Dennis DeSantis on Music Education, Creative Blocks & Finishing Tracks

Brian Funk sits down with Dennis DeSantis — composer, author, and professor at Eastman School of Music — to dig into modern music education, overcoming creative challenges, and the art of finishing work.

Dennis DeSantis is a composer, percussionist, sound designer, author, and educator who spent years as Head of Music Learning at Ableton before moving into academia. In this episode of the Music Production Podcast, Brian Funk catches up with Dennis to explore what genuinely modern music education looks like, how producers can break through creative paralysis, and what it really means to finish and release work.

What It Covers

Dennis is building a brand new BM in Music Creation and Technology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester — a programme designed to welcome both classically trained musicians and bedroom producers equally. The conversation unpacks why mixing those two cohorts in one room is so powerful, and how ideas from centuries of music history keep resurfacing inside tools like Ableton Live and Max for Live.

The pair also get into the gear acquisition trap: why having fewer tools often produces better music, how separating tinkering from actual music-making is a discipline worth developing, and why the blank-canvas problem — total creative freedom with zero constraints — can be the hardest place to start. Dennis draws on his experience writing Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers to ground these ideas in practical reality.

There is also an honest discussion about the vulnerability of putting finished work into the world, the tension between building an audience and staying true to a creative voice, and how early-career composers navigate the difference between doing work for hire and developing their own sound.

Key Themes

• Music Creation and Technology at Eastman: What the programme aims to do, who it is for, and when the first students will be admitted.
• Bridging backgrounds: How classically trained musicians and self-taught producers can learn from each other in the same space.
• Historical ideas in modern tools: Why concepts like the fugue show up inside Max for Live devices, and what that means for how we think about music technology.
• Gear versus music: Separating the act of tinkering with tools from the act of making music, and why that distinction matters for productivity.
• Creative constraints: How limited gear, directed briefs, and restricted palettes often unlock more creativity than total freedom.
• Finishing and releasing work: The psychological weight of committing to a finished piece and why overthinking kills output.
• Content creation versus artistry: How musicians juggle the algorithmic demands of social media with genuine creative practice.

Why It Matters

Whether you are a producer stuck in an endless loop of plugin shopping, a musician wondering how to develop a distinctive voice, or simply curious about where music education is heading, this conversation offers grounded, practical perspective from someone who has worked at the highest levels of both music technology and formal education. Dennis and Brian speak frankly about the challenges that most producers face but rarely discuss openly — and that honesty alone makes this episode worth your time.