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 !

People are always asking me - can you master on headphones ?

And then the next question - which ones are best ?

And one name keeps on coming up - Audeze.

In this video I try out several different pairs of Audeze headphones, and let you know what I think about using them for mastering.

The results may surprise you !