A-Level Music Technology is a recording and production qualification. Half of it you make: a recording and a composition, produced in your own school’s studio across the two years. The other half you sit as exams — and one of those exams puts you at a computer with a DAW, a MIDI keyboard and a folder of somebody else’s multitracks, with two and a quarter hours to turn them into a finished mix.
In the room
Headphones and your own audio player, loaded with seven commercial recordings you have never heard before. No DAW. No internet. You write down what was done to those recordings, and how you can tell.
In the room
A computer, a DAW, a MIDI keyboard, headphones, and a folder of audio and MIDI parts supplied by the exam board. You answer written questions on the theory, then build the mix and bounce it before time is called.
Component 1 · 20%
Recording
You record a track from the exam board’s list — 3 to 3½ minutes of it — in your own school’s studio, and keep a logbook of how you did it.
Component 2 · 20%
Technology-based composition
You build a composition to one of the exam board’s briefs, using synthesis, sampling and creative effects rather than writing for players.
Why this site doesn’t teach them
Every school does coursework differently — different DAWs, different microphones, different live rooms, different performers, different gear. What works in one studio can’t be lifted straight into another, and your teacher is the person who knows yours.
The exams are the part that is the same for every student in the country. That is what this site is built around.
Not sure whether this is you? Three topics are open to anyone to read, to try on the bench and to quiz yourself against — nothing to sign up to.