Production

When the Beatles fed tape loops of flutes and strings through a Mellotron on Strawberry Fields Forever, they weren’t just reaching for an unusual texture. They were doing something philosophically…

Move your mouth two inches from a cardioid microphone and your voice takes on a weight it doesn’t naturally have. Move back to twelve inches and that weight disappears. What…

There is a moment in almost every mix where something feels thin, or disconnected, or simply not quite there — and the instinct is to reach for space. That instinct…

The vocoder was never meant to sound cool. It was designed in the late 1930s by Bell Labs engineer Homer Dudley as a way to compress and encrypt voice transmissions…

Every mix has a width problem, and most beginner producers make it in the same direction: they pan things wide because wide sounds impressive, and they end up with a…

There is a moment every producer knows: the mix that sounded fine at low volume suddenly turns to mush when you push the master fader. Everything is loud, nothing is…

At some point in a mix session, your ears stop telling the truth. It happens gradually — you stop hearing the low end clearly, the vocal starts sounding normal when…

1. Too Much Low End The reason this happens is almost always the room. Small, untreated spaces build up bass frequencies in unpredictable ways, so what sounds full and warm…

Solfeggio frequencies sit in a strange position in music culture — dismissed by physicists, embraced by meditators, and used by producers who aren’t sure what they believe but like the…

There’s a moment in almost every mix where everything sounds muddy and wrong, and the reason is almost always the same thing: the kick drum and the bass guitar are…