Journal

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 […]