Producer education is crowded with tutorials that promise faster results, cleaner templates, and repeatable steps. Flying Lotus is taking a different angle with his new School of Song workshop: process first, finished track second.
That is the tension that makes this one interesting. FlyLo’s music has never felt like it came from someone chasing the fastest path from loop to upload. His catalog has always leaned into sketches, strange turns, jazz language, sample instincts, dense digital detail, and the kind of creative decision-making that is hard to reduce to a preset pack.
Now he is teaching that side of the work directly.
The online workshop runs across four consecutive Sundays, starting September 13 and ending October 4. Each class day will include two live Zoom lecture times, 11 AM PT and 6 PM PT, with recordings sent out afterward for anyone who cannot attend live.
schoolofsong.org/products/workshop-with-flying-lotus
For more information, contact: hi@schoolofsong.org
The sketchbook approach is the real hook
The most compelling part of the course is FlyLo’s “Sketchbook” approach.
School of Song describes it as using the DAW as an exploratory environment, where every session does not have to become a finished track. That should hit home for a lot of producers. So much creative pressure comes from opening the DAW and immediately demanding a result from it.
FlyLo will cover how he gathers sounds, loops, and samples in Ableton, then turns those fragments into finished music. That is the gap many producers get stuck in. Starting ideas is easy. Knowing which ones have life, which ones need more attention, and which ones should stay in the sketch folder is harder.
That same question came up in my article on Flying Lotus releasing the Flamagra instrumental album, because hearing FlyLo’s work without vocals makes the architecture of his production easier to study. The arrangement choices, harmonic turns, and textures become the story.
Piano, practice, and learning after success
One of the better details in the course description is that FlyLo will talk about committing to piano study after years of working inside the DAW.
That is a quietly important admission. A lot of producers treat theory or instrumental practice like something they either learned early or missed forever. FlyLo’s workshop pushes against that idea by looking at how practice can open new dimensions of expression even deep into an established career.
He will also talk about transcribing, sampling, theory, and how to practice without external accountability. That connects naturally with my article on how learning chord progressions can speed up production decisions, because theory is at its best when it gives you more ways to move, not another reason to freeze.
Flying Lotus Says Individuality is the harder lesson
The workshop also includes a section on individuality, which might end up being the most valuable part for some students.
The course description frames it around trusting quirks, developing a point of view, and making work that feels personal in a cultural moment that keeps pushing artists toward sameness. That is exactly the kind of thing people say they want until they sit down to make music and feel the pressure to sound current, clean, searchable, and easy to place.
FlyLo is a strong teacher for that conversation because his career has been built around a musical identity that people recognize quickly without needing a simple formula. From 1983 to Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes, and You’re Dead!, his catalog has always made room for odd edges.
I think about that same thing when looking back at our review of his Flamagra 3D performance in Los Angeles, where the live experience leaned into scale, abstraction, and presentation as part of the music itself.
Registration closes September 12
Flying Lotus’ School of Song workshop costs $200 total. A 20% discount is available for people who sign up with a friend.
The deadline to register is Saturday, September 12 at 11:59 PM PT. The course begins Sunday, September 13 and continues on September 20, September 27, and October 4.
For producers who already know how to open a DAW and start ideas, this feels like a stronger pitch than another settings-based class. The real lesson is how FlyLo thinks, practices, gathers fragments, builds momentum, and protects individuality while still finishing work.
That is the piece people will be signing up to study.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
