Transmissions

The first song you finish doesn’t feel like work. It feels like discovery — like you reached into some dark space and pulled something out that you didn’t know was…

Jack White decided the White Stripes would only use guitar, drums, and voice. No bass. No keyboards. No overdubs beyond the most minimal exceptions. Critics at the time treated this…

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…

There is a chord progression that has soundtracked more of human experience than any other sequence of notes in history. Four chords, played in the same order, appearing in hundreds…

You’ve been staring at the page for an hour. Nothing comes. The harder you concentrate, the emptier your mind gets. You try a different chord. You rewrite the same line…

In 1995, David Bowie sat in front of a Mac laptop running a programme nobody outside his circle had ever seen. He typed sentences into columns — fragments from newspapers,…