Article Type: Mixing Notes

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]