Royal Caribbean music director returned to Berklee Online to master production, build her own studio, and bring a children’s music series to life
Kristen Long is a vocal coach and regularly-gigging performer (both solo and as one half of the Minx & the Maestro), and if that doesn’t keep her busy enough, her “day job” is as a music director for Royal Caribbean Productions. With a schedule that rarely slows down, stepping away from work to earn a graduate degree was never going to be an option.
“Once the Berklee Online program offered the master’s degree in Music Production, I felt it was something that I would like to do,” she says, “because I didn’t want to just stop working for a year or two while I get my master’s.”
As a 2001 Vocal Performance graduate of Berklee College of Music, Long says she found the Online program both familiar and new.
“I did love my experience in Boston,” she says. “However, the Berklee Online experience, I just felt I got so much out of it, especially for production. I needed the equipment to do the work on, so I had to invest in my studio, and with this program, you learn how to build that studio from somebody like John Storyk, which is massive! Had I been on campus, I would have used the on-campus facilities, which would have been fantastic, but I wouldn’t have gotten to know my gear.”That hands-on component of learning on her own setup was central to what Long says she was looking for: building skills she could immediately integrate into her career. One of the impetuses for learning how to produce her own music was that she conceived of an animated children’s series based on music. Producing the music herself meant saving time and money. The series will be called Mandy and the Jam Fam. The main character’s name: Amanda Lynn Jam (say it out loud, you’ll get the pun!).
“We recorded a bunch of the songs for the cartoon, and we’ve done a little pitch trailer,” she says. “We’re talking to animation companies, and still trying to find partnerships for animation companies, but the response in the children’s media sphere so far has been awesome.”
While the flexibility of the program made it possible for Long to keep working, the workload itself came as a surprise.
“I am a ‘throw me into the fire and I’ll come out the other side shining’ type of girl,” she says. “I initially enrolled in three courses per quarter, and as soon as we got into the first class of each of those three classes, the professors said, ‘I hope nobody’s trying to take three classes.”
Long scaled back her workload a little, but was still able to finish the program within a year and a half. Another unexpected pivot came during her culminating experience. Long had initially hoped to use the project to develop audio for her animated series, but instead committed to creating an EP, a decision that ultimately expanded her creative range.
“When I just was like, ‘Okay, this is what it is, it’s an EP.’ I really loved making that EP,” she says.
She’s not the only one who loved the project. She won the 2022 iZotope Award, honoring innovation in music production.
“I’m very proud of that project, and it was a lot of fun to make, and to experiment,” she says. “I made a bamboo flute sound like an electric guitar, and some of the songs were written in conjunction with paintings and pen-and-ink drawings that my first husband did, who’s no longer with us. I was able to pull the sound frequencies from the pictures of the artwork and mix those into the songs that they were created in conjunction with. So that was really cool, too.”
Long says there were other aspects of the Music Production grad program that appealed to her.
“I loved that the program also had audio for film and TV and stuff like that, and then the fact that we had access to some professors who we wouldn’t have even had access to on campus was really helpful for me,” she says. “I felt like it was a very personalized experience, more so than when I was there in person.”
Another element that Long says she appreciated about the Berklee Online experience was the camaraderie among classmates.
“I didn’t find there to be too much competition online. I found it to be very much just mutual support,” she says of her cohort. “We try to keep in touch as much as possible and just send each other preliminary mixes sometimes, just to get an ear on it with people whose ear you trust, and that you know that they’re going to be honest.”
For Long, the production grad degree didn’t replace what she was already doing—it sharpened it.
“I didn’t know how much I was going to love it, but I did. I feel like it’s everything that I do in one,” she says. “It’s taking the best of everything that I already do and putting it in one package.”
