After the Workshop Ends

Hey everyone,

What happens after the workshop ends?

Around this time of year, I would have been registering for Durango. I reached out to an old Berklee classmate recently, and I think that's probably why this has been sitting so heavily with me. I really miss it.

I remember registering the first time and being so excited, but also honestly pretty terrified. There's a particular kind of fear that comes with deciding to take yourself seriously. It's one thing to write songs by yourself and call yourself a songwriter. It's another thing to walk into a room full of people who have devoted themselves to the same thing, put your work in front of them, and basically say, "Here. This is what I made."

I had no idea if I belonged there.

I went anyway, and Durango changed me. Not because somebody sat me down and told me I was a great songwriter. That's not really what happened. My songs got questioned. Ideas got challenged. Things I thought were finished weren't, and things I thought weren't very good sometimes turned out to contain something worth chasing.

Mostly, I was surrounded by people who cared deeply about the work. That's probably the part I miss the most. Everyone cared—not about content, or feeding an algorithm, or whether something would perform. They cared about songs. They cared about art. They cared about getting better.

When you're surrounded by people who take the work that seriously, something starts to happen. You start taking yourself seriously, too. At some point, without really noticing it, I stopped feeling like someone who wanted to be an artist.

I was an artist.

That sounds like such a small distinction, but it wasn't. It was enormous. Durango validated something in me that I don't think I had been able to validate for myself.

And man, I miss that.

I miss Berklee. I miss Durango. I miss sitting around talking about songs and bringing something unfinished into a room and having someone hear something inside it that I couldn't hear yet. I miss someone asking, "Why did you do that?" or saying, "I don't think this is actually what the song is about."

I miss hearing some reference I'd never encountered before and spending the next three days completely obsessed with it. I miss somebody hearing the weird little thing I almost threw away and saying, "Wait. Go back to that." I miss being around people who knew my work well enough to recognize when something was different, or when I was hiding, or when I'd stumbled into something I needed to follow.

I miss mentorship.

And I've felt pretty lost without it.

I've been thinking a lot about why, because it's definitely not that we're lacking information now. Good God, we have information. Every technique is searchable. Every chord can be identified. Every production trick has a tutorial. Almost every record ever made is sitting in our pockets.

And now AI can give us answers to almost anything we can think to ask. It can generate melodies, lyrics, arrangements, images, videos, entire songs. We have more answers available to us than artists have ever had.

But I don't think answers were what I was getting from Berklee.

The people who mentored me weren't valuable because they knew the answer. They were valuable because they helped me see. They remembered my work. They knew what I had been wrestling with. They understood what I was reaching toward, sometimes before I did.

They introduced me to things I never would have found on my own. They noticed when I was repeating myself. They questioned assumptions I didn't even realize I was making. Sometimes they just asked one question that completely changed the way I saw something.

And then they did something really important: they gave the work back to me.

They didn't decide what the song should be. I did. They made my world bigger, and then I had to figure out what to do with it.

Lately I've realized that this has a lot to do with why I built StudioOps.

I didn't sit down one day and think, "I'm going to recreate Berklee with software." God, no. I don't think you can recreate it. Those people mattered. Those rooms mattered. Being nervous before playing a song for someone mattered. Walking around afterward thinking about what they'd said mattered.

The late conversations mattered. The friendships mattered. Durango itself mattered. Human mentorship is human for a reason.

But I think somewhere underneath everything I've been building was a question I didn't even know I was asking:

What happens after the workshop ends?

What happens when you go home and there isn't a room full of writers waiting to hear what you made? When the professor who knew your work isn't there anymore? When nobody remembers that weird little idea you mentioned six months ago, or introduces you to the thing you didn't know you needed to hear?

What happens when nobody asks the question you desperately need someone to ask?

I think StudioOps is, at least partially, my attempt to answer that.

And importantly, the answer isn't "have AI make the song." I'm interested in almost exactly the opposite. How do we build an environment that helps an artist become more capable of making their own?

Something that remembers with you. Something that notices patterns across years of your work. Something that brings art, film, literature, history, harmony, production, and culture into your field of view—not because those things contain an answer, but because they might make you see your own work differently.

Something that occasionally says, "Hang on. You're explaining this away. Look at it again." Or, "What aren't you considering?" Or, "You keep coming back to this. Why?"

Or maybe just:

"Keep going. There's something here."

And then it gets out of the way, because you still have to decide.

That's the part I never want to lose. I don't want AI to replace mentorship, and I don't think it can. But I do think technology can learn something from what great mentors actually do.

A great mentor doesn't make the work easier by doing it for you. They make you more capable of doing the work. They expand what you can see. They complicate your easy answers. They introduce you to things outside yourself and help you develop your own judgment.

And eventually, something really beautiful happens: you start carrying them with you. Their questions become questions you know how to ask yourself. Their standards become part of your standards. Their curiosity becomes part of your curiosity.

Maybe that's what I've really been trying to build.

Not an AI songwriter. Not a synthetic professor. Not an oracle telling artists what's good. A place to think and wander. A place that remembers. A place that takes the work seriously. A place that occasionally pushes you when you need pushing, and helps you keep becoming the artist you're trying to become.

I would still give almost anything to be headed back to Durango this fall. I miss the excitement. I even miss being scared. I miss wondering what I was going to bring into that room, and I miss wondering who I might be when I walked out of it.

Maybe there's something important in how much I still miss it.

Because StudioOps didn't come entirely from some grand theory about AI or the future of creativity. Some of it came from somewhere much more personal.

I found a place where I felt like an artist. I found people who made me better. I found a place where I didn't feel quite so lost.

And then it ended.

I think I've been trying to find my way back ever since.

I found a place where I felt like an artist. And then it ended. I think I've been trying to find my way back ever since.