Sounds so good at low volumes
Don’t quite get the mix/master at louder volumes
Inspirational nevertheless
Complicado
Radio show set up
In person and Zoom guests
Multiple frontier models used to figure out the software and audio routing configuration
Podcast Prep Checklist — TEMPLATE
Show:
Date:
Guests:
Zoom link:
Recording folder:
☐ Power on Apollo / Mackie
☐ Open UAD Console
☐ Confirm Mackie mics hit Apollo
☐ Open Loopback
☐ Confirm Podcast Send To Zoom meters
☐ Confirm Zoom Guest Return meters
☐ Open Ableton podcast template
☐ Confirm Podcast Aggregate selected
☐ Confirm A To Zoom output pair
☐ Confirm Mackie Mics: Monitor In / Sends Only
☐ Confirm Zoom Guests: Send A off
☐ Confirm Podcast Print armed
☐ Confirm individual tracks armed
☐ Open Zoom
☐ Select mic: Podcast Send To Zoom
☐ Select speaker: Apollo
☐ Test guest echo
☐ Open OBS, if needed
☐ Confirm OBS input
☐ Record 2-minute test
☐ Play back test
☐ Start show
☐ Back up recording after show
Was supposed to be semi-retired by now.
Again, the best laid plans…
Tired as F.
Good stuff happening in the studio though and the reboot of The Sursumcorda Radio Hour is almost realized.
The best laid plans
Often get disrupted by economic slavery
Another day
Another dollar
I keep vacillating on what genre I want to produce.
Dub Techno is so alluring. Experimental ambient so satisfying.
Guitar-based is so tactile.
I need to get back into a process and stick with it.
So many distractions.
Deep into physical setup and pre-production for the return of the Sursumcorda Radio Hour.
It’s going to be a gas gas gas.
Bernadette and I are deep into setting up a studio, pre-production, and nostalgic reboothing of the live streamed Sursumcorda Radio Hour.
This plugin gets a lot of flack from the YouTube producer community, but for experimental ambient production it’s pure quicksilver.
Thank God.
I’m increasingly less interested in making tracks and more interested in documenting a life.
Most modern production advice assumes music is built like a product: define a goal, optimize the workflow, refine the result. Useful enough, maybe. But the music that stays with me feels more like a memory than an achievement.
So my process has become a form of journaling. Music as blog.
I collect fragments: old jazz records, favorite and nostalgic tracks, degraded guitar loops, field recordings, overheard conversations, books, strange photographs, half-forgotten dreams, cities, obsessions, periods of uncertainty. Small artifacts from ordinary life. Then I let them sit together long enough to begin speaking to each other.
I trust accidents more than formulas. Mood more than technical correctness. I trust the strange moments when machines and memory begin blurring together.
Each release feels less like a statement and more like a timestamp. A note left behind saying: this is what the world felt like from where I was standing.
Years later, I hope I can listen back and hear not just songs.
And, leave a time capsule for my family in friends and hope that a giant EMF event doesn’t erase my legacy.
—- By Dave Wesley with some help from AI.
The Core Signal Philosophy (don’t skip this)
You’re not mixing clean → you’re sculpting decay + harmonic memory
Color should accumulate across buses, not live only on channels
Always leave one layer untouched/clean so the chaos has contrast
This guy. Props.
Reminds me of the book, “Mix With Your Mind”, which I read 20 years ago and probably need to read again.
I have a long way to go.
Long live Dom Fox.
This post is sourced by many pages of production notes over many years. I refrained from editing.
There’s a point in every late-night session where the DAW stops feeling like software and starts feeling like ritual.
The kick becomes architecture.
The reverb becomes weather.
The EQ curve becomes a form of divination.
Your notes orbit this idea constantly — that sound is not just heard, but aligned. Frequencies as geometry. BPM as cosmology. Arrangement as liturgy. A mix not as a product, but as an energetic structure suspended in air for a few minutes before collapsing back into silence.
Most producers are obsessed with adding more. More plugins. More layers. More “cinematic” nonsense drowning in OTT and fake nostalgia.
But the deeper lesson hidden in your notes is subtraction.
Cut 400Hz and suddenly the fog lifts.
Mute one synth and the groove appears.
High-pass the ego.
Leave space for the ghosts.
Dub techno figured this out decades ago: the most important instrument in the track is often the absence between the chords.
There’s also something beautifully unhinged about treating arrangements like sacred geometry. One page maps chakras to frequencies and colors. Another breaks down Catholic mass structure like it’s a techno arrangement template. Another talks about sonata form and thematic return. At first glance it looks chaotic.
It isn’t.
It’s the same idea wearing different robes.
Tension. Release. Return.
Drone. Void. Impact.
Human beings have always repeated patterns to induce transcendence.
A Berghain loop and a Gregorian chant are cousins who took different drugs.
And honestly? The producers who make truly immersive music are usually the ones willing to become slightly irrational about sound. The ones who hear emotional weather in resonant frequencies. The ones who spend 40 minutes tuning a delay feedback loop because it “feels spiritually crooked.” The clinically optimized producer rarely makes anything memorable.
Your notes understand something important:
A track does not need to be perfect.
It needs to feel inevitable.
Like it was excavated instead of produced.
So the next time you open Ableton, don’t think like an engineer first. Think like an architect designing a room for invisible entities. Build tension into the walls. Let the compressors breathe with the tempo. Let reverbs decay like collapsing stars. Tune the kick until it stops fighting the bass and starts speaking with it.
And if the track gets too clean, ruin it slightly.
Perfection is sterile.
Mystery has low-end.
I need to get my shit together. I mean, honestly. Also, I am most definitely not a hippie campfire guitar player.
So many ideas. So little time.
Job stuff going to shit.
Creative reinvention and reinvigoration
The triumphant return of the Sursumcorda Radio Hour
Another culture focused radio show
Content creation
New tattoos
Shit like that
From the guy who introduced me to so much great music starting almost 20 years ago: