Transmissions

Not every poem wants to be a song. Some resist it — the line breaks are too private, the silence between words too load-bearing to survive a chord underneath. But…

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…

Every music theory textbook has one. It sits there on the page, perfectly symmetrical, twelve keys arranged in a circle, and somehow manages to look both essential and completely inert.…

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…

There is a version of every song that is better than the one you are currently working on. There is also a version that is worse. The problem is they…

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…