Journal

The kick and the bass are fighting over the same 60 Hz, and one of them has to move. That is the whole problem sidechain compression solves, and it is the technique I reach for before I reach for EQ. Cutting the bass everywhere to let the kick through leaves the low end thin between […]

Wave Theory is a MIDI generator from BangZilla that takes a drawn waveform shape and converts it into note data. It costs $59 and there’s a 14-day trial. I got hold of it because the pitch is interesting to me: not another sequencer with a grid, but a shapes-to-notes idea where the contour of a […]

The mid-side workflow in Pro-Q has always been the quiet killer feature. Not the dynamic EQ, not the spectrum grab. The ability to split a stereo signal into mid and side and treat each half as its own world is what turns a clean EQ into a surgical tool. Pro-Q 4 refines that, and after […]

Most thin mixes aren’t thin because the bass is quiet. They’re thin because two or three sources are sitting on the same fundamental and quietly cancelling each other, and the room you mixed in never told you. The low end on your studio monitors reads full, you bounce it, you play it in a club, […]

I keep two bus compressors on the drum group and neither of them costs more than a decent night out. That is not a brag about being cheap. It is what years of hearing my own kicks get smaller taught me: the price tag tells you next to nothing about whether a compressor grabs a […]

I keep swing on a separate MIDI track from my kick, and I always have. The reason is simple. A swing amount is a percentage of a grid subdivision, so if you apply it to the whole pattern, the kick gets moved right along with the hats. A kick that lands early or late by […]

Most bass problems in club music aren’t bass problems. They’re sub problems. The fundamental sitting between 30 and 60 Hz is the part that decides whether a track moves a room or just sounds thin on a laptop. Get it wrong and no amount of mid-range EQ saves you. So here are six tools I […]

I bought an Apollo Twin X Duo in 2019 and have run every session through it since, so the DSP-versus-native question is not abstract for me. It is the reason I have kept a Thunderbolt cable plugged into a Mac for six years and the reason I have occasionally stared at my plugin folder wondering […]

I have no verified details on a 12.2 update, so I’m not going to invent a feature list for it. What I can do is talk honestly about the groove tools that shipped in Live 12 proper, because those are the ones reshaping how I build house. The timing and migration behaviors for any later […]