Between April and July 2003, I took a really cool course at Home Studio about home recordings, which gave me a good theoretical basis that I needed to help me with my future recordings. Professor Sergio Izecksohn teaches the first steps to not only work in a studio, but to set up your own home studio. It is highly recommended for anyone who wants to record their own music, professionally or not.
During the two modules of the course, we recorded and mixed the song “Me Chama” by Lobão and the result was cool despite the rush. Érico Barbeitos recorded the vocals and guitar, Gustavo Monteiro the rhythm guitar, André Rastaman played the lead guitar, Newton Zen played the bass, and I played the keyboards. The drums were programmed by Professor Sergio.
We used a Roland XP-50 synthesizer as drums, André‘s own guitar, a MusicMan StingRay 5 bass guitar, a YAMAHA F340 folk guitar, AKG C-414, Shure SM57 and SM58 microphones, and a Kawai MX-9000 piano for strings. Everything was sequenced in Cakewalk Sonar 2.2 and edited in Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6.0, and we recorded everything in the same night in our own home studio.
Since most of the group had “Silva” in their name, Sergio nicknamed the group Turma dos Silvas, which is why we named the band The Silvas. You can listen to the final result here.
In 2005, my Remix Album was released in New York, and of course I included Sergio’s name in the acknowledgments. When I showed it to him, he was very happy and said that it was the first time his name had appeared on a CD outside of Brazil.
In 2006, I was invited by Sergio to teach programming and remixing classes at HomeStudio, which was an honor for me.
The idea of the programming course ended up being too long and expensive, and Sergio didn’t believe we would have enough students to make up for the investment, especially in terms of time.
But the Remixer course attracted a lot of interest and we ended up focusing on it. I believe the biggest problem was the lack of free time I had to dedicate to the project, both to make it viable and to teach the classes, which at the time were all in person, which also affected students who didn’t live in Rio, making it difficult for them to plan to travel to Rio, in addition to the high costs.
I got permission from the international bands Real Life, Opium and EuroVision to make their parts available to the students for practical classes and final assessments. I received very positive feedback, both from the students and from Sergio. By chance, Raif Emerich, one of my students, ended up becoming an electronic music teacher there later on, and he continues to this day as one of the course’s teachers.
Due to scheduling issues in terms of my availability and that of interested students, there were no new classes. To this day, I am still being charged for this online course, I am working hard and I believe it will finally be released in 2025.