Musical Innovator at MMW
Article in STROLL, Ahwatukee Foothills Magazine
July 2023
Christian Rich and Music Maker Workshops (MMW) are taking music exploration and creativity to a whole new level.
To begin, Mr. Christian is a multi-instrumentalist, a composer, a producer, a performer and, yes, a creative teacher of music and sound. At MMW, he teaches guitar, drums, bass, and ukulele.
Before joining this team of music educators, he had been teaching privately for 10+ years with students ranging in age from 5 years to 90, including the visually impaired. One of Christian’s gifts is his ability to adapt to each student’s individual needs, combining traditional and creative methods in his teaching philosophy to encourage the student to have fun while working hard.
In addition to this brief background (you can learn more in episode 7 of the MMW podcast), Christian teaches production at MMW, which is an entirely different arena of making music. HE explains in the podcast, “I like production because I like electronic music, and I think that is what initially got me into it…weir sounds with a cool beat behind it…so I started when I was 15 making beats on something called Fruity Loops Studio, now it’s known as FL Studio. I would just randomly put things in there. I didn’t even play instruments or record. I just took a midi piano, plugged a piano into a computer, put sounds on it and went from there… I never went to school for it. I took a Berklee online class, lots of YouTube videos, lots of YouTube videos.
This past spring, Christian was able to take that learning collaboration with the owners and musicians at MMW to come up with a program where student vocal recordings were featured on Spotify. Christian explains, “We produced an album of nine songs, vocal students from the school, participated in. Two of the students wrote original songs and the rest of them did cover songs..I had to create the backing track, so they gave me the chords and they gave me the songs, so I would go home and I remade the song on my computer on Ableton, and after that, we see up a recording day and all nine students came in and recorded their songs right here in the studio, and I went home and mixed it and mastered it and now it’s on Spotify.”
This production of the MMW Album debut on Spotify comes full circle for Christian who talked about his musical background as a kid and how he wrote his won music. He explains, ‘I think it’s really cool as a young person that I wrote a song, it really inspired me. And I want to inspire others,” which is something he did with the vocal students at MMW. Christian hopes to do more of this in the future, and loves that MMW allows for this musical freedom, describing the workshop as a creative playground where teachers “get to help our students in really creative ways. ”
For more information about Christian’s musical background as a child, the classes he teaches, and his current performances/gigs, go to MMW podcast, episode 7.
To Book Lessons with Christian please Link Here