Let’s be honest for a second: sending your tracks off to an online mixing engineer can feel terrifying. You’ve spent months, maybe even years writing, re-writing, and tracking your songs. They are your musical babies. Sending them to some engineer across the world feels a bit like dropping your kid off at a boarding school run by strangers. I’m pretty strange, admittedly! Will they destroy the vibe you worked so hard to build? Will they turn your gritty indie-rock track into a generic, happy...

This week I read a post that made me laugh. Someone was lamenting that they "wanted to hear Billie Eilish’s wonderful voice as she is, not tuned," and expressed genuine shock that her vocal track had been "meticulously compiled from dozens of takes by her and her engineer" It made me laugh because, outside of a few specific genres, record-making has never been about presenting things truly as they are. It has always been about creating something beyond reality, especially in pop music. Record...

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug when it comes to audio and record making, and the truth is there really are both pros and cons of “the old days” and where we are today. This applies to everything - to gear, to production techniques, to sonics, to job titles, to technology. Everyone’s a producer now, but hardly ANYONE is a producer if that makes sense. I just finished a hip hop project, something I don’t get to do many of, and it reminded me of making an album back in the day, and how much of a...