Transmissions

There’s a moment in certain songs where a chord lands and you feel yourself lean forward slightly, waiting for something to happen. The harmony hasn’t collapsed into dissonance, exactly, but…

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…

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Northcote Parkinson was writing about bureaucracy in 1955, but he might as well have been…

Rhyme is one of the oldest tools in human language, and also one of the most misunderstood. Most people think of it as a simple binary — words either rhyme…

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…

Key changes are one of the most abused devices in popular music and one of the most powerful in the hands of someone who understands what they’re actually doing. The…

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…

The moment you sit down with someone whose instincts are faster than yours, whose ear catches things before you’ve even registered there’s something to catch, you have a choice. You…

A single vocal take, recorded well, has a kind of exposure to it — every breath, every micro-pitch movement, every bit of room sound sits naked in the mix. That…