Mastering is simple. Not easy, but simple.

That's the message behind this series of 6 video tutorials I made recently for Sound On Sound magazine.

In them, I walk you through my entire mastering process from beginning to end, explaining how and why I work the way that I do at every stage.

I just watched an interesting video that Drew Oliver made for iZotope, where he notices a "peak level bump" in a recent release, and suggests it might be a deliberate production strategy.

And maybe he's right, but I assumed something very different when I saw what he was talking about – and in fact I can think of several other possible explanations, too.

I thought you might be interested, so I made a video explaining my thoughts. Take a look and let me know what you think ! And be sure to check out the original video - the section I'm commenting on starts @ 12:31

Almost 30 years ago (!) I mastered what I believe was the second ever album of 'generative music' to be released.

Around the same time, inspired by the experience, I bought the first – Brian Eno's 'Generative Music 1' – but was never able to play it properly.

...until now.

This is the (deeply nerdy) story of those two albums, of why I love them both, and how I finally managed to listen to Brian Eno's 'Generative Music 1' myself, exactly as it was originally intended.

Have you watched one of my videos recently and thought something like "this is all very interesting, but I'm not sure I can hear what you're talking about" ?

If so, then YouTube's new Stable Volume feature could be the reason.

In this video I show how it works, and how to disable it. Because when it's on, you'll never hear my videos the way I intended them 😕

I also explain why YouTube have added Stable Volume, and why it's not a complete disaster for everything we watch - but also why I'd like to be able to disable it permanently for my channel.

Suddenly this week everyone is talking about BlueSky, for some reason.

I signed up there ages ago as a possible alternative to Twitter (RIP), which was becoming less and less fun (for some reason).

Sadly there just weren't enough people talking about music production, audio technology, mastering and sound engineering to hold my interest back then. I tried Threads instead, which was OK but just seemed like more of the same algorithmic content that I was already seeing on Instagram and Facebork.

And now suddenly, almost overnight, everyone is trying BlueSky, for some reason...!

It's full of musicians, recording engineers, music producers, mixers, mastering engineers and more.

Honestly, it's really good fun. Loads of great people, no algorithm deciding what it thinks you're interested in, some innovative features and no aggressively promoted stuff you'd never normally choose to look at. It's great !

But because there's no algorithm, it can also be a little slow to get up to speed with. Finding people is a bit clunky, the search is often a bit hit or miss, and it's easy to get discouraged before you've even had a chance to get started.

So I'm putting this post up to try and help with that. If you've been wondering what all the fuss is about, and want to find some interesting people to follow and look at quickly while you give BluSky a try, here you go !