More earbuds

When I'm mixing I use my Steven Slate VSX headphones which are kinda expensive and sound good, they can also emulate other headphone sounds which is great. I reckon you want to mix so that the song sounds good on any system - which is a compromise - but I have been surprised how little of a compromise it really is. As in, you can have a mix which sounds great on great headphones but sounds bad in a car, or with phone speakers...but with a bit of tweaking it still sounds great on great headphones but now sounds good in a car and on phone speakers as well.

Part of this is experimenting with cheap and budget headphones. Always wired, usually earbuds, and I avoid ones with built in microphones. As in, I buy them to test mixes to see what that style of headphone will actually reproduce. I reckon a lot of people are going to listen to a mix with built in phone speakers and it's never going to sound great on them. You aren't going to hear any of the textures or subtleties so the best you can kinda get is keeping the mix clear enough to understand the vocals and feel a beat. But I'm suspecting that many people will be using a budget set of earbud headphones, possibly some that came with their phone (is that still a thing?) so having a mix sound good on that is pretty important.

In my testing of budget headphones I have discovered a few things. Firstly, that there are good budget headphones. If for you headphones are a bit of a consumable, like they are for me - as in, you will get five years tops out of them before you have broken them somehow - then budget headphones can be a wise choice for casual listening. You can also have a few sets scattered around your house for quick and easy listening. My recent purchase exposed something to me that I guess I had always known but really stood out this time.

The real low end cheap headphones will reproduce sound but they aren't worth the money, even small amounts of money. They will do some electrical or mechanical trickery so that the bass sounds big (annoying - what are we, all gamers wanting to hear big explosions?), they will cut out the low mid muddiness but push the upper mid range so that guitars and vocals sounds crisp and clear. They aren't fooling anyone.

So the mid tier budget headphones will have a more natural flatter EQ, they don't need trickery because the drivers are better. I think back to the Sennheiser MX500 earbuds - the fit, the sound - it's earbuds so the sound is not going to be perfect, but they kinda got it right. The Apple ipod style were also okay but I was never into the Apple scene.

Which brings me to my point - the most recent budget headphones I have been using, when I'm walking around the house listening to mixes - kinda impressed me. Yincrow $AUD20(2025) earbuds, quite acceptable. I was testing $AUD30(2026) NiceHCK B40s. Both had a nice natural sounding EQ, there did not seem to be any trickery involved trying to disguise badness. In my A/B testing, the NiceHCKs had some edge over the Yincrows that I couldn't put my finger on. Sure, the NiceHCK has a slightly boomier bass and a slightly elevated high mid, but neither sounded "forced". The NiceHCK also had a slightly higher volume, I noticed the driver was slightly bigger so maybe it was pushing more air? Or just more efficient? I was nudging the phone volume up/down two clicks during the A/B test so to identify tone differences not volume differences.

I did some research (okay...lazy AI research...I didn't read and think through every subreddit post about headphones...) I realised what I was hearing was the minute transient response difference between the drivers. The NiceHCK must be able to respond a tiny bit faster and better articulate those tiny tiny harmonics and overtones present in the recording. So while they both had a similar frequency response there was some sort of time domain frequency smearing more apparent in the Yincrows. Quite the epiphany. Sound is complex, headphones are a compromise in reproducing it. Manufacturers are doing well with mid-tier budget headphones. Both these headphones are acceptable but the NiceHCK ones have an edge over the slightly older Yincrow, there is a lot going on in those tiny little speaker drivers!

20 years of YouTube

...20 years just clicked over last week - 28th May 2006 was the date of my first video upload. I didn't think I was an early adopter, YouTube had been around for a year. But in hindsight I was an early adopter. I was ten years earlier than Rick Beato who celebrated his ten years (I just watched his video). We had the same reason for using YouTube - it was an easy method to share videos with somebody. In my case it was for a fingerstyle forum (doesn't exist anymore). In 2006 digital videos were definitely a thing but not as easy as today's tide of smart phones. I had bought a Sony point and shoot camera capable of grainy video when my first daughter was born late 2003, in between hundreds of baby videos there are some of me recording myself playing guitar right back to 2004, so I was not stranger to it.

I never quite had that "viral video" moment like Rick did, however I had a lot of traffic - when I put out Canon in D it was getting thousands of views a day, the peak was 2010 when across my channel I was sitting at 7,000 daily views - enough to push Canon in D over 3 million views in those few years. Unlike Rick however, I didn't have much to offer - just an amateur fingerstyle hack (my original videos show the classic early stages of being a guitarist - it's just about moving your fingers fast into the next position and pluckin' them notes...it's missing musicality.) I never built anything around my YouTube channel, just arranged songs and played them, gave out my tabs for free (at least a hundred thousand downloads!) slowly got better while an ever-decreasing number of people watched. Not a problem, was never about being a star, was about sharing a hobby I was passionate about.

The stats - the early days show the rise - more and more people discovering YouTube. Then the fall - more and more people posting on YouTube. Those people, especially talented musical fingerstyle players, far eclipsed the increasing rate of people using it, hence the great rise and fall of my channel. In the later years it's the algorithm that decides who is going to see what - you can see a few blips along the way as events occurred, the one I remember the most was when Ennio Morricone died and a heap of people watched my Ennio video (I actually have two).

Black line = total views, Blue line = Canon in D, Green line = Here Comes The Sun.

Going forward? There is no "what happens now", I've always been doing the same thing! I get inspired to arrange a song, or something musical I'm interested in, and I record a video. Even back in 2008 I was talking about playing for audiences and how recording a video for YouTube is the next best thing, it forces you to finish a project - don't be a half-song playing guitarist. No more to say, I talked about YouTube statistics back in 2013 and not much has changed. I talked about how creators are at the whim of The Algorithm and not much has changed with that either.

So business as usual. I do have a backlog of songs to record but I'm not as single mind focused on just recording arrangements as I used to be...but that's okay. Just get out there and create - don't leave it to The AIs to do!

Train Your Ear

Train your ear is advice I preach to myself regularly. Sometimes I listen too.

If you like mixing audio, which I do (who doesn't?) then you just gotta keep persisting. I am reminded of some advice that really stuck with me - half a decade ago I was in Nunz's recording studio and my nephew was there because he liked the idea of being an audio engineer. When asked about what he should do, Nunz was emphatic, I will paraphrase: "Mix. Record. Sit at your console and keep doing stuff. Every waking moment of your life you should spend listening, mixing, learning. You life has to revolve around audio engineering. You need to be completely dedicated or you won't make it."

It seemed extreme at the time - but the longer I mix the more it doesn't seem extreme at all if you want to make a livelihood of it.

I have pretty much an endless supply of recordings to mix - at my local church I can hit a button and get a multi track high quality recording of as much CCM as I like! You might not be a fan of Contemporary Christian Music but it has everything you need - the staples of acoustic guitar, bass guitar, drums, keys, vocalists - but also electric guitar, violin, sax and other can make an appearance. The teams change from week to week, the music will vary from rock to ballads to classic gospel hymns. Not only do you get to mix the recordings, but actually being part of the team is another wonderful experience - the production - what everybody is playing when - the participation, the comraderie...one gig every week if you wanted it! Don't sit in your room playing by yourself - be part of your local church and get on the music team! But I digress.

According to my archive I have mixed 70 songs in the last two and a half years. I am now at a stage where I can hear a mix and mostly recognise what it needs. EQ, compression, reverb, limiters, saturation. Listen to the feel and tweak faders. Carve out spaces in frequency, in time, in panning. So many options, so many choices you can make. Still learning, still experimenting. My early mixes are pretty awful. My recent ones are okay. Because I have persisted, I keep listening, slowly, I am training my ear.

Jack's Utopish social media and recording a Quip

Gotta love what Jack Conte tries to do. All the creatives out there, feeding the social media beast which has turned into a piece of crap algorithm driven attention seeking advertisement focus killing machine so billionaires can make more billions...creatives don't stand a chance of being truly creative if they need to feed that machine or are creative as a hobby with the day job pays the bills. I like my day job, but I also love creativity and I have been dabbling in sharing my creativeness with the world via the internet for more than two decades now. When Jack started up Patreon several years ago I jumped onboard - it's a way for fans to support artists.

So he's just released a bunch of updates which included the concept of "Quips" - shortform videos on the platform, with the idea that they are just quick and not overproduced. Behind the scenes style. I can get onboard with that! I have been making Jawmunji Talks videos on and off for years, generally I go longer form, but I have also done a few Youtube shorts. Seeing as I'm a recovering perfectionist it's good for me to be less-producey, so I just recorded a Quip and popped it into Jack's machine. Will that machine turn ee-vil? Maybe, but I want to say no. People will game it for sure, but will it intentionally be made ee-vil like the social medias? I want to say no. Will it get traction? Maybe! It will if we feed it! Can Patreon be the vehicle where fans can actually support creatives? I kinda think it already is! I love the "1000 Fans" notion - that you "only" need 1000 fans to pay you $100 a year and that is a decent income. I think of my youngest daughter in her various bands, I know she has followers, and she sells merch at gigs, and it gets devoured. I helped her make 30 high quality CDs for Hyperfest - all sold (note to self - write a blog about that). The lino print cheap t-shirts she makes move easily at a greater profit...heh, I think the CDs are much better value for money, but there you go!

The point being that she is already supported by local fans who show up and buy merch at all her gigs. So that, applied world wide on the internet seems like an obvious step. But the current social media, the streamers, all the internet machinery for it - designed to make the maximum amount of money for shareholders and if the creatives got nothing from it then that would consider that great.

Stepping off my soapbox, I decided to post a Quip. I love to talk about creative stuff that excites me. I love to engage with people who also love to talk about the creative stuff that excites me. I don't need to make a living from being creative, but I wouldn't stop people who want to support me as well! I do have a bunch of mates already on Patreon - in the early days I used to offer stuff so I amassed a number of supporters - but I stopped offering stuff (it was in a very very grey legal area) - and encouraged supporters who were expecting stuff to cancel their subscriptions - but offered cheap tiers for anyone who wanted to keep supporting me. Some did! Thank you supporters - it is great to engage with fans but when someone supports financially it changes things...people making a sacrifice because they believe in something. They don't have to sacrifice but they want to.

Let's switch to tech talking.

I would dearly love to have a dedicated room with cool gear set up to make it super easy for me record a video whenever I am in the creative mood. I do not have that. So just now I spent more time setting up the gear than recording the video. Shame. So here are some notes to Future JAW to help him out:

• OBS Studio: still amazing. Keep using it for this sort of thing.
• Web cameras: I'm running a classic Logitech C922 Pro and a C920. Both are dated - I'm going to buy a more modern replacement for the C920. Important - don't saturate your USB bus with webcam feeds, try to make sure each one is plugged into a different USB bus...currently I have one on the laptop and one on the dock.
• Microphone: my ever-useful Zoom H1D. Turn it on a set it into audio interface mode. Plug it into USB, it's low bandwidth so it will be fine. In OBS Studio go into Settings->Audio and point a Mic/Auxiliary Audio to it.
  Remember! Windows->Sound Settings for Input and Output definitively show what is connected. All apps refer to the devices there including OBS!
• PeSonus Studio 1824 interface, via Reaper DAW: this is the complicated bit. Guitar instrument cable -> PreSonus interface -> USB to laptop -> Reaper DAW -> OBS + headphones. I use the 1824 in ASIO mode, which is the best way to interface with an interface, and Reaper can apply fx and send them back to the interface, so I plug my headphones into the front of it and get near-zero latency. HOWEVER that isn't shared on the Windows laptop I use UNLESS you turn on Loopback=virtual in the PreSonus Universal Control application. Once you do that, you will see in Sound Settings an input for PreSonus Virtual - which you can then add to OBS as another Mic/Auxiliary Audio.
• OBS Studio again: brings it all together. I've tried different picture-in-picture/split/shifting/etc methods for the webcams, I went for portrait this time, one webcam on top another on the bottom. In Settings->Video I went Base of 1080x1920 (ie portrait HD). Then it is a case of adding the two webcams, cropping and moving them to fit. The Zoom HD1 microphone I initially added a gate filter, but the electric guitar acoustically was getting through the gate when I dug in. If I increased the gate I had to shout to trigger it. So I added a mute/unmute hotkey and remembered to deal with it. Not great.

When in doubt, just talk through your problems with a chatbot - that's what I did. General life tip with chatbots: you have to have some basic knowledge of what you are trying to achieve, you have to half know the answer or they will lead you down a never ending garden trail to nowhere. You have to have  a year's worth of built up a knowledge of knowing how to get what you need from a chatbot, accumulated from trial and error...hence I wrote the notes above to help Future JAW when he forgets things.

What I need to do to be a little better for next time (and there is always a next time, I have been doing "behind the scenes" videos for 20 years) - at least one better webcam, and a microphone stand that puts a microphone close to my mouth so I don't have to worry about mute/unmute, so I can just use gating.

Oh and I played Pink Floyd Learning to Fly. I was aiming for a more "Pulse" live feel, so more bassnotes, wasn't quite getting it, still undecided whether I should be hitting it that hard. The G string rings a bit too much, wasn't happy with my playthrough. BUT THAT'S ALRIGHT...if you want perfection use AI slop.

Oh, shiny!

I am easily distracted. Not in a doom scrolling/cat video sort of a way, more some shiny and new creativity catches my attention. I think we all are at least to some extent - my fascination for new things/the unknown comes from a desire to understand everything. Case in point this very blog. I created it in 2008 born out of my obsession with fingerstyle guitar arrangements. But it was immediately filled with anything that had some grounding in music.

Currently there is plenty of shiny things around me - mixing, AI, recording - but underneath are still the fingerstyle arrangements. When I sit here at the computer, my custom electric guitar is hanging right behind me and if I've heard a song or had an idea I will grab it and hash something out. Further, I've learnt that if I spend so much as even half an hour hacking out a song, I need to type it up into Musescore, otherwise the next shiny thing will take over, my thoughts are lost and maybe years later it will be shiny again, I'd already had a crack at that song but there is no documentation and I'm almost starting from afresh.

For example, looking at my arrangements folder, I can see quite a number of arrangements unreleased. Don't get me wrong - there are a heap that are released! I learnt many years ago that you need to finish things, even if they aren't perfect. Just ship it - the next ones will be better. It needs to be to a certain level of quality and completeness though - I don't throw half cooked ideas out there as if they were baked, iced and ready to be served.

So - my most recent incomplete arrangements:

• Pink Floyd - Learning To Fly. It's a great song underneath, it meets the criteria of being simple enough - intuitive chords and melody - but with some nice flavours/textualisations that makes it interesting and engrossing. I can't decide whether to keep the bassline rolling like it is in Pulse or keep it laid back and relaxed.
• Supertramp - Give a Little Bit. Love the rhythm and the weird "chord progression get reversed" feel. Such a fun song to play and a positive vibe. I need to nail down the final arrangement, I have played this out a few times now.
• Dexys Midnight Runners - Come on Eileen. Fun, but quite difficult. Lots of chords that is hard to fit the melody in, hard to not play it too fast. Been sitting on that for ages simply becuase it is so difficuly.
• Gorillaz - 19-2000. Iconic. Weird. Challenging. Love it. Difficult to play. I need to simplify it to keep the groove and feel...in fact just then, looking at it, holding my guitar, I just resolved a tricky high melody into a bass groove. Simpler, but holds the same feel. Nice. Shiny.
• The Beatles - Blackbird. Yes, been playing this forever as just the guitar part, but then introducing the melody, the problem is the verse melody fits really nicely but a fifth down, but the chorus doesn't work a fifth down. Not idea how to resolve, have tried many ideas, have looked at others play this, still don't know what to do. Sits on the backburner. I play it out sometimes and just cheat through the chorus by not playing the melody.
• Metallica - Enter Sandman. I've basically arranged this in my head and play it out regularly, haven't tabbed it.  Pretty easy and super effective - a crowd pleaser.

Two layers of shiny going on here - first - arranging one song and not finishing it and being distracted by the next song - second - being distracted with mixing worship music/AI to automate and simplify processes/building guitars and basses/so many other tricks and hacks to thing about!

Oh, there is somethign shiny over there, I'll be back!

Note: I still don't know how I feel about AI pictures. They are quirky and fun and pull together ideas. But all built on stolen photos and art. Don't like AI music. Do like hacky AI code for tools. Don't like AI algorithms vomiting confirmation bias back at me. Do like AI as an intial research too. I could go on - but it's early days of AI and I'm still deciding where I stand. Today I felt like an AI picture. Sorry to those offended.

More vibe coding - song analysis

I am fascinated by the happenings in the LLM/Chatbot/"AI" landscape. I studied an "AI" unit at Uni more than 30 years ago, we called it "Artificial Neural Networks" in those days, but the underlying premise remains. I'm sure the tech is WAY more complicated than the simple models and training data we used. Heh, for my final year project I wrote a program in C, in DOS, that was running on a "luggable" computer (not quite a laptop, but a computer with battery you could carry around and use), that had a sound interface and a microphone. There was a small database of words, students would walk around with the computer and get volunteers to say the words that appeared on the screen and it would capture the audio - to be used for training data. I managed to put a pretty oscilloscope graphic on the screen as well - to make it fun for the person talking - as they pressed the space bar, said the word, pressed the space bar for the next word. After twenty or so words it would thank them and save all the sound files to folders to be later used as training and test data for speech to text. Very early stuff.

Anyway, it's fun to see it have come so far.

My most recent vibe code, with Claude who is my current favourite vibe coding chatbot, "we" wrote a python script to analyse music. Let me explain.

I have been mixing songs from my local church for a few years now, it's such a great way of practising and improving. Both as a musician and as a mixer/producer of a mixed song. I have mixed more than 60 songs over the last two years and I thought I'd take my favourite 12 from 2025 and make a playlist. But each mix has a different feel, as my ear developed, as my skills developed, so the 12 songs across 2025 have quite a different feel, even though they are all similar in style. Sure, there are differences - we aren't playing the same song over and over! - but I felt that as an "album" of 12 songs there should be a certain level of consistency.

I think you know where this is going

A basic consistency check is your LUFs and LRA. You don't want to be constantly turning the volume knob up and down between songs, or even within songs - so an overall perceived loudness (LUFs) and a measure of how much dynamics there are in a song (LRA) is important both for the listener and for a streaming service. Streaming services will adjust your loudness if you don't hit their metric.

In Reaper DAW I can easily track LUFs and LRA - but I was interested if I could get other sonic characteristics as a metric for comparison in Reaper.

In typical Chatbot style there was lots of talk about integrating various sonic libraries into Reaper (it has great programmability) blah blah, but chatbots just don't think outside the box. When it was talking about calling some python external to Reaper I said - "can we just do all this outside of Reaper?" and the answer was basically "yes that would be easy." Sheesh.

Suffice to say I now have an interesting python script that analyses a group of songs for an interesting range of metrics, looking for outliers and suggesting what needs to be changed and how it can be changed.

So much going on there. First thoughts are "C'mon JAW, are you trying to make all music hit the same bland boring metric?" No. And a little bit yes. Who else here turns down the start of "Time" on Dark Side of the Moon because they don't need to have extremely loud alarm clocks scaring them. I get it, the artistry, the "scare me into action because every year is getting shorter", but I don't need it on the 100th, 1000th listen. Or the first whalesong note in "Echos".

So I'm going to say yes, the LUFs should be close to each other (especially since the streamers will change them if you don't behave yourself) and the dynamics shouldn't be crazy wide. You don't want a listener turning up a song at the start because it is a quiet guitar intro only to turn it down again when the verse kicks in. At the same time you don't want your song to be so compressed that there is no dynamics at all (I was guilty of that on a few).

However for spectral data broken into bands, Sub - Bass - LoMid - Mid - Presence - Air, I do feel like there should be a certain amount of homogeneity across the board and yes, I did tweak some outliers. Frequency rolloff point at 85% is also another interesting metric. I don't want there to be some songs that sound like an AM radio and some that sound like you are standing outside of a rave party. Particularly when the recordings are from the same venue, the same style of music and the same groups of musos appearing in the songs.

From a vibe coding point of view - it s so good to do, fun and super effective and efficient. From an art point of view - I like consistency, I like having my mixes compared with each other to see where I went a bit wild in places. I have templates and recurring processes, but I mix to the song so they are always going to get a different vibe. From an album point of view I think reeling in some of the outliers is a good idea.

If you want to try it out, get it here.

Shine on you crazy tab

I saw Yoni play Shine On You Crazy Diamond many years ago, thought it was such a good interpretation, Ioved the idea of trying it, decided it was too much of an undertaking. Around May last year I had started noodling with it and even recorded a youtube short playing part I. Well I have been plugging away at it in the background. Yep, it is a massive undertaking. Heavily influenced by Yoni, there are a few bits he had taken out and I added in, a few bits he played I didn't. I also gave up at the start of part V whereas he took it a little bit further. I play my arpeggios different, more classical like maybe? I pay it different enough to warrant my own tab for it, otherwise in a years time I will have completely forgotten how to play it.

This very morning, on a sunny Labour day in Australia, I finished the tab...well it will need several more play throughs and tweaks - sooo many articulations. 6 pages. I kinda regret starting but it's so iconic and so nice to play. I play it through around twice a week to really push it into muscle memory, and at over 8 minutes, with a lot of complicated chords it's challenging. It's been more than six months, and it has kinda pushed out any other arrangements I have been working on, it would be at least three if not four of my normal arrangements worth. I practise parts on my electric, but my full playthroughs are usually on a classical. I think it sounds better on the classical, even though I run out of frets on a classical. On one calm day when I'm feeling chill and relaxed I'll try recording it. Then I can release the tab to you all. And get back to the backlog of all the other arrangements and recordings I have queued up :-)