KERN audio / field notes
field notes.
weekly Tuesday email. one mixing or DSP idea per issue. ~5 minute read. 3,500+ producers reading. no spam, easy unsub.
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.