Transmissions

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…

There is a chord that feels like standing at the edge of something — unresolved, unstable, pointing in multiple directions at once. Play a diminished seventh chord on a piano…

There’s a moment in “A Day in the Life” where the song simply stops being the song it was and becomes something else entirely. The verse-based, reflective narrative dissolves into…

Somewhere along the way, perfect pitch became the thing musicians whisper about with a kind of reverence — as if those who have it possess some genetic gift that separates…

Run a sine wave through a vintage console preamp and what comes out the other side is no longer a sine wave. It is close — very close — but…

The Amen Break In 1969, a Washington D.C. soul group called The Winstons recorded a B-side called Amen, Brother. The track itself was a loose, energetic cover of a gospel…