📋 APPLY HERE! → https://forms.gle/w5HkT5SwZ3FRxdKYA (closes October 26)
👨🏫 Instructor: David Shimel
🗓 Schedule: The class will meet 2 days per week on Mondays and Wednesday for 4 weeks: October 27, 29, November 3, 5, 10, 12, 17, 19. There will be optional, remote-only makeup sessions each Thursday (October 30, November 6, 13, 20) for folks who can’t make one or both regular sessions each the week.
🕰️ Time: 6:30 - 8:30 PM Eastern.
🗺 Location: TBD
💰 Tuition: $500. We also have some scholarships available, so if you’re interested in receiving financial aid, please fill out this form. Protip: your employer may offer you a continuing education budget to spend on classes such as this one!
👥 Enrollment: 20 students in-person, unlimited students remotely.
💡Prerequisites: This is an all-levels class, so the only prerequisite is an interest in making music with computers!
✂️📃TL;DR: Want to learn how to produce your own electronic dance music (EDM) using Ableton? And then DJ it with Mixxx?? Then apply here today!
EDM 101 is a FractalU Fall 2025 course.
Every human is the living expression of a unique myth, and sound is the most mercurial medium for that expression. While our modern era tends to favor vision above the other senses since it can be immediately understood, audio has retained its mystique despite (or because of?) our fascination with legibility. By tapping into music’s Dionysian power, we can bypass the conscious mind and connect with people on an emotional level.
Thankfully it’s 2025, and we no longer need a dedicated studio full of expensive, specialized equipment to make a professional-sounding song; we can do it all from the comfort of our personal computers. And due to the Internet and social media, major record labels and radio stations no longer have a stranglehold on the distribution of music, or function as gatekeepers to what becomes popular. Now anyone can upload a song to the cloud where, algorithm-willing, it has the potential to become a breakout hit.
EDM itself is only a few decades old, hardly older than computers themselves, and both are still making their impact felt on our culture. No longer confined to illegal warehouse raves or nerds’ basements, hardly any of today’s pop songs have managed to elude EDM’s seductive influence, and major music festivals are obligated to showcase at least a few DJs (Coachella) when they’re not drawing their entire lineup from their ranks (Electric Daisy Carnival). Just what are producers putting in these seemingly simplistic songs??
So, let me invite you on a journey of mythical self-discovery, to frolic on the frontiers of audio artistry, in the approachable yet enigmatic universe of Electronic Dance Music!