Author Archives: Justin Colletti

When you go to concerts today, you will find people looking at their phones. We could complain about that, or we could realize that there are two potential ways to deal with it. The first way is to realize that, since they’re going to be looking at their phones anyway, you could just make them […]

It’s not enough to do work for work’s sake. Not in the long run, anyway. I know, I know, work really can be its own reward. For a time. But for work to be sustainable, and for it to feel meaningful, one of two things must be happening. We either have to be: 1) Making […]

Music is built, to varying degrees, on repetition. With few exceptions, this is true not only of music’s structure and form, but of the way we interact with it, whether we’re practicing musicians or just listeners. For most of us, there is a point in our younger lives when we watch the same movies and […]

Earlier today, while doing research for a story on surround sound mixing, I came across an old article that appeared in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. It was written in August of 1941, shortly after Disney debuted the groundbreaking Fantasia, the first commercial picture ever to be released featuring surround sound. […]

There have always been more books in the library than you could ever read. There have always been more magazines than you would ever be able to keep up with, and more newspapers than could ever be relevant to you. There has never been a point in modern history where there weren’t more bands on […]

…To live, to eat, to visit, to shop, to see a concert or to walk around in. They might not always be where we want or expect them to be, and they will rarely be in the same places they were a decade ago. But they’re always there. Likewise, there will always be places that […]

Why is your song seven minutes long? Is it because it’s your song? If so, re-evaluate. What are you saying in seven minutes that you couldn’t say in six or five or two? If a song is long because you keep on adding verses and choruses, it’s probably longer than it has to be. Sometimes, […]

One thing that we can learn from history is that the strategies that worked the last time around are unlikely to be the strategies that are going to work this time around. And yet still, so many of us get caught up “fighting the last war.” Want to make a debut album? Maybe the best […]

Has music ceased being cool? These days, when someone tells me about some cool new thing that just came out that I absolutely have to experience, it’s almost always been a TV show: Breaking Bad. House of Cards. The Wire. Dexter. Mad Men. Girls. Game of Thrones. When was the last time someone told you […]