Notes from a small project studio, written between takes.
Recording, mixing, and the craft of listening closely.
Studio notes and working methods
Review
Three compressors under forty dollars, one drum bounce, no vocal to hide behind. I ran all three on the same stereo drum mix from a session I tracked last month: live kick, snare, two room mics, overheads, and a hi-hat track that I keep on a fader because the drummer plays it loud. The bounce […]
Review
I don’t chase free reverbs the way I chase free compressors. Most of what turns up is either a one-trick plate or a convolution loader with no character. So I put REV-246 on a session with low expectations. It models the EMT 246, one of those German broadcast units from the era when digital reverb […]
Review
Some singers just sing slightly under the note, and no amount of EQ will fix it. I get that kind of take regularly, and I still don’t reach for pitch correction. Not out of principle. I just find that a tuned vocal often stops sounding like the person who walked into the live room. What […]
Review
I record bands in one room. Not a live room with a control room and a glass window, just one treated space with the drums at one end and the amps at the other, and everybody playing at once because that is what the songs need. The take that comes out of that room is […]
Review
I bought Colorfield on a Tuesday, used it on a session that night, and had a vocal sitting better in eleven minutes than it had in two hours of fiddling with my usual plate. That’s the pitch, roughly. Vitric Audio built a mix-stage room simulator, not a reverb, and priced it at $29. Nineteen with […]
Review
A singer I record often has a voice that sits well until she pushes. On the quiet verses the level is fine; on the chorus she leans in and the first syllable of every phrase spikes about 6 dB above everything else. That is the take I keep on my drive for testing compressors, and […]
Review
Every mix I finish gets played in my car before it goes anywhere. Not because the car is a reference system, but because it is a hostile one. There is a woofer down in the door card doing one thing, a tweeter up by the mirror doing another, and a cabin full of glass and […]
Review
Most drum bus saturation advice is written by people who never have to fix the damage the next morning. The plugin gets praised for making drums aggressive, then the same drums turn up in the mix as a flat grey smear with no transient left and no air on the cymbals. I record bands in […]
Review
I keep my session folders on a rule that has nothing to do with music. Every project gets a folder named by the client, then the song, then a four word description of what it actually is, and that folder never moves once it is created. I came to this after losing an afternoon looking […]
A note from the studio
I’m the engineer behind Jeans Music Lab: one person, one small project studio, and a lasting curiosity about how records are made. I write about the choices, experiments, and everyday listening that shape the work.