Drum and bass is one of the most physical genres in modern music. The drums are faster than your heart, wants to beat. The sub-bass rolls under everything, low enough that you feel it before you hear it. When the drop hits, the room moves.  You can read about it. But mostly, you have to hear it.  This guide is for… Read More »What Is Drum and Bass? A Beginner’s Guide to the Genre

[📌📌 Insights taken from real Drum and Bass artists who have been using these DAWs for a while.]   In 1995, a former graffiti artist named Goldie released a drum and bass album that would change the genre forever. It was called Timeless. The title track ran 21 minutes. The album sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone and earned a place on… Read More »Best DAWs for Producing Drum and Bass 

Drum and bass has a streaming problem.  The genre was  originally built loud. Club systems, festival rigs, late-night sets where the bass needed to physically move the room.   For thirty years, drum and bass producers mastered their tracks hot — often pushing well past -10 LUFS. That was the standard, and the genre’s identity was partly bound up in that loudness.  Later on, streaming changed the… Read More »How to Master Drum and Bass for Streaming 

Drum and bass is one of the hardest genres in popular electronic music to mix cleanly. The reason is simple, and it’s the same reason the genre is so addictive when it works.  In a drum and bass track, the sub-bass, the bassline, the kick drum, and the fast breakbeats are all fighting for attention at the same time.… Read More »How to Mix Drum and Bass (Without It Sounding Muddy) 

As a producer, as a songwriter, I’ve spent a lot of time either in my bedroom or in studios, alone.” — Maggie Rogers That’s most of us now.  You sit down with a laptop, a mic, and an idea. You write the song. And then you sing it.   Finally you record it. Also do the mixing and mastering your… Read More »How to Write a Song Worth Releasing  

A six-second drum break, a few warehouses in London and Bristol, and a tempo nobody had pushed that hard before. That is roughly where drum and bass starts.  This post tells the story of how it actually happened, from the late-80s UK rave scene to the moment jungle stopped calling itself jungle.   If you want the broader overview of… Read More »How Drum and Bass Music Was Born 

In 1969, a band called Led Zeppelin released a song that opened with a single guitar riff. Four bars, played slow, built from a handful of notes. The song was “Whole Lotta Love.” The riff has been stuck in the head of every guitar player since.  Here’s what most people don’t realize. That riff uses five notes. Just… Read More »Pentatonic Scale: How Five Notes Built Modern Music 

Before Avicii became Avicii, he was a teenager in Stockholm building tracks in his bedroom. One of the tools he reached for early was a piece of software called Mixed In Key. It did one thing well. It told him what key every song was in, and which keys would sound good together. He used it to… Read More »How DJs and Producers Use the Camelot Wheel to Match Keys 

Most artists think of mastering as the final checkbox, something technical that happens after the real work is done.  A 2009 study by researchers Bryan Paton and Phillip McIntyre proves it is far more than that. When listeners heard mastered and un-mastered versions of the same songs, they felt them differently, not just heard them differently.   The mastered… Read More »Why Mastered Music Feels Different (Even at the Same Volume) 

In 1984, Bruce Springsteen recorded a rough vocal for a song he wasn’t sure he’d finish. The take was loose, almost careless, a placeholder while he worked out the arrangement. When the band tried to re-record it later, nothing matched the original feeling. So they kept the scratch.  That song was “Born in the U.S.A.”  This happens more often than people… Read More »What Is a Scratch Track in Music?