Equipment included

Everything in this photo, included in the price

This is the full setup that travels with me — nothing for the school to buy. Students are taught directly on this equipment, the same class of gear used in professional studios, and I bring the laptops that run it. For the live coding module every student needs their own computer, provided by the school.

Top-down view of the full KLANGCODE studio setup — THE FULL SETUP

Headphones: the t.bone HD 990D — one pair per station
Mixer: Behringer Xenyx 502
DJ controller: Native Instruments Traktor Kontrol S8
Production controller: Ableton Push
Groovebox: Native Instruments Maschine
MIDI keyboard: Akai MPK Mini
Ableton Link sync: A dedicated router, so every station stays locked to the same tempo
Laptops: The ones that run the controllers — one per hardware station
Audio interfaces: Behringer UPHORIA UM2

Why it works · STEM + digital art

STEM you can hear

An abstract loop on screen turns into a beat filling the room. That jump between abstract and physical is the whole subject.

OUT · 001

Immediate results

Two lines of code and there is a beat in the room. The feedback is audible and instant: students know it works before anyone marks anything.

OUT · 002

Collaborative work

Each group runs one station. Nobody plays alone: the final track only fits together if all four layers listen to each other and leave space.

OUT · 003

Professional tools

Not toys. The same class of production and mixing equipment used in professional music studios, set up in the music or computer room in thirty minutes.

Formats

Pick a slot. I bring the studio.

The content adapts to the slot, not the other way round. These are the formats German schools use most.

Projekttage / Projektwoche

Project days or week

1–5 consecutive days, usually 8:00–13:00 From 500 € — the longer you stay, the more you save

Breaks the normal timetable without touching weekly lessons. The easiest format to approve at school level.

Arbeitsgemeinschaft (AG)

Weekly afternoon club

60–90 min per week, one term or a full year 90–120 € / session · 1,350–1,800 € per semester

Fits the Ganztagsschule afternoon slot and allows progressive learning: coding and sound design build up week by week.

Kompakt-Workshop

Half or full day

A single block of 3–6 hours for one class 500 €

Slots straight into an existing subject — computer science, art or music — as one module. Low-risk way to try the programme.

Lehrerfortbildung

Teacher training

Half or full day for the teaching staff 700–800 € half day · 1,200–1,500 € full day

Train-the-trainer: teachers learn the creative coding tools and classroom routines so they can run them again themselves.

Ferienkurs / Feriencamp

Holiday course

3–5 days during the school holidays 1,250 € (3 days) · 2,000 € (5 days)

Run with the school, a youth centre or a municipal holiday programme. High demand from families looking for something worth doing.

Individuelles Format

Design your own

Length, group size and slot set by the school From 85–120 € / hour

Tell me the hours you have and what the group already knows, and I build the module around it — from a single lesson to a term-long project.

Projekttage / Projektwoche — price by length

1 day: 500 €
2 days: 875 € 437 €/day
3 days: 1,250 € 417 €/day
4 days: 1,625 € 406 €/day
5 days · full project week: 2,000 € 400 €/day

Transport and set-up of the full studio is a one-time 125 € within Zone 01 — every extra day only adds 375 €, so longer bookings save more per day.

Prices shown are all-inclusive within Zone 01 (Mannheim & nearby). Further out, travel is added at cost — see where the workshop travels.

Where the workshop travels

Bookable anywhere in the EU

The studio is in Mannheim, Germany, and the whole setup fits in a van and two flight cases. Zone 01 covers short trips around the region. Beyond it the school covers travel and, where needed, accommodation — everything else stays the same.

ZONE 01

Mannheim & nearby

Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, Heidelberg, Schwetzingen, Speyer, Worms, Weinheim, Bensheim, Darmstadt, Mainz, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt am Main — short trips around the region. Same-day travel, no accommodation, no travel surcharge.

ZONE 02

Within 2 hours — high-speed train or flight

Anywhere around two hours from Mannheim by high-speed train (ICE, TGV…) or by plane — the rest of Germany plus nearby countries such as France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland or Austria. Longer travel day, so accommodation is included and billed at cost with receipts.

ZONE 03

Beyond 2 hours — long-distance & EU projects

Anywhere further in the EU, in English, German or Spanish. Best booked as a full project week so one trip covers several groups; travel, freight and accommodation billed at cost. Includes teacher advisory as part of the engagement.

For schools · The practical side

What your school will want to know

Languages: English, German or SpanishYour choice per group — also works as a bilingual (CLIL) lesson
Background check: Extended certificate of conduct (erweitertes Führungszeugnis) availableShown to the school before the first session
Invoice: Invoice for every bookingSmall business under §19 UStG — no VAT, prices are final
Student data: AI illustrations instead of student photosTo protect students' data, the classroom images on this site are AI-generated illustrations, not real students
School provides: One computer per student, power sockets and a projectorI bring all the music hardware and the laptops that run it

The course · From zero to live

What is taught

Five areas that move from listening to writing to performing. Nobody needs to read music or to have coded before: the first sound happens in the first twenty minutes, and everything else is built on top of it.

01

Listening and structure

The music theory a producer actually uses, learned by using it.

Tempo in BPM: counting the pulse, and why dance music lives around 120–130
Bars, the 16-step grid, loops of 4 and 8 bars
Four on the floor, offbeat and syncopation — where a sound lands and why it grooves
Arrangement: intro, build, breakdown, drop — how a track is laid out in time

02

History and electronic culture

Where these sounds come from and why they still shape today's pop music.

From modular synthesizers to the classic drum machines of the eighties
Samplers and sequencers: how the loop became the unit of composition
House, techno and minimal: how each genre builds its groove layer by layer
Algorave and live coding as a performance culture of its own

03

Synthesis, sampling and sequencing

Building a sound from scratch instead of picking one from a list.

Oscillators and waveforms: sine, saw and square, and why each one has a character
Filters and envelopes: cutoff, resonance, attack and decay shape the sound in time
Sampling: record a sound anywhere in the school, trim it, pitch it, loop it
Step sequencing: programming patterns on pad controllers

04

Programming: live coding with Sonic Pi

The same musical ideas, now written as code that runs while it sounds.

Core syntax: play, sleep and sample to place notes and rhythms in time
live_loop and sync: independent loops that stay locked to a shared pulse
Variables, ranges and randomness to build patterns that never repeat identically
Demo: an external script or a voice prompt driving Sonic Pi — the door to interactive installations

05

Mixing and DJ performance

Taking the music out of the computer and onto real mixing hardware.

Gain, volume faders, EQ and filters: giving every part room in the mix
Beatmatching: matching tempo and aligning the downbeat of two tracks
Transitions and crossfading between sources
Curating an atmosphere: sustaining a room behind a visual exhibition, not just playing hits

06

The live set

Everything converges on one performance in front of an audience.

Each group brings the loop it built to a shared mixer
One student rides the crossfader, another edits the code on the projector
Rehearsing entries, transitions and the ending as a group
The code and the audio files stay with the school afterwards

OUTPUT

Regardless of the format, the module always ends the same way: the whole group plays one piece together, live. Nobody performs alone — the track only exists while everyone is listening to each other.

Live coding explained

Music written while it plays

Live coding means writing the program that generates the music while it is already sounding. Nothing is pre-recorded: you type a loop, run it, and the change takes effect at the next bar. The screen is projected, so the audience reads the music as it is written.

Student writing live code on a laptop with a small keyboard controller — LIVE CODING STATION

sonic-pi · minimal techno loop

# Minimal techno base — 129 BPM
use_bpm 129

live_loop :kick do
  sample :bd_tek, amp: 1.5
  sleep 1
end

live_loop :hihat do
  sync :kick
  sleep 0.5
  sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: 0.8
  sleep 0.5
end

Sonic Pi · free and open source · runs in the school's browser-era hardware and on any laptop

use_bpm 129
Sets the unit of time. BPM means beats per minute — the beat is the pulse you would tap with your foot. At 129 BPM one beat lasts 60/129 ≈ 0.47 s and a 4/4 bar lasts four of those, about 1.86 s. From here on, everything is measured in beats instead of seconds, so changing this single number re-times the entire piece.
live_loop :kick do … end
Declares a named loop that repeats forever and runs independently of the others, each with its own clock. Re-running the edited code swaps the contents in at the next loop boundary, so the music never stops. The name matters: it is the reference other loops use to lock onto this one.
sample :bd_tek · sleep 1
sample triggers a recorded sound; sleep advances that loop's clock by one beat — it does not pause the program, it places the next event in time. One sound plus one beat of waiting, repeated, gives a kick on every beat: "four on the floor", the pulse of house and techno. amp: scales the volume, where 1 leaves it unchanged.
sync :kick · sleep 0.5
sync holds this loop until the kick starts its next cycle, so both share the same downbeat — that is phase, and it is what stops two correct loops from drifting apart. sleep 0.5 is half a beat, an eighth note: starting with it places the hi-hat exactly between two kicks, the offbeat that pushes the groove forward.

Sonic Pi · envelope (ADSR)ATTACK

AAttackhow fast it starts

DDecaythe drop after the hit

SSustainthe level it holds

RReleasethe tail after you let go

Four numbers describe how loud a sound is at every instant. Change them and the same note becomes a kick, a bass or a pad — it is the first thing students edit themselves.

Try it yourself

Change one number, hear the whole track change

This is real Sonic Pi code, running in your browser. Four of its numbers are highlighted. Tap one and the track rearranges itself around your change — exactly what a student does in the first hour.

Four numbers

techhouse.rb · Sonic Pi 5

# KLANGCODE · tech house · 5 loops

use_bpm

live_loop :kick do

sample :bd_haus, amp: 2.4, cutoff: 115

sleep 1

end

live_loop :clap do

sync :kick

sleep 1

sample :perc_snap2, amp: 0.7, rate: 0.9

sleep 1

end

live_loop :hats do

sync :kick

sample :drum_cymbal_closed, rate: 1.5,

amp: (ring 0.25, 0.55).tick

sleep

end

live_loop :bass do

sync :kick

use_synth :tb303

notes = (ring :c2,:c2,:eb2,:c2,:g1,:c2,:bb1,:c2)

play notes.tick, cutoff: ,

res: 0.8, release: 0.2

sleep 0.25

end

live_loop :stab do

sync :kick

use_synth :prophet

sleep 0.5

with_fx :reverb, room: 0.7, mix: 0.3 do

play (chord :c4, :minor7), cutoff: 105,

amp: 0.5, release:

end

sleep 1.5

end

Each line lights up the instant it makes a sound

:kickx

Two bars. Every bar is one sound, coloured by the loop it came from — the same colour as the edge of its code block.

Web Audio reproduction of the Sonic Pi code shown · the code itself runs unchanged in Sonic Pi 5

Sequencers and synthesizers

How the pattern and the sound are made

Two ideas explain almost every electronic instrument: something decides when a sound happens, and something decides what it sounds like. The first is the sequencer, the second is the synthesizer.

Student programming a pattern on a pad controller — SEQUENCING & SOUND DESIGN STATION

The sequencer: when

A sequencer divides a bar into equal slots — steps — and asks one question per slot: does this instrument sound here, yes or no? A lit pad means yes. The machine then repeats the bar indefinitely, which is why electronic music is built from loops instead of being played from beginning to end.

One row per instrument, one column per step
16 steps make a bar of sixteenth notes; the grid below uses 8, so each step is an eighth note
Kick on every beat is four on the floor; hats between them are the offbeat

The synthesizer: what

A synth generates sound from scratch instead of playing a recording. An oscillator produces a raw waveform, a filter removes part of its frequencies, and an envelope decides how the volume evolves over the few hundred milliseconds the note lasts. Change those three and the same note becomes a kick, a bass or a stab.

Kick: a low sine whose pitch drops fast — that drop is what your chest feels
Hi-hat: filtered noise with a very short envelope
Bass and chord: saw and square waves through a low-pass filter

This is a live instrument — try it: tap the pads to build a beat, then press play

Step sequencer · 1 bar · every sound synthesized live

129 BPM

1·2·3·4·

Tap the pads to build a beat Press play

Mixing and DJing

Two sources, one room

A mixer takes several sound sources and decides how much of each reaches the speakers. Every channel has a volume fader and an EQ to cut lows, mids or highs; the crossfader moves the room from one deck to the other. The difficult part is not the mixer — it is that two tracks recorded at different tempos have to be brought to the same speed and the same downbeat first. That is beatmatching.

Student mixing on a DJ console in front of the class — MIXING STATION · THE CLASS LISTENS

Tempo, then phase

Tempo: both tracks must run at the same BPM, adjusted with the pitch fader
Phase: their first beats must land at the same instant — that is what nudging corrects
Only then can the crossfader do its job without the mix stumbling

Try it

Deck A is locked at 129 BPM. Deck B starts at 121 and is yours to fix: move the pitch until the numbers match, then nudge until the four lights of both decks blink together. The indicator tells you which of the two problems you still have.

This is a live instrument — try it: press play on both decks, then fix the pitch and nudge

Beatmatching · two decks Press play on both decks

DECK A

129.0 BPM

Tempo locked

DECK B

121.0 BPM

Pitch · deck B tempo

Phase · deck B against deck A

« NUDGEin syncNUDGE »

Crossfader

AB

Play both decks · slide the pitch to 129 · nudge until the lights blink together

Book a meeting

See the projects before you decide

Studio visit in Mannheim, a video call, or just a message — pick one below and I'll reply within 48 hours. Free, no obligation.

Code never sounded this good

A music tech lab that fits in a school timetable

Everything in this photo, included in the price

STEM you can hear

Immediate results

Collaborative work

Professional tools

Pick a slot. I bring the studio.

Project days or week

Weekly afternoon club

Half or full day

Teacher training

Holiday course

Design your own

Bookable anywhere in the EU

Mannheim & nearby

Within 2 hours — high-speed train or flight

Beyond 2 hours — long-distance & EU projects

What your school will want to know

What is taught

Listening and structure

History and electronic culture

Synthesis, sampling and sequencing

Programming: live coding with Sonic Pi

Mixing and DJ performance

The live set

Music written while it plays

Change one number, hear the whole track change

How the pattern and the sound are made

The sequencer: when

The synthesizer: what

Two sources, one room

Tempo, then phase

Try it

DECK A

DECK B

I'm David

See the projects before you decide