Category Archives: Uncategorized

I recently had the good fortune to interview Paul Waaktaar-Savoy of A-ha about his new studio in Park Slope. This is the first time I’ve seen a Tree Audio Roots console in a studio. Very cool design by Jim Keller of Sondhus. Beautiful space worth seeing.

We put the finishing touches on a new issue of Scientist yesterday. In it, you will find: Why Music Education Actually Matters Music Business Lessons from The Beatles 5.1 Surround Mixing Tips NYC Indie Labels: Captured Tracks The Best Basses for the Recording Studio …and some favorite posts from this blog. There are also some […]

It’s a natural instinct to seek prestige. Given the choice, we’d all prefer to be regarded highly rather than lowly. But prestige in and of itself is not a worthwhile goal, and seeking it outright will often lead you down exactly the wrong path. If you look around the world—and this goes doubly in creative […]

It has been said that there is a consumerist trap: “Buying things we don’t want, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.” As creators, we face an additional set of pitfalls. I would offer the producerist trap: “Spending revenue we’re not making, to create art that doesn’t speak to us or […]

In an age of infinite information, priorities become more important that ever. You can’t read every article, you can’t master every subject, you can’t see every movie, and you can’t devote yourself to every cause. But if you pick just a few, and guard your hours and your intellect enough so that you know you […]

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. […]