I love audio gear. And plugins. And quick mix tricks. Like anything one does for decades, mixing music eventually becomes a game of inches and I’m always looking to claw my way to that next inch.

Whatever your craft, I’m guessing this applies to you too. So I hope you’ll keep reading when I tell you that this article is about the O.G. of audio mixing tools: the volume fader.

I’ve recently refreshed my relationship to the fader and I’d like to share a few anecdotes that may jar some creativity loose for you as well.

Better than a mouse. Look, I will not sit here and disparage the mighty mouse but there’s something about moving volume faders with a mouse cursor that feels like an “arms-length” transaction. There’s nothing quite like getting your monkey paws on an actual knob or fader to give you a sense of control. There’s a reason speed boat and fighter jet throttles are big, meaty throws and I’m guessing there’s more to it than just mechanics.

I have a motorized fader for writing automation. I also have a MIDI keyboard with eight comically short little faders on it. The faders on the MIDI keyboard map to corresponding track sends for a selected track (fader 1 = send 1, fader 2 = send 2, etc.) and I find this to be a more pleasant way to dial in both volume and send levels. I can close my eyes and control multiple faders at the same time while feeling more connected to the music.

What no software on earth can do - I recently did a coaching call with Mike Senior – author of my all-time favorite mixing book “Mixing Secrets for the Home Studio”. It was a refreshing session. While talking about finding small moments of magic to accentuate in a mix, Mike said something that really grabbed me: “there’s no software on earth that can say ‘hey! that’s interesting’ and then turn it up”.

Mixing is about balance but it’s also about unbalance. Sometimes a happy accident will sound surprisingly cool and recognizing the opportunity to turn something like that up (way up!) can create a memorable moment in an otherwise forgettable song.

Like playing an instrument - If you grew up in the 90s listening to hard rock then you know mixer Andy Wallace’s work. Think: Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, Slayer, etc. As far as mix gurus go, he tends to be on the reclusive side but the one thing that EVERYONE who’s watched him mix says is that he uses surprisingly little processing and spends a lot of his time going through the song and writing volume fader automation. Much of that punch, and excitement, it turns out, is about carefully pushing and pulling instruments and song sections using the fader!

He uses a technique that involves having two volume envelopes for a track: one for writing automation and the other for storing and “compiling” your automation passes. You take a pass of a song section, writing volume automation (maybe with your eyes closed). Then you copy that envelope to the second lane. Now repeat. Go through the same section again and adding additional fader rides; fine-tuning any adjustments as needed. It’s a bit like playing an instrument (or maybe a meta-instrument) and recording multiple takes for a song section.

I often find myself repeating similar moves as on previous passes; getting even more “unbalance” into sections I want to accentuate. Repeat as many times as necessary to get that satisfying movement.

Don’t think too much – On a recent mix I did, the client feedback was “the drums sounded punchier in the rough mix”. Now, the temptation is to do something sexy or akin to pulling rabbits out of hats. Layer in some samples, reach for a transient designer, or a multi-band clipper. Or buy something new. Instead, I thought “what if I just turn the kick up by 1.5dB?”. And, of course, that worked just fine.

The tools in a craftsman’s toolbox represent hundreds of hours of trial and error, of frustration overcome, and inspiration found. Some cover very narrow uses for edge cases while others are well-worn and used on every single job. To know when the simplest answer is the right one is a sign of maturity in one’s craft and, to that end, we ought not neglect the classic tools - like the humble volume fader.

Live music has an elusive, immersive quality that is impossible to capture or recreate. You can’t document it with your cell phone. Hell, you can’t document it with a camera crew! It’s some combination of reacting to the collective emotion of the crowd, seeing the intensity of the musicians in person, and the raw kinetic energy of the impossible-to-ignore volume.

I’m writing this while enjoying that fading glow one experiences the morning after an amazing concert. Last night I saw Bent Knee at a small, but acoustically impressive venue called the Space Ballroom.

The band members met while studying at Berklee College of Music and, unsurprisingly, their musicianship was world-class. There are the proverbial (and likely literal) 10,000 hours that each member had to put in. Then 10,000 more put in by the band – which is itself an organism.

What you see on stage is an effortless precision and tightness that impresses while allowing one to forget the skill required. Genius lies in making the difficult seem easy, after all, and such is the gift of the skilled showman.

The band had recently lost two of its original members. They cited the punishing lifestyle of 13 touring years as the main drivers.

I was at the show with my high school friend Dan. He was a drummer. Probably still is if he would pick up the damn sticks.

Before the show he was reflecting on the line-up change. He doesn’t know the band members so his comments are part speculative and part self-reflective. He said, “you start approaching 40 and realize that you have no assets. It can be unnerving”.

In 2011, Dan and his brother Matt were working to realize a similar dream in another genre-bending project called HERE. They planned a small, multi-city tour along the Northeast seaboard and needed a bass player to fill in for about a week’s worth of shows while their bass player was unavailable. I got the call, learned the songs, packed the bass and set off.

The week was informative. Early in the evening we would arrive at a venue – always a small, almost-but-not-quite cozy bar with a sticky floor and names carved crudely into anything made of wood. We would load in. That freakin’ tube bass amp was so heavy. I can still remember the feeling of carrying it up a flight of stairs.

We’d find a place for our gear. Maybe perform a quick sound-check. Then the waiting would begin. What to do? You go for a walk and eventually end up at the bar. Chat with the bartender. Drink a few beers. Get a slice of pizza.

Then you play a 25-minute set to an audience that has never heard of you and mostly doesn’t care. The set is exhilarating. It’s fun to lock in and become the Megazord that only exists for the duration of a performance. Afterwards you break down the gear, try to engage with a few stragglers, get in the van and start driving. Hopefully someone has an uncle in the next city and you get to sleep under a nice (and also free) roof.

Rinse. Repeat.

One week. That’s all I did and I realized it wasn’t for me. I didn’t feel healthy. I didn’t feel stable. I like routines. I like the comfort of my own bed. I don’t like driving a van. Bands will tour for months at a time. It’s an amazing feat of physical and mental will. The magic trick is that a band like Bent Knee can make that seem invisible from the stage.

After one song the singer, Courtney Swain, said: “you know that feeling when you realize you’ve been carried away and driving a little too fast on the highway and then there’s a toll booth approaching? That’s how I feel right now coming out of that song and into this break”. She was beaming and in her smile was the closest you will get to a magician revealing their secret.

Here it is: excellence requires a level of effort made possible only through love.

The morning after the show, I woke up early and had a traditional Saturday morning cartoon breakfast with my toddler. Throughout the day I reflected on all my half-hearted attempts over the past 15 years to become a better instrumentalist or to start and maintain a band. Too much friction. Too many distractions.

On the other hand, I built the studio and learned which knobs to turn and when to turn them. It wasn’t easy but not doing it didn’t feel like an option. Ultimately, I’m grateful that I spend a significant portion of my time working in a craft I love – striving for excellence and often ending my days by coming at the tollbooths a little too fast.

Living in Connecticut is sometimes like being a character in a Wes Anderson film.

Here’s one example. Wednesday afternoons, I drive to a dusty old post office nestled (like everything else) into a cozy corner of the woods. Behind this post office, somewhat inexplicably, is an equally dusty old indoor basketball court. There I meet up with a well-known painter who’s in his 60s and we spend 90 minutes shooting jump shots.

We also talk. About movies, art and creativity. Recently I asked him about generative AI and its impact on the art world. I expected him to shrug it off.

He’s well-established with a career that spans decades. He has “portfolio capital” and what seems like no shortage of work. I’d guess he’s as well-positioned as any creative to ignore the AI phenomenon. To my surprise he says he does think about it and what he tells me next strikes me like a bolt of lightning – implications for music coming immediately to mind.

He says that generative AI is impacting his technique. He’s leaning into thick, chunky paintbrush stabs. He’s making space for paint drips and accentuating the coarse textures of his brush stroke.

In other words, he’s emphasizing the part of the art that exists in the physical world or, as he put it, “the physicality of the thing”.

There is a natural complexity that arises when one applies gobs of different color goop to a canvas board. I’ve seen his work in person and can attest to its literal texture and the additional impact it brings to the viewer.

For all its impressive insights and cognitive abilities, AI does not yet exist in the physical world. It can only see the pixels in an image representing a single brush bristle captured accidentally (or serendipitously) in a skyline. It can perhaps try to imitate the effect in generating something new but, having never existed in the physical world, it will fail to be convincing and it will generate something that feels spurious – even where we cannot put our finger on what exactly is off.

For now, anyway.

Right. Onto music. A few days ago I mastered a song by a very cool artist (Mary Esther Carter). As I was working on it, I thought to myself, “wow! This song has a VIBE. I can inhabit it. I can see sweat on clothing and feel the heat off an amp head. I wonder how they did that?”. After sending off the master with a note complimenting the crew that made the thing I got a response saying “thanks! We recorded it live right off the floor!”

“There it is!”, I thought. The musical equivalent of physicality is “space”.

The work that is easiest for AI to replicate is the work that is built layer by single layer. An impressive keyboard part with crazy fast arpeggios? Cakewalk for the robot. Double bass death metal beat? How fast do you want it?

But if you put four musicians in a room and set up a $20 microphone - and even if the musicians weren’t very good - and even if the microphone was put into a weird sounding spot, I guarantee that you will, with that one channel of audio, capture something physical. Something unique. Something that exists in a sacred moment of space and time and that cannot be authentically replicated.

It certainly cannot be “generated”. And listeners will recognize the physicality of the work.

And your soul may exchange an understanding nod with theirs.

“I just didn’t understand why some of it was happening”, said my mom after listening to the 13-minute prog epic I had recorded.

I was 16 years old. I had been playing guitar for 3 years and had recently discovered the weird wild world of prog and prog-adjacent rock bands. Artists like Dream Theatre, Yes, Rush, Meshuggah.

It fascinated me. Odd time signatures were like puzzles to solve. Technical virtuosity was like watching world class athletes compete – with all their speed and grace.

So I set out to write a prog epic of my own. It was going to be like nothing the world had ever seen. With twists and turns and different textures swirling around the listener.

Now it was finished. And my first listener “didn’t understand why some of it was happening”.

Of course I smile looking back at this. There is a kind of striving or stretching that young musicians have – a yearning to fall farther from the tree of their influences. Not just to reinvent, but to invent from whole cloth.

What if I used a crash cymbal instead of a snare drum? What if I ran my voice through a bass amp?

This is the “wilderness” end of the creativity spectrum - where raw experimentation, independent of any context or knowledge about “what works” rein supreme.

It’s how you bootstrap serendipity and discover permutations that may have, indeed, never existed before.

More importantly, it’s part of the iterative process required to find your voice as an artist.

On the other hand, it can be slow and inefficient. Snare drums just work better than crashes for back beats. Why? I don’t know but we have over 100 years of Western music saying that they do.

Which brings us to the other end of the creativity spectrum: the “formula”.

There are dozens of YouTube videos that will explain the limited range of song structures and chord progressions used in top pop songs over the decades - and how to generate a successful bassline for each.

You could take this information (especially with generative AI) and just churn out vanilla-flavored mediocrity until the cows come home.

This will also not work. It will be boring. Predictable. People won’t care.

Since we’re framing the creative process here as a spectrum with “wilderness” on one side and “formula” on the other, it might be tempting to think there’s a sweet spot somewhere in between.

You know, where good song babies come from.

But I actually don’t think that’s the case. I think good songs come from a process that embraces both ends of the spectrum – where the artist jumps between extremes.

You need periods of unconstrained experimentation and iteration – what Rick Rubin calls “seed gathering” in his book, The Creative Act - but you also need to understand when a dash of “formula” will anchor a unique idea and make it satisfying. After all, music has been iterating for generations to find what’s satisfying for humans.

An analogy to cuisine is helpful. There are many different culinary traditions in the world. Almost all of them use salt, spice, and sugar in the creation of their most satisfying meals. Humans universally enjoy salt, spice and sugar – though you could not make a meal of these ingredients alone.

Consider a an unforgettable meal crafted by an experienced chef. There will be a foundation of ingredients that are distinguishing to the cuisine. For example, pad thai will likely have noodles. There will be something unique that the chef has brought to the recipe – some subtlety of flavor or texture that surprises and delights. There will be salt and spices.

It would be foolish to attempt to cook a never-before-seen gourmet meal without using salt or spices.

Similarly, it would be foolish to attempt to create a great song without building and releasing tension.

A kick drum and a crash cymbal striking at the same time create a wall of the full audible spectrum that can bring a tremendous feeling of resolution and power to the 1 of a chorus.

Choruses usually repeat 2-3 times because people find the anticipation and release satisfying.

Rock music has snares on the 2 and 4.

All of these things have been done to death – because they work.

So find your wild ideas. Explore and cultivate them. But don’t forget to jump to the “formula” side of the spectrum from time to time - to augment your unique voice with tried-and-true conventions that will satisfy listeners.

Don’t forget the salt.

“God. DAMMIT”, I growl as I monster-stomp out of the studio for a 2^nd straight morning with nothing to show for my efforts.

Like many people reading this, my time feels stretched to new limits these days. The pressures of deadlines, the confusion of what it would mean to be a “good” parent, the vague injunction to stay active, the Sisyphean upkeep of domestic life.

As such, “time budgeting” and task triage are likely two of my most important daily activities. Under such conditions, the act of creating something often feels like an indulgence one cannot afford.

After all, how do you budget time for creativity? I know how long it will take me to go grocery shopping but how long will it take me to write Verse 2?

It could take 5 minutes on the way to said grocery store. Or it could require 2 hours and a waste bin full of crumpled note paper.

This particular morning, I’d made a 2^nd attempt at filming a 60 second video for my website. That’s right: 60 seconds. Not exactly opus material, either.

Saturday, the day before, I had assumed I could film the thing in 90 minutes – leaving this morning for editing.

I had done all the prep work: cleaned the space, put up some additional acoustic treatment, played with the lighting, gotten a haircut as a token nod to professionalism, charged the battery of my wife’s fancy camera, set up a microphone and a camera stand.

Yesterday it turned out all the footage was worthless. The camera, fancy though it was, didn’t like the lighting. Things looked fine in the view finder but on the big computer screen I quickly realized it wouldn’t do.

Today I used my phone but again found the results unusable. The camera angle wasn’t right. The microphone had to be kept out of frame and didn’t behave the way I wanted. The audio didn’t sound good – an unforgivable sin on the website of an audio engineer.

180 minutes of sunk cost. 3 of god’s good hours. Gone. Nothing to show. Tomorrow is Monday.

The diesel-powered treadmill rolls on.

It’s easy to get upset.

But here’s the thing. The thing I realize time and time again only to forget the next time. That 180 minutes of churn is part of the process. Sometimes (even oftentimes) you can’t get “there” without going precisely through “here”.

Monday morning I carve out another 60 minutes at the expense of something else. I set up my phone, do some quick test takes for audio and video, and start rolling within 10 minutes. This is day 3. I know EXACTLY what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it. I finish in 25 minutes. I’ve also learned what works in this space for footage shot from similar angles in the future.

There was no way for me to get this outcome without the churn of the past 2 days.

In our productivity-driven world, it’s easy to see time as a precious resource that mustn’t be squandered. This point was made wonderfully by Edward Hall – discovered by me in the Oliver Burkeman book Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals:

“Edward Hall was making the same point with his image of time as a conveyor belt that’s constantly passing us by. Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time.”

This is a persuasive illusion that I often embody but believing it in a creative context is likely to keep you spending time doing only things which can be precisely predicted – like watching 45 minute episodes of The Diplomat.

Milk must be churned into cream. And so too churn is the process through which creativity is refined and ideas start to take solid form.

It is not wasted time – just “the time it takes”.

So if you’ve spent 2 hours writing Verse 2 and feel you’ve gotten nothing – just know that the path to completing that song runs precisely through here. That, when the time is right and those perfect lyrics seem to pop magically into your head, it wasn’t magic it all. It was the fruits of your struggle.

“What’s happening here?”, I think listening back to the bassline I just recorded. It wasn’t what I had intentionally set out to record just 30 minutes earlier.

Let’s back up.

I’m a particularly mediocre bass player and a particularly fast audio editor so my recording process consists of looping a song section – a verse, let’s say – and then recording over that loop 8, 9, 14 times in a row without stopping.

Then comes the act of ruthless triage. I “comp” – meaning I take the best snippets from the best takes and end up with something that, to the untrained ear, might pass for competence.

The day before, I’d sent a handful of bass ideas to the artist whose song I’m producing. He wrote back with the polite equivalent of “less of you, please.”

His instruction was to simplify the chorus — good advice, in fact. The kind of thing that made me wonder if he should be producing me and not the other way around.

So I comes up with a simpler bassline, see? And I starts looping and recording it.

There’s a part of this process that I love. Around take 4 or 5, I really start feeling the groove. I think competent musicians call this “the pocket”. I wouldn’t know anything about that but once I’ve played the part enough times, my fingers start to know the way. I close my eyes and try to respond to the push-pull dynamics of the groove.

Except slowly, like in a bad dream, the new “simplified” bassline starts sounding suspiciously like the one I recorded yesterday!

This is not the first time this has happened. I’ve had situations where a song will sit for months – waiting on one thing or another – and I’ll come up with a nearly identical part from a clean sheet approach.

So, back to the question posed in the opening line: “what’s happening here?”

Let’s consider some possibilities:

1. What I’m experiencing is the residue of the previous recording session. My fingers played that part a bunch and now they’re gravitating back to it.

2. Like baby ducklings imprinting the term “mother” onto the first living they see, it’s just hard to shake that first idea you come up with. In other words, there are any number of “right” answers but I tend to prefer whatever I came up with first.

3. There is a subjectively correct answer to what this bassline should be. Subjectively because your answer may be different than mine but mine, such as it is, is the only one I will ever feel to be “right”.

Like with most things filed under the category “art” inside my brain, I don’t know what the actual answer is. However, from a MINDSET standpoint, I have always behaved as if it were #3. And in fact, this belief is a prerequisite for sanity – if you’re me.

You see, facing the infinite as a set of possible outcomes is like floating alone in space: dismally hopeless. A scary enough prospect to prevent one from donning the space suit in the first place.

How could you ever rest with a bassline knowing that there may be another one out there, somewhere, that could be not just better but perhaps even iconic?

Ok. Maybe not iconic. But still. I’m indecisive and this type of thought can paralyze an indecisive creative. So I’ve done what people often do in the presence of uncomfortable emotions: embrace a more convenient belief.

It’s nice.

It makes working on music less like carving David out of a block of marble and more like solving a really fun escape room.

It helps me avoid procrastination because I know I can solve most of these musical puzzles if I just turn them around enough times.

It also reduces my anxiety of “forgetting” something I came up with because, once discovered, the subjectively right answer is easy to stumble upon again.

I mean, that’s why you never do the same escape room twice, right?

In April 2023, the music world felt a ripple – though you may not have heard about it unless you spend time in circles where people worry about this sort of thing.

An anonymous producer released a song that was entirely crafted by generative AI. The vocals were “faked” to sound like Drake and The Weeknd.

It was dubbed Deep Fake Drake.

I remember listening to the song with a kind of foggy skepticism that was slowly replaced by gloom. The song was ok. I’d say I liked about as much as I like the 75% of Drake songs that seem like they were manufactured in a hit song factory. And in that vein, it was convincing.

In the fall-out, artists were worried about their voices and likenesses being used against their will, or without their knowledge. Producers and mixers were worried about their craft being displaced by algorithms that work faster and produce work of comparable quality. Hell, I was one of them and, in some ways, I sill am. Maybe you are too.

What if I’d poured 15 years into a honing a skillset that was about to become obsolete? What if I had gotten really good at fixing flip phones just as smart phones were being released?

That same week, I had a multi-day studio session with an artist I love. His name is the amazing Lorenzo Landini and he is a story-teller. His lyrics are honest, his music organic, his voice authentic and strong. I’d never met him in person before though we’d been collaborating remotely for some time. This weekend was about spending some time “in the room” untying some of the trickier creative knots the work presented.

As we got to work the richness of data that can flow between two humans sharing a physical space immediately impressed me. There are so many subtleties in human communication. A short intake of breath. A slight wrinkle of the brow. Both looking up at the same time with a spark of “that’s the one!”. These things made working a pleasure. Browsing through guitar overdubs, we hit a stride that didn’t require much verbal communication at all. Just small glances and head gestures were sufficient to convey what we were thinking.

We were shaping the marble on the same wavelength. How cool.

Lorenzo is also an amazing chef. Late in the evening he cooked up a feast for our family and we laughed, told stories and learned about each other’s pasts. It was a short weekend, and we had much to get done so after dinner we returned to the studio. As we sat in the comfortably lit studio space, papers strewn about, melted into chairs with the slouch of the weary but inspired creative, I was overcome with equanimity towards Deep Fake Drake and AI in general.

Would it make hit songs? Undoubtedly. And soon, I’d guess. I smile thinking about the fact that people set up bot farms to listen to songs as well. I like to envision this cul de sac of internet where robots are listening to songs made by other robots – amassing billions of worthless streams. Maybe transacting billions of dollars back and forth.

What would that mean?

Who cares.

Music is about human connection – conveyance of emotion and story. Catharsis through creation for the artist – or feeling understood for the listener – or understanding. Or simply being moved to move. That doesn’t mean human jobs in the music industry won’t be displaced. I’m sure they will. Less people are riding horses than 200 hundred years ago so there’s less demand for horseshoes and wagon wheels.

But music cannot be viewed in such strictly utilitarian terms because people will always want to create it – not just to consume it. And just like so many acts that are intrinsic to humanity, it will always be more satisfying done together with other humans.

It is a human endeavor – to create. To tell. To listen. There will always be space for people creating music together – even if the charts fill up with AI-generated mega-hits.