Production

There is a moment in the opening of Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits — a recording often held up as a landmark of early CD-era production — where the…

The history of recorded music is, in large part, a history of things going wrong at exactly the right moment. Not the polished decisions made in well-lit studios by people…

Before the drum machine, a song had a pulse because a human being decided to give it one. The kick landed where a foot pressed a pedal, the snare where…

Somewhere between silence and sound, there is a hiss. Not an unpleasant one — more like the breath of a room, the exhale of the universe holding still. Engineers call…

There is a moment, maybe two bars in, when a beat stops being something you hear and becomes something you feel in your sternum. Not every rhythm does this. Most…

There’s a note that every experienced drummer plays but no audience member consciously hears. It has a name — the ghost note — and it might be the most important…