About two months ago, I flew up to Boston with my mom and dad to be a part of the Berklee College of Music (In Boston, not California) EDM Production summer program. Me and my parents spend a few days hitting tourist spots around the city before they dropped me off at check-in for the actual program.

Fast forward a few days, after I moved into a sketchy off-campus dorm and got the gist of what I was supposed to be doing with my time there, me and all 60-something others in the program were divided into groups of six and given a group mentor responsible for keeping us from burning a studio we’d be working in to the ground. Each group had the same task; collaborate to produce one track to be played at the end of the week. To anyone that doesn’t make music, having six people and more than five days to work with sounds like more than enough to make just one song, right? Try agreeing on what kind of story to collaboratively write in a room with five other people.

Over the course of the next five days, me and the other four group members (one of them stopped showing up after the first two days, we never figured out what happened to them) threw around ideas and blended multiple genres into the same track. The key to collaborative success, in our case and most others, is compromise. Instead of blending all of our individual styles into one continuous piece, we decided to have separate sections in the track for each of our particular strong points and often working off of what another one of us had made; I produced the drums, someone else put down a synth over it, someone else would add another layer, and so on.

The final product was an incoherent chaotic mess with jarring transitions between genres, but it was something we were all proud of. Every group had a similar experience, having several people each different musical backgrounds. It was an incredible experience and I’m glad I got to go and be a part of it.