Archive
Everything published so far, newest first — 9 pieces in all.
October 19, 2026
Most of the loudness confusion I see from people prepping tracks for radio comes from treating one number as gospel. There is no single correct loudness target. There are several, and they depend entirely on where the audio is going and whether anything downstream will turn it down for you. Here is the plain version, […]
October 11, 2026
You finish a mix, it sounds huge in the studio, you bounce it, you play it on a laptop, and it turns to paper. The bass disappears, the vocal jumps forward, and half the arrangement you sweated over has gone missing. This is not a mystery and it is not bad luck. Nine times out […]
October 3, 2026
I can usually tell how a mix was prepped by watching someone use an analyzer. If they stare at the curve, chase every wobble, and nudge until the line is flat, the result almost always sounds stiff. Ten minutes with a spectrum analyzer is plenty, but only if you point it at the right questions. […]
September 24, 2026
Two hours is where a set stops being a playlist and starts being a piece of programming. And the thing that breaks it, almost every time, is not a bad track. It is a good track that arrives four or five dB hotter than the one before it and makes the whole room flinch. I […]
September 15, 2026
Most sets die around the third track. Not the first, not the second. The opener gets attention for free, the follow-up rides the goodwill, and then somewhere in minute eleven the room checks out. I spent years watching this happen on a station where the skip button was one click away, which is a far […]
September 7, 2026
Most of the work that decides whether a track survives an automated station happens before anyone touches a limiter. I ran a station for years, and the failures that actually dented the listening experience were never about plugin choice. They were about files: mismatched levels, missing metadata, tag fields that garble on the player, sudden […]
August 30, 2026
The worst feedback I ever got on a station was about a spoken intro. Not the music. The voice. A host had cut a fifty-second bit over the top of a slow soul record, and on my monitors it sounded fine. On a car radio it sounded like someone talking through a blanket with a […]
August 22, 2026
I spent years programming an internet radio station, and the most useful lesson came from a cheap car radio in the parking lot. A mix I’d spent a week balancing sounded like a wall of mush through those speakers. That’s the honest test: not how a track sounds on your monitors, but what’s still there […]
August 13, 2026
Every long playlist has a moment where it stops being a sequence and becomes a grind. Somewhere around track nine the listener’s ear recalibrates to whatever the average level is, and from then on every quiet track feels like a drop in energy. I spent years programming internet radio and this was the thing nobody […]