It’s been a busy summer for MPC! We’ve taken the programme all over, from youth centres and cultural spaces to festivals, working with some brilliant partners along the way. Wherever we’ve gone, the aim has stayed the same: giving young people the chance to get hands-on with professional equipment, learn from experienced Producer Educators, make music and share what they’ve created.

New Gen Festival

With support from Waterworks Festival, we delivered a five day intensive in Hounslow with Minds to Media and Diaxpora FM. Young people wrote and produced original tracks in Ableton, recorded vocals, and developed their live performance skills before taking their music onto the New Gen Festival stage.

Centre for Knowledge and Equity

Our intensive at the Centre for Knowledge and Equity explored dub, UK bass music, soundsystem culture and Black musical innovation. Participants worked with Ableton Live 12 Suite, Push, Move, microphones and a Boss Space Echo pedal. People went from feeling unsure about the technology to making bangers.

Flipside

With support from Percolate, Kaila and Sokari led six sessions for young people with mixed levels of experience at The Vibe in Barking and Dagenham. By the end, 75% felt more confident using Ableton, 84% wanted to continue learning and every participant who completed the evaluation described the experience positively.

Tomorrow’s Warriors

At the Southbank Centre, we delivered a production workshop for Tomorrow’s Warriors, introducing young musicians to Ableton, hardware and hands on recording techniques. Participants created new music, recorded live musical ideas and developed them into arrangements, combining their existing musicianship with new approaches to electronic production.

MPC x Open Music Archive x Arc

Working with Open Music Archive, we created a sample pack from recordings by Manchester’s legendary Hallé Orchestra. The pack was also cut to dubplate where young people from MPC & Arc sampled it and transformed the orchestral material into new music of their own, connecting the archive with their individual musical ideas.

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A huge thank you to all of the partners, spaces and people who helped make this summer possible, and to every young person who joined us along the way. It’s been amazing to see MPC reach new places and communities, and we’re excited to keep building on that momentum. Here’s to what comes next!