag that never actually is on (is it?), I think they are great value at $12 or so. I mean you can't compare them to something like Scoreclub which costs a lot more.
The Trailer one for example is just as good as the Evenant one, which is about x 20 the cost.

I've done a handful of Mike's courses, and while they are great, I feel he's just too polar opposite of me musically that there's no point of me going further.
But if you're an orchestral film composer I'd highly recommend his courses.

I have a bunch of Udemy courses from Game Design to Painting to Music theory. There's some really good content there, if you know where and how to look.

Of course more expensive courses on other sites will be better, but that's to be expected.
 
The one I'd bought was some course about orchestration that they kinda branded as being one of their most popular.

Utter garbage.

It was basically this woman explaining things I already knew, and was nothing that you couldn't find for free on random music sites, forum posts, YouTube, or cheap ebooks. It was just so basic from start to finish, and catered to the lowest-common-denominator of music. How they felt this is worth 200 bucks is beyond me.

Though, as I explained in a thread a couple months back when someone was asking what courses people have purchased, I find "low-quality, high price" is kinda the status quo on online courses.

Which is why I mostly avoid them now and just learn face-to-face with qualified teachers.

Well, the Udemy Orchestration 1...compose for strings is super boring, and the woman sounds like a robot. It's very long and having a hard time focusing on it..LOL The Trailer course was great, and was very hands-on, and informative for sure...
 
Well, the Udemy Orchestration 1...compose for strings is super boring, and the woman sounds like a robot. It's very long and having a hard time focusing on it..LOL The Trailer course was great, and was very hands-on, and informative for sure...


These are great:

https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-arrange-4-part-harmony-for-strings--audio-23215

https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/arranging-for-strings-part-2--cms-19809


all his stuff is good:

https://tutsplus.com/authors/ryan-leach

best

ed
 
I have a bunch of Udemy courses from Game Design to Painting to Music theory. There's some really good content there, if you know where and how to look.

Of course more expensive courses on other sites will be better, but that's to be expected.

I find is some instructors neglect the production quality of their videos. As for content I don't find much difference between the pricey ones.
 
I've signed up to 5-ish courses from Udemy now, which includes a guitar and a Ukulele one. Forgetting about $200 price tag that never actually is on (is it?), I think they are great value at $12 or so. I mean you can't compare them to something like Scoreclub which costs a lot more.
The Trailer one for example is just as good as the Evenant one, which is about x 20 the cost.

I've done a handful of Mike's courses, and while they are great, I feel he's just too polar opposite of me musically that there's no point of me going further.
But if you're an orchestral film composer I'd highly recommend his courses.
yeah, Udemy is the same as a lot of merchants out there - greatly inflate the MSRP, but perpetually have sales so people think they're getting a great deal. Courses are frequently 10-25$. Don't think of them as worth more than 25$, IMO.

That being said, quality of courses vary by instructor. Udemy has been great for my technical learning aside from music.
 
Well, the Udemy Orchestration 1...compose for strings is super boring, and the woman sounds like a robot. It's very long and having a hard time focusing on it..LOL The Trailer course was great, and was very hands-on, and informative for sure...

This is actually the one course from Udemy that I thought had real value. Not for the tedious and virtually pointless bullet point summaries of orchestration textbooks that make up 80% of the actual content, but for the handful of listening assignments, which I guess you could call hands on. And here I though the instructor was very good at guiding me through actual scores that in ways that would have been hard to do myself.

There’s s deeper problem though, inherent in the buisness model, I think.

Which I think comes down to the fact that pedagogy is hard, and it’s not always obvious just how valueable good pedagogy is. In fact, really good pedagogical structure and technique is often invisible, like a lot of designerly disciplines. And Udemy doesn’t incentivise depth in and crafting of pedagogical technique.

Instead, they make grand promises about the breadth of what you’ll learn, and the value proposition is in the grand promises of the chapter titles, corroborated by vacuous internet happy talk.Yet Udemy instructors, I’ll wager, are seldom paid enough, and certainly not incentivized to improve the underlying pedagogical depth of their course to my great degree. Even though some of them are no doubt very fine teachers in their own right.


Score club costs more, because good pedagogy is expensive.

Mike Verta’s (anti-) theory of pedagogy is about the sharing of experience, so a very different thing again (and not commodifiably to a Udemy-like marketplace model, because how would you find even a second Mike Verta, never mind a sweatshop full of Mike Vertas).
 
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Actually, I think it’s more than that. For Udemy to shift product in volume, they need to promise that learning all of this is easy.

In this sense scoreclub is probably more expensive also because it doesn’t make absurd promises that what it’s teaching easy. And will probably never sell as many copies as as result.
 
I'm still going through the list, but just wanted to add that I think you guys should check out Ed Buller's list. First and last link in particular: Rick Beato and Adam Neely are must-see's.
I really like Adam Neely - he's like the Vsauce of music. You never know what he's going to talk about, and it might not always be relevant to composers, but it's super interesting IMO.
 
Hi and happy New year,

Looking to further my knowledge. I have Virtuosity and Template Balancing from Mike. I also have string orchestration and trailer music courses from Udemy.

Any recommendations? I can get 3 from udemy with their current sale, or 1 from Mike...I am interested in Film/TV scoring work. Don't need any mixing classes...mostly orchestration, composing, creating mockups...etc...and the business side of things.

Thanks for the suggestions.
I have most of Mike's classes. If you're into TV and film scoring definitely get "How to score a film in 7 days" and "Scoring 1". They where the most useful and practical for me.
 
I wanted to say, I hope you'll find them useful, but that would be rather stupid since there's so much great information in each one of those that there's no way anybody couldn't chance upon something eye-opening and immediately worthy. :)

I was rewatching Mod Squad some week ago and there was so much great stuff even in the first hour of it, and these classes are between 3 to over 6 hours long. it's good to refresh one's memory by watching those classes again from time to time.

I think it's a good thing to have more of these classes, so you slowly absorb the information and put together the bigger picture. Those four I mentioned were most useful for me to understand what those composers like Steiner, Korngold, Herrmann, Goldsmith, Horner or Williams were doing in there pieces, but then you, of course, need to practise those things yourself. It's not like you watch these videos and become Williams. :grin: But without these videos and in the world we are living now, that's a near certaintly you'll never get even close to what Williams is doing.

Just out of curiosity, I bought Cartoons and Comedy class, I was so surprised when Mike said scoring a comedy is like the most difficult job (since you must know how to compose in every style (action, romantic, western, jazz, world music, what have you) so you can use those styles in a parodic manner or even seriously, etc.), I really wasn't expecting something like that, just little things like this put everything else into another perspective. And when he was talking about how were Spielberg and Williams using music in comedic moments present in Indiana Jones, when they went quite full on, when there were only some rather hidden hints of sillyness in the music, where they left the picture completely without any music, etc., so interesting.
 
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