Music Production Mentoring

Reviewed two submitted pieces this morning — a cassette-recorded rap by Jon and an anxiety-themed instrumental by Alessandra. Feedback centered on rhythmic phrasing, rhyme placement, melodic theme development, the use of stereo space, and the creative and practical tradeoffs of committing to a lo-fi cassette recording workflow.

Covered mastering fundamentals in an office hours context, including peak limiting, LUFS targets, loudness matching across an album, and multiband compression for mid-side and frequency-specific control. Also worked through a specific guitar rhythm challenge — the train beat feel — with Alee, demonstrating how the upstroke placement on beats two and four creates the characteristic gallop pattern, and discussed drum recording pass-by-pass versus full-kit capture. Additional topics included ear health, hearing protection, tape saturation plugins, and professional portfolio practices for mix and mastering engineers.

We discussed the 1991 hit, Loosing My Religion by REM. We talked bout arrangement choices driving production choices and vice versa. The song has an interesting structure, and is 4:53 long so- unconventional by pop standards, with a mandolin solo in the middle. Participants were challenged to discern the structure, arrangement, and mix choices, as well as discussions around what it would be like if this song were made today, and how might the production choices differer? What is stylistically appropriate for one genre could make or break a song and the development of those sensibilities.

Covered pre-mastering mix preparation, including gain staging, LUFS metering, true peak reading, and strategies for managing dynamic peaks in choruses. Discussed top-down mixing with a mastering chain in place, the value of separating the mix and mastering stages into distinct sessions, and plugin installation troubleshooting on macOS (Ventura and Tahoe), including AAX path resolution, security/privacy settings, and risks associated with unvetted plugins.

Covered recent updates to Logic Pro and the friction they introduce for experienced users — specifically the reorganized content library, changes to Drum Kit Designer, and multi-output routing. Also discussed a past project involving a video-sequencing app with a custom scripting language for audio and video, and briefly touched on Ableton's video sampling capabilities.