Writing
Notes from the studio and the floor — electronic music, the underground, and the craft behind the records.
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Structure vs. Free Composition
I'll let you in on a secret nobody tells you when you're new: the most creative records you'll ever make won't come from having every sound in the world at your fingertips. They'll come from boxing…
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Facing the Crowd: A Short History of the DJ
The single biggest change I've watched happen in thirty years of doing this has nothing to do with the music, the technology, or the size of the rooms. It's the direction the room is facing.
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Advice for New Producers
There are a few things I wish someone had told me when I was starting out. Not technique — technique you'll find anywhere. These are the things underneath it, the habits that decide whether you…
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For People Who Have a Hard Time Understanding Bass Music
If you've ever tried to understand bass music and walked away feeling stupid, the problem probably isn't you. The problem is that you tried to understand the whole thing at once, and the whole thing…
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Different Genres, Different Styles of Mixing
Watch most hypnotic techno house DJs for ten minutes, and you'll notice something: the crossfader barely moves from the center. Two records are playing at once, almost the whole time, and the set is…
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Getting a Deep, Multilayered Sound
A track that feels thin almost never has too few instruments. It has too few voices. That's a different problem, and once you see the difference, the fix stops being "add more stuff" and becomes…
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How I Discover Music
When people ask me how I find new music, what they usually expect is a genre map — a clean tree that tells them where everything fits. I gave up on that idea many years ago.
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My Live Set Configuration
The full breakdown of my Ableton Live rig — two decks, eight channels, eight-bar loops. Every routing choice serves one goal: nothing goes wrong on a dancefloor that I can't recover from in a couple of seconds.
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Choose Your Workflow, Then Your Gear
Most people buy the gear first and figure out what to do with it second. It's backward. Decide what you want your hands to do, design the controls you need, then go find the hardware that matches.
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The Tool Was Never the Problem
Sampling, the drum machine, the DAW — every one of them was going to kill real music. AI is the newest moral panic in a long line. But there is a real line this time, and it isn't the tool. It's authorship.
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To Producers Afraid of Printing Their MIDI
Why committing your sound — printing MIDI to audio — is what lets it finally become something, and where the real work starts.
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The Long Version
A record is the short version. This is where the long version lives — the rooms, the gear, and the reasons behind the tracks.
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Rave Revolution: How UK + US Laws Shaped Underground Dance Culture
Early raves attracted people with renegade spirits because they were illegal. How four decades of UK and US law pushed dance culture underground, overground, and back again.
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How Sampling Transformed Music (A Short History of Sampling)
The single most important invention in the history of music is the phonograph. The second is the sampler — and a short history of how it rewrote music, culture, and law.