Mitchell Cohen

Mitchell Cohen is a Berklee College of Music professor and graduate, a jazz pianist/composer, and a music-tech founder who specializes in turning messy creative problems into clear, repeatable results. Over the years he has taught thousands of students at Berklee alone and remains energized by the same motive in every lesson and collaboration: helping people express themselves through music and technology. His teaching materials and utilities are used worldwide—backed by hundreds of paid sample-pack sales and broad global downloads of his free tools—and his approach is consistent whether he's in the classroom, the studio, or the code editor: cut through complexity, show the path, and ship.

A working artist across genres—releasing as Mitchell Cohen (EDM, jazz, downtempo electronic; producer for rap/hip-hop) and under the aliases moodbird (lo-fi beats) and Fat Mitchell (EDM)—he bridges performance instincts with engineering discipline, so musical outcomes lead and technical scaffolding follows. Onstage experience informs his design sense, from sets at the Country Music Hall of Fame and The EDITION Rooftop/Nightclub in Miami South Beach to the Freedom Balloon Festival (headline DJ), The Middle East (Upstairs/Downstairs), the Worcester Palladium, and Tsongas Arena. When he builds software—like the Tandem MIDI Canvas iOS app or his Solfège Tuner—he optimizes for stage-and-studio realities: fast interaction, musician-friendly UX, and results you can hear.

Mitchell's toolkit spans CoreMIDI, Swift, Xcode, Next.js, GLSL, Tone.js, Tauri, React, Python, TensorFlow, Apple's Vision framework, Metal, JavaScript, and the WebAudio/MIDI APIs. He started building plugins in HISE for VST/AU and now develops in JUCE, often pairing native DSP with modern web front ends to accelerate iteration and deliver clean, legible interfaces. His recent work explores AI agents and on-device intelligence, including iOS 26's Foundation Model, to keep creative workflows responsive and private. For Tandem he built custom CoreML models that help propose MIDI interface layouts automatically, shortening the distance from idea to usable control. He also introduced Tandem mode—the first iOS controller experience that lets two people collaborate on the same controller simultaneously—reflecting his broader aim to make music technology social, intuitive, and performance-ready.

In addition to teaching sound design, synthesis, Ableton/Logic workflows, controller design, MIDI/MIDI 2.0, and audio-reactive visuals, Mitchell contributed to the refactoring of Berklee's MTEC-214 (Producing With Logic Pro) curriculum, aligning course structure with how records actually get made. He's known for documenting the why behind decisions, capturing the final settings that truly sound good, and building interfaces that make the right choice the easy one. The through-line of his career is simple and durable: people who work with him finish tracks faster, understand their tools better, and leave with workflows they can trust on the next project.