Notes from a small project studio, written between takes.
Recording, mixing, and the craft of listening closely.
Studio notes and working methods
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 […]
Review
My converters clip at +18 dBu, and I have never once wanted to find out what happens when a snare gets there. The whole job of gain staging in a hybrid room is keeping signals loud enough to be clean and quiet enough that nothing digital ever sees a full-scale sample. It sounds simple. It […]
Review
Most flat vocals are not pitch problems. I have sat in front of a comp that felt dead and reached for the tuning knob out of habit, and the result was technically correct and still boring. What actually fixed the take was almost never more correction. It was something that added a second opinion to […]
Review
A template is a promise you make to yourself. I had thirty-two tracks of one, built up over a year of small decisions, and a routine plugin update broke it on a Tuesday. Not a crash. Worse in a way. The project opened, the vocal comped and sat exactly where I left it, and then […]
Review
I keep two cheap ribbon mics in the cabinet next to the good stuff. One cost less than a decent dinner. The other was a return that a shop sold me at half price because the box was torn. Both get used on guitar cabs more than any condenser I own, and neither has ever […]
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
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 […]
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.