KERN audio / field notes
field notes.
weekly Tuesday email. one mixing or DSP idea per issue. ~5 minute read. 6,000+ producers reading. no spam, easy unsub.
Sep 22, 2026
·build log
three years, twenty-one versions, one reverb
open is out. a reverb that listens to what you feed it and makes room for it, three years in the making, with a blind-listening lab i did not plan to build and a rule that nothing ships until it passes. it failed twice. here is what the lab found, what i fixed, and what i heard with the names hidden. $29, no ilok, and the bundle stays $69 for five plugins through monday 5 october.
Sep 15, 2026
·sound science
your loudest master never arrives loud
streaming turns your master down to a target before anyone hears it, so mastering louder buys nothing but lost dynamics. and the loudness war mostly did not do what people think: measured across five decades the spread between loud and quiet did not narrow. what came down was the transient crack, by about a decibel and a half. so the thing to watch is heavy limiting and clipping, more than compression as an idea, and the move is to master until it is finished and let the platform set the number.
Sep 8, 2026
·sound science
the dialogue you mixed is not the dialogue they hear
a chain of reasonable decisions ends at the sofa with the voice buried. the film is about the chain. this issue is about your end of it: how to mix dialogue so it survives a stereo fold-down, a flat panel and an ordinary pair of ears, with the numbers i use, including one my own films failed on.
Sep 1, 2026
·sound science
a row of spikes nobody trained in
generated music leaves a mark, and it has nothing to do with taste. it is a row of evenly spaced spikes, put there by an operation that is also sitting inside half the plugins you own. which gives you a rule you can use on any analyzer: evenly spaced peaks came from a process, musically spaced peaks came from the music. plus a second tell the paper does not cover, and a note on why neither one is worth trying to EQ.
Aug 25, 2026
·sound science
nobody publishes where a phone speaker stops
two films, a few days apart, and the same thing happened twice. i went looking for the frequency a phone speaker gives up at so i could mix against it, and it isn't published anywhere. then i sat down to check the tuning arithmetic and found the vallotti preset in almost every synth is named after the wrong person. go and check a number, and it's either not published or it's filed under someone else's name.
Aug 18, 2026
·sound science
nolan wrote a screenplay the way you build a chorus
i went to see the odyssey and came out thinking about an illusion nolan has been using since the prestige. a stack of octaves slides upward under a volume curve that never moves, so the tones rise while the sound as a whole goes nowhere, and your ear climbs anyway. the useful part for a mix is that the rise lives in the handover between layers, which means you can build for a full minute and land exactly where you started with all your headroom still in your pocket.
Aug 11, 2026
·sound science
the top octave is not always there when it arrives
i took the finished file from my last video and downloaded what the platform actually hands out for it. the file my laptop gets still has everything up to 20 kHz. the file a lot of phones get stops dead at 16. same upload, same second of audio, and at 17 kHz the tone is either sitting there untouched or it is 55 dB down. which one you get is not something you choose, so the hearing tests built on top of that chain are measuring the delivery as much as the ear.
Aug 4, 2026
·sound science
the eleven true things, and the one i had to cut
i went looking for the research behind the mixing rules everyone repeats. most of them hold up. what doesn't survive is the way they get passed on: the number stays and the condition falls off, so a true finding ends up applied in the one situation it was never measured in. eleven of them, and a twelfth i cut on camera because i couldn't find a number i was willing to defend.
Jul 28, 2026
·sound science
your low end is mono before anyone hears it
you widened the bass at 2am because it felt bigger, and it was. then the club, the phone and the festival all took the weight back out of it. nothing broke. large sound systems feed every subwoofer one shared signal, because the arrays used to aim bass away from the neighbours only work when the feeds are identical. anything living only in the difference between your two channels isn't quiet out there. it's absent.
Jul 21, 2026
·sound science
the 3 kHz you hear is not the 3 kHz they hear
you cut the same harsh band on almost every mix, and you're never quite sure you got it right. here's why that doubt is rational: the outer ear has a resonance sitting in that region, and it varies between normal, healthy ears by about 2 kHz in frequency and 10 dB in level. your low mids travel to other listeners. your 3 kHz doesn't.
Jul 14, 2026
·sound science
the loudness your meter cannot see
bounce two masters to the exact same LUFS and one still sounds bigger. the meter isn't broken, it measures energy, and your ear measures how that energy is spread across the bands of your hearing. saturation barely touches the first and changes the second, which is why a little of it reads louder while the number sits still.
Jul 7, 2026
·sound science
the spectrum analyzer is making you deaf
looking hard at a meter doesn't just distract you from listening, it measurably turns your hearing down. vision and hearing draw from one pool of attention, and when the eyes work hard the ears go quiet. so make the call blind, then look to confirm it.
Jun 30, 2026
·sound science
reverb is a trade: space for position
you add reverb to give a sound a place to live, and the same move pushes it back and softens its presence. space and distance are the same dial. the trick is knowing what you're spending, and using pre-delay to keep the front edge while the tail buys you the room.
Jun 23, 2026
·sound science
you cannot fix a local problem globally
a harsh spot in one narrow band is a local event. reach for a global fix, a broad eq, the whole fader, and you dull everything that was fine while the problem survives. masking is local. the fix should be too.
Jun 16, 2026
·sound science
the harshness you stacked yourself
stacking the same part many times does not just make it bigger. it makes the few frequencies every layer shares reinforce into a hard, narrow edge. here is why thickness turns brittle, and what actually fixes it.
Jun 9, 2026
·sound science
why your widener kills your snare
a wider mix and a softer snare are the same move. width is decorrelation, and decorrelation is the natural enemy of a sharp transient and a safe mono fold. here is the trade, and the three rules that get you the size without the cost.
Jun 2, 2026
·sound science
the half of compression nobody teaches
compression is a mirror. downward turns loud parts down. upward turns quiet parts up. most producers only ever learn one half.
May 19, 2026
·build log
the tooltip I deleted
Tuesday night I added a tooltip to clarify a knob. Wednesday morning I deleted both. here is the rule the tooltip broke.
May 12, 2026
·sound science
your compressor inherits everything upstream
Mathieu sent a session asking why his bus comp sounded mushy. the answer was three plugins earlier in the chain. four jobs that come first.
May 5, 2026
·field notes
the case for fewer controls
Softube ships a four-knob controller. iZotope sells 17. the real question is not how many knobs but which ones are load-bearing.
Apr 28, 2026
·longread
the case for fewer controls (long version)
why fewer controls, well chosen, beats more controls every time. a piece on plugin design philosophy in 2026.