Compulsory Modules 

Unlocking the Studio: Your Journey into Sound Engineering
This module provides a solid grounding of the foundational skills and concepts needed to record and mix in the recording studio. Using professional recording studios with state-of-the-art equipment, staff with practical industry experience will introduce you to microphones, mic technique, routing, tracking, printing, overdubbing, re-amping, mix-prep, dynamic processors, and effects. You will learn about industry best practices and genre-specific workflows, develop the critical listening skills needed to achieve identified production aesthetics and explore your own creative workflow.

Sound Synthesis in Music Production 
Sound Synthesis in Music Production offers a fun and engaging way to explore synthesis techniques (additive, AM/FM, granular, chorus, AI-based concatenative) and supports the development of your creative sound generation abilities. You will design your own software synthesiser and organise your musical ideas into audio tracks. You will reflect on the many popular music genres, such as Hip-hop, House, and Techno, which will prepare you for future exploration of sound for visuals, games, advertisements and Foley in your second semester.

Sound for Moving Image 
This module introduces you to the world of sound effects for visual media, revealing the process of audio-visual synchronization across various contexts, including video games, films, and advertisements. You will acquire practical skills in creating convincing and believable sound effects and learn the basics of Foley artistry. With a hands-on, practical learning approach, you will be guided step-by-step in crafting unique sounds to complement visual spaces, events, and themes in moving image contexts.

Becoming a Cultural Citizen
Acquiring the foundational tools and skills you need to develop your student profile is the focus of this module. You will learn about the different pathways in your cultural or creative field while developing your own identity as a cultural critic, creative, and citizen. You will explore and map out your personal and professional development goals and plans, ensuring you make the most of your time at university and beyond. You will gain professional skills in communication and team working.

Optional Modules

Popular Music and Digital Platforms
This module introduces key theoretical and practical aspects of popular music, exploring its socio-cultural contexts, functions, performers, markets, and scenes. It challenges cultural assumptions about sound and listening, examining popular culture, fandom, and sound recording. You will learn about music dissemination, consumption, and sharing on digital platforms, covering ethics, strategies, methodologies, and realities in today’s music world.

Compulsory Modules

Studio Engineering and Live Sound  
In this module, you will gain comprehensive skills by integrating live sound and studio engineering practices. You'll learn industry best practices and gain practical experience as both a live sound technician and engineer. This includes professional PA setup and mastering a cutting-edge digital PA system for live performance events. The studio engineering segment will build on your first-year foundations, allowing you to develop advanced techniques in various genres, ensuring a well-rounded expertise in both live and studio environments.

Sound Design
Have you ever thought about the sound wizardry involved in action films, videogames, TV? Well, you will prepare something sonically magical in this module – beautiful sounds never heard before – and use them creatively. You will dive into the marvels of advanced software and develop your sound-design skills using a variety of spectral and time domain techniques. We will discuss technical and aesthetic aspects of the uses of sound design, providing skills for creative project work in your third year.

Sampling and Remix
This module equips you with sampling and remixing skills through hands-on learning in Ableton Live. You'll explore the historical roots of sampling and learn various contemporary music production techniques, including AI-based stem separation. Engaging with key sample-based music pieces, you'll delve into discussions on creative reuse and recontextualization. Critical discussions will cover topics such as, intertextuality, authenticity, ownership, legal and ethical issues. You'll also learn remix principles, allowing you to rework and reinvent musical ideas across various genres and styles.

Optional Modules

Professional Experience for Music Production (Year 2)
This module offers you the chance to contribute to the world outside Keele either through completing a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of projects for different clients) or working as a team to deliver a successful festival or event. You will be trained to showcase your creative and collaborative skills and abilities effectively before applying for an opportunity advertised through the module (or you can source your own, subject to it meeting the module’s requirements).

Pathways with Music Production: Developing Your Profile
Broadening your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you enables you to identify, analyse, and showcase your degree skills and experiences effectively. Through completing and reflecting on problem-based tasks relating to different sectors, such as telling the story of a business, or writing a funding proposal to support a music festival, you will build and refine your creative and collaborative skills and learn how to articulate them in ways that will be attractive to employers.

Augmenting Live Performance
Augmenting Live Performance introduces you to leading-edge, modern live music performance techniques and gives you the chance to build your own digital performance devices and apply them live contexts. You will explore current and historical issues around liveness and learn the semiotics of performance. Building on first-year skills you will explore specific augmenting live performance techniques, including recording studio and electronic music production techniques in live performance events, FX as performance tools, Launching, Reactive elements, Chance elements, and Live looping. 

The American South: US Summer School (Level 5)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.

Students at Level 5 must choose to do EITHER ‘Professional Experience for Music Production (Year 2)’ OR ‘Pathways with Music Production: Developing Your Profile’.  

Compulsory Modules

Music Production Final Year Project
Using skills from the first two years of your degree, you’ll build a portfolio showcasing your strengths in music production and sound design. You will develop works using studio and lab tools, guided by research questions and supervision. Projects may include mastering an album, creating industry-standard sound designs (foley, video games, audio-visual ads) or writing about practice-led research. Your work will be presented in a concert or show, enhancing your portfolio for postgraduate study and boosting employability.

Advanced Audio Tools
This module explores the design, function, technology, and visual aesthetics of advanced audio tools like VST plugins, audio units, and M4L devices. Through two practical assessments, you will build and programme audio tool prototypes for music production contexts. Topics include emulation, skeuomorphism, and visual feedback, focusing on effective user experience (UX) and engaging graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Activities include prototype testing, pitching ideas to an industry focus group, and designing new graphics for audio tools.

The Art of Mixing, Mastering and AI in Modern Music Production
The contemporary skill set needed to be a mix and mastering engineer involves a range of tools and audio principles knowledge. You will learn how to prepare music releases, game audio and music, TV, Radio, podcasts, and audio for streaming platforms. You will engage in more advanced multitrack mixing involving analogue and digital hardware. You will also acquire critical mastering skills and explore the practical and creative use of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in highly efficient and future-proof ways.

Optional Modules

Professional Experience for Music Production (Year 3)
In your final year we offer you another opportunity to complete a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of clients), or work as part of a team to deliver a successful festival or event. Completed during the final stages of your degree, the module gives you cutting-edge experience of the sector you wish to enter following graduation as well as valuable employer contacts, thereby providing you with an effective career launchpad.

Employing Music Production: Putting Your Subject into Practice
Now you are preparing for life after graduation, this module enables you to put your degree skills into practice and work with employer-clients on a series of real-life projects. Enhancing the creative and collaborative skills you developed on ‘Pathways with Music Production’, ‘Employing Music Production’ will train you to work effectively with clients from a variety of settings, including charities, publishers, and museums, and will give you the opportunity to present your work to your chosen employer-client.

Music and Social Movements
This module explores music as a tool for conflict transformation through activism and its darker aspects, such as manipulation, power, and violence. It examines how music can acknowledge trauma, understand conflict roots, facilitate debate, preserve memory, and subvert the status quo, while also being used for political power, population manipulation, torture, and maintaining hegemonies. Additionally, it considers how music technology and the industry impact music’s potential to inspire resistance or submission.

Podcast and Radio Production
Developing your own podcast and learning about audio storytelling techniques, production skills, and social marketing strategies equips you with new skills to promote and disseminate your musical activities to your target audience through an online platform. You will receive advice and feedback from practitioners in an industry pitching session. You will also analyse podcast trends and explore the impact of podcasting on the media landscape, including its influence on public service broadcasting and podcast adaptation for TV.

The American South: US Summer School (Level 6)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.

Students at Level 6 must choose to do EITHER 'Professional Experience for Music Production (Year 3)’ OR ‘Employing Music Production: Putting Your Subject into Practice’.