Routing

Tricking yourself is just not a good long-term strategy.

There are a few reasons that pro audio connections often run over balanced cables like this or this.

This isn’t a stereo connector.

There’s a reason we teach mid-side recording, and it isn’t because it sounds good, although that’s one of the reasons we like to use it.

This is a dynamic microphone.

(beep) - What’s happening here might not be exactly what you think.

There are vocalists out there that will never ever give you a good performance in headphones, but even seasoned vocalists sometimes have a hard time matching the vibe and the performance of a relaxed studio environment with the monitors on.

Here are 10 chords for you to chew on, centered around the key of C until you’re ready to join a beat kitchen class.

Gain staging explained: the complete signal chain from mic to speaker, how to set levels at every stage, headroom targets, and why volume is the most powerful mixing tool.

Fletcher-Munson curves and equal loudness contours — why bass disappears at low volumes, what the loudness war did to music, and how LUFS metering fixes it.

What mastering actually is: the perfect-pretty-loud framework, LUFS targets for Spotify and Apple Music, and why learning mastering early makes you a better mixer.

Why reference tracks are non-negotiable, how to choose them, and the difference between hope mixing and intentional mixing.

All right, you want a tip find two quick ways to find stuff in logic.

Annotated DAW mixer diagram showing serial and parallel signal flow — sends, buses, groups, and stereo output routing explained.

As soon as you send a signal anywhere, your stereo output, your headphones, you’re using a bus.

It’s a radical idea. But I teach mastering before I teach mixing, and I don’t spend a lot of time on it. Two reasons. Mastering is pretty straightforward. The objective…

Whether you call it a bus or whether you call it a send and a return, the utility of running effects like reverbs and delays in parallel rather than in series is more than just a matter of resource management.

When you place reverb on a channel, does it sound different than when you put it on a bus?

"Pre-delay is about more than just the time between the original sound and the onset of reverb, as you may have heard." Most people assume that reverb time is the factor that tells you how large a space you’re simulating, but actually there’s a lot more going on.

You can expect to have a hard time understanding what a multiband compressor is if you don’t know what a compressor is, but you should also be familiar with a crossover network.

This cable goes one way.

Check this out and tell me if it makes sense to you.

I’m a guy who loves to get my hands dirty.

There’s one thing that separates veteran producers and engineers from newcomers, and that thing is understanding signal flow.

Today we’re gonna build something.

Insert effects vs send/return routing explained — buses, grouping, parallel processing, resampling, freeze and bounce, and building a reusable mix template.

How to set up a DAW session: templates, gain staging in practice, track naming, color coding, exporting stems, versioning, and future-proofing your projects.

Artistic vs technical mixing, why the line between production stages is blurring, the importance of finishing, and audio terminology people use wrong.

A practical mixing workflow: level-matched reference tracks, selective leveling, the listen-compare-act loop, and knowing when your mix is finished.

Don’t be intimidated by a compressor, you deal with stuff like this all the time.

"Heh, Nathan." I initially responded to a mastering session and have never been replied to.

A clashing note is one that doesn’t fit with your existing harmony.

Sometimes we can easily explain the relationship between two chords using an established music theory device.

If your workflow is inefficient, nothing you learn in your DAW has much impact.

Check this out and tell me if it makes sense to you.

Logic has this secret automation folder.

Most producers think they understand stereo — but confuse width with quality. What stereo actually means, how it’s encoded, and why mono compatibility matters more than width.

If you find yourself running off lots of mp3 files and wishing you had a better way to do it in macOS, here’s my workflow and maybe you’ll like it.

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

The diminished triad resolves in more directions than any other chord. Why its symmetrical structure makes it the most versatile connector in harmony.

Hey, I want to apologize to the person who kind of ambushed me on Discord the other day and asked me to listen to their song.

A student recently told me that the "aha moment", the one where they finally understood what a compressor was doing, was when they recorded a compressed signal so they could see and feel the resulting waveform.

Do someone the great kindness of putting this little riff under their fingers.

One of the hardest things about learning to mix, especially when you’re starting out, is you’ll have no way of knowing when you’re done.

This little unsung hero is part of my workflow in Logic and it’s called Create Track.

Okay, this just in. If you want me or someone from Beat Kitchen to come and talk to your newspaper, we would be delighted. Not only does that sound like…

This Friday, I’ll be kicking off Beat Kitchen’s Digital Marketplace Summit with a free workshop for members.

Welcome everybody. This is Mark Jaffe from Five Bridges. Mark is a wonderful attorney who really takes a focus on creative stuff and he’s agreed to come in and talk…

For most of you, the whole hardware software debate is overblown.

After teaching countless people how to use programs like Logic and Ableton, I’ve decided to give up.

I’m excited to announce that Beat Kitchen is launching our scholarship program with a pay what you can tuition option.

Hey, there’s nothing inherently wrong with presets.

Whoever told you you can sample five seconds of a song and not have to get clearance is conflating that with one of two legal concepts the first being fair use and the second being incidental use Incident use is easy if I’m doing a documentary and that guy drives by blasting a song out of his window I don’t have to pay for it.