Today, for paid subscribers, I’m releasing the first batch of many: five of my favorite records, for you to use, remix, and sample.

This is my first public sample release since the three Kingsway Library albums I’ve done. I’ve been making and licensing records as samples in some form—mostly privately, for specific producers—for the last 8 years.

I see these records as the rough, first brush strokes of a song. They’re fragments that are intentionally left vague and gestural. The energy in these ideas is meant to stir up some ideas—to get you to run recklessly. The key to making them, as I see it, is to follow the Hemingway quote: “always stop when you are going good… when you know what will happen next.”

Samples are nutritional goods, useful for many genres but notably at the heart of rap music. For years, I’ve been providing these rough-hewn ideas to a close group of producers who can bring them to life. I’ve watched as these little seeds can take on a new identity in the hands of a great artist. It’s a fun assignment, and I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of my post. It means I’m always starting—always experimenting with how things begin.

Know this: you’re encouraged to use these in your music. I’m inviting you to. Maybe you just like the melody, or something about the inner texture. It’s all in your interpretation.

Use and abuse

For paid subscribers, these samples will come with a license to use them in your music. The exact details of the license is forthcoming (I need a bit of time to adapt my team’s normal one for use here). It’ll be on my homepage when it’s ready. For independent (non-label) projects, It’ll be a no-nonsense license that lets you use these samples and their stems in your released music as you see fit.

For projects that end up at a label, I will draw up a separate, simple license (much like the Kingsway license that’s on my other public samples) that makes it easy to clear these samples. I’ve been doing license clearance for my samples for many years now—we’re easy to work with, and we’ll get any project sorted.

I’m including a brief rundown of how I made each sample, with some notes on the techniques I used, specific gear, etc. This is a way to share some of my findings and experiments with you all, so you can riff on these ideas in your process.

The full set is available for listening here. What follows are the downloads, write-ups, and stems:

1. Miracles

Read more

To my new subscribers: welcome! Thanks for helping me start this new venture. I’ve enjoyed fielding questions about my screen sharing method over the last week.

In these “nitty gritty” posts, I’ll detail how I’ve set everything up and why. These posts will be unapologetically detailed; I want to ensure that anyone who finds this guide can get it right.

The list of topics I want to cover is getting longer every day. I’ll be writing more about the insights I’ve had while embedded in the music-making culture of today, and how creativity can flourish alongside—and sometimes in spite of—technology.

These days, there is a glut of new gear and new technologies, all of which claim to solve our many problems. We ought to be more discerning about which problems we want new technology to solve. It’s a matter of picking and choosing. We ought to decide which of the old rules should be unbreakable—those inflexibilities which may become trademarks of our artistic process—and those which, by throwing them out, will let us be more creative.

To that end, this screen sharing thing has been unambiguously great for me. I really think any producer or engineer with their own studio should give it a try. So let’s give your studio an upgrade that will actually move the needle. Let’s make it feel wireless.

get a second laptop

Buy one used, or repurpose your old machine. I’m using the smallest, most inexpensive M1-series MacBook Air I could find. It’s a base-spec MacBook Air from 2022, and it cost me $500, used. I wanted to get a very lightweight one (the recent ones are satisfyingly small), but don’t be misled: it needn’t be the latest and greatest. A less powerful laptop should easily do the trick.

I’ve purged this computer of all other apps, and I’ve set it to stay on, password-free, and ready to mirror. To do this, head to System Settings → User & Groups, and set Automatically log in as → (your username). I’d rather this computer have no other apps on it; its purpose is to be light, focused, and always connected. When I want to work wirelessly, I can grab it from the stand by my couch where it is perched, charged and running.

I’m a big fan of using computers this way: single-purpose devices that dutifully perform one task. The point isn’t to introduce a new laptop into my life; the point is to have a reliable tool for my process. My habit of doing this will be a recurring theme. I have multiple single-purpose computers, and each cost me comparatively little. Each—as with Rick and Morty’s butter-passing robot—must silently resent me for their relative insignificance.

The idea is to host your studio computer’s screen and share a duplicate of it on the remote laptop. With good screen sharing software—the new ones are silky smooth—you’ll start to treat this computer as a reliable, mobile mirror of your desk setup.

the best wireless screen sharing app for Mac today

The app I’m using is Jump Desktop. With a recent update, it’s become blazingly fast, and it has a few advantages over the native MacOS screen sharing app. If you want the quickest solution, download it for both machines (the Desktop client is $34.99 on the App Store, and you don’t need their other subscriptions), get going right away, and worry about optimizing it later.

For the longer story, I must mention the High Performance Screen Sharing Mode that, as of Sonoma, is now baked into MacOS. That update first made me realize this could be done. Before Sonoma, screen sharing was cumbersome: the computer’s resolution was often not scaled correctly, latency was sluggish, and color accuracy was pretty lackluster.

Some elite group of programmers inside Apple has clearly been tasked with fixing this, likely to coincide with the release of the Apple Vision Pro (you can view and control your Mac inside the Vision Pro, wirelessly). Recently, Apple has ported this tech to the Mac directly, naming it the new “High Performance” screen sharing mode.

The new mode is, without qualification, bonkers good. The connection is absurdly solid. The latency is now nearly imperceptible. There’s very little jitter—the time-skipping effect that makes these wireless connections feel shaky. The stream is at retina resolution, and the colors look so good they seem native. You can even scale the resolution to the MacBook Air’s dimensions. The trick—making our little MacBook Air feel like the whole studio—is so convincing, you quickly forget it’s a trick.

Ah, if only it were so simple. Apple left frustrating limitations in their implementation that cripple its usefulness for us musicians. Those who have spent years religiously following Apple’s work may recognize the pattern: a new feature is released, often cutting-edge and with a lot of promise. Yet upon closer look, it has usability issues that Apple has not considered, preventing the app from living up to its promise. To users’ dismay, the feature is then all but abandoned, languishing for 10 years between updates.

So it is with Apple’s native screen sharing. The biggest deal-breaker is that the High Performance Mode blacks out your main screen when remote screen sharing is running. A decision, presumably for privacy’s sake, that ends up making the whole thing far less useful. Ideally, our studio screen (the one at the desk) remains untouched and visible, and we simply have a copy of that screen on our wireless laptop.

Another deal-breaker: touching any key on your desk’s keyboard other than Escape summons the deafening voice of Siri out of your speakers. “Your computer is being remotely controlled!” it chides. Siri cares about privacy, that much is certain. But her warnings are abusively loud when your speakers are turned up, as musicians tend to. After a particularly loud session of berating, I searched far and wide for a way to silence her. Of course there’s no way to turn it off. I’m left with a feeling of helplessness only Apple can provoke. The Apple giveth, the Apple taketh...

Enough whinging. Here we arrive at my favorite: Jump Desktop. There are others, and I’ve tried them, but for one reason or another they are less reliable or have some deal-breaker. For a while, Jump Desktop didn’t come close to Apple’s High Performance Mode’s slickness. This year’s update has brought it up to speed. It is still a tiny bit less smooth, but everything else about it is well worth the trade.

Here, we have full control over how screen sharing works. We can choose in detail to prioritize either speed or picture quality. My settings are: non-retina resolution, high quality color, at Fluid 2.0, 60fps. This gets me 7-9ms of latency. Streaming at Retina resolution gets me about 15ms, which isn’t too bad, but my main machine (a 14” M1 Pro from 2021) starts to spin its fans up. Yours may not have a problem with the highest settings, but my computer’s fans get a little nervous.

All this streaming takes some more processing from your computer, but not as much as you might think. The main process involved is encoding your computer’s screen to video and sending it over your network. Modern DAWs like Ableton predominantly use the CPU, not the GPU, which leaves plenty of headroom for something like this.

optimize your wireless settings

For most of you, that’s the end of the story. You’ll have a perfect mirror of your main machine, except on a laptop. Run around the room in happiness, your new wireless DAW in your hands.

For those of you who wish to optimize further to improve the picture and latency, here’s what I’ve tried (and what works), in order of priority:

1. Plug your main machine into your router via Ethernet. This is the first step toward greater reliability; any network engineer would tell you to try this. Any network lag will almost certainly improve.

2. Physically move your router into your main studio room. This did wonders for my connection’s reliability—I figured it wouldn’t have much of an effect, but it was noticeable.

3. Turn off other wireless features, such as AirDrop, on your remote computer. A single-purpose computer will not be adding much strain to your network, but it’s worth checking.

4. Prioritize the network traffic of both machines. You may have other devices that hook up to your Wi-Fi. Presumably, your Apple TV can wait at the back of the line while your wireless studio takes priority. To do this for my router, I find the QoS (Quality of Service) tab, locate both my main and remote machines, and toggle “Priority.”

All that said, I’m not sure how necessary this optimization is. This year, I’ve run sessions in studios with this technique on the fly, using my coproducer’s laptop and mine to make an ad hoc screen sharing session. Even though nobody was using Ethernet, the connection was eminently usable. Really, the network doesn’t have to be stellar to be useful.

The total latency in the room for my MacBook Air is about 9 milliseconds. Audio nerds may exclaim that this is a nontrivial amount of lag, and that is true with audio. In video land, it’s almost negligible. Consider: my main studio monitor’s refresh rate is 60 Hz. That means it’s showing a new frame every 16 milliseconds. The time it takes to get picture on my second screen is less than it takes for my monitor to show the next frame. That’s very, very fast.

corollaries and other ideas

There are some fun implications of having a wireless laptop in control of your studio, and, having run things this way for over a year, I have some other ideas.

The Jump Desktop app itself offers one: since we’re transmitting wireless video one way, why not send your MacBook Air’s microphone feed the other direction? This is a tantalizing idea that turns out to be an easy add-on. With a bit of setup, the microphone you’ve got on your wireless laptop now can show up as an input in your studio.

What’s fun about this is that your wireless laptop acts as the lavalier mic of the studio. Your laptop’s coming along for the ride with you, so you can use it as a microphone as you move around the room. There is some latency, of course, but it’s too fun not to try; just time-align things later. I’ve taken my MacBook Air into my adjoining kitchen to track pots and pans during a session. Nice and frictionless.

I’ve thought about mounting something more substantial to the back of the laptop—like those stereo Zoom capsules—to get an even more interesting stereo picture. But the laptop mic, much like your iPhone’s mic, is kind of fun, and it’s more bass-sensitive than you might expect.

Jump Desktop also offers other ideas: it lets you do screen sharing over the Internet, in addition to just LAN. It’s the difference between controlling your studio in the same room and from a forest nearby. I haven’t tried this personally, so I can’t attest to its ease. But it is intriguing. Could I bring my laptop to the woods, wirelessly recording foley directly into my session? Why would I do that in the first place (my brain still wants to try it)?

Could I send someone my Jump Desktop link and have them record their ideas directly into my session using their mic input? I have no idea. If I attempt any of these schemes, I’ll update the post.

wireless headphones

Which brings up another thought I had last year while setting this up: wouldn’t it be nice to bring my headphones around the studio with me, just like my laptop? And, indeed, there are some new products that attempt to address this.

I’ve bought several pairs of the AIAIAI TMA-2 Studio Wireless headphones, a set that transmits lossless audio to you, wirelessly. They are on the cutting-edge of a problem that very few companies have tried to solve. The newest ones advertise under 10ms of audio latency. This may not be good enough for the latency freaks among us (I’m a recovering freak myself), but it’s good in most tracking scenarios, other than perhaps vocals. Surely, if the monitoring path in your computer is latency-free (such as with UAD Console, or Pro Tools Carbon), this shouldn’t be too big a price to pay.

That said, my excitement for them has dimmed somewhat. I feel obligated to report caveats, having used them for over a year. They frequently disconnect and need to be re-paired with their transmitter. Their output level has a narrow range between the noisy and the distorted, and the volume at “normal” levels is a bit meager. The charging cables are awkward and fiddly, in an age of seamless wireless charging (such as Qi charging). One can’t help but imagine a version where a simple headphone-hanging “dock” charges the headphones where they rest.

They’re not quite ready for prime time in a commercial studio—there are a few too many quirks and pain points. Still, in this newly-freed, semi-wireless studio world, anything that helps the cause feels freeing. And the effect is very nice while working. I’ve grown fond of editing in my bedroom next door, lying in bed (a habit I’ve had since college, one I truly missed in the Age of the Desk).

As for me, I’ll keep using these headphones until a better option arrives at my door. And there’s reason to believe it’s coming: wireless tech is improving. Apple may beat everyone to the punch soon and deliver ultra low-latency AirPods using a new chip.

I must emphasize that, unlike the headphones, screen sharing tech has really advanced beyond the experimental; it’s stable. If you can get your hands on your wireless network’s settings and use Ethernet, even more so.

questions welcome

I’m interested to see if some of you try this, and how it affects your work. By all means, post questions (or success stories) about implementing this in the comments.

And who knows? Maybe there are other implications to doing this in other fields I’m not aware of. Are graphic designers as stuck at a desk as we musicians are these days? How about video editors?

As always, feel free to reach out with other ideas.

Recording studios: my favorite kind of room. Each one has its own signature, reflecting something special about the artist who built and now inhabits it.

Today’s home studios are having something of a moment. I’m increasingly delighted when I enter many artists and producers’ home studios; they seem more carefully considered than ever. There’s a tasteful smattering of instruments, equipment, writing tools. Some of them are messy and cramped, full of toys and nests of patch cables. Others are minimal, essentialist. Many of them are built in homes, an extension of the artist’s living space.

Besides this charmed affair, I’m also occasionally in commercial studios, or rooms set up by label A&Rs, for what are meant to be collaborative sessions. Typically, I’m the producer, working with an artist or group. We’re sometimes joined by songwriters, instrumentalists, lyricists and friends, all crowded into one tiny room.

Yet nearly all of these creative spaces—from the big-name ones, to bedroom affairs—suffer from the same problem. And if you were to spy upon a writing session in one of these rooms, you’d feel it immediately, by the body language of the participants:

the tyranny of the desk

An open secret for you: the people who create the music you love these days are, largely, sitting at desks behind computer screens. Less “Abbey Road, Studio Two,” more “home office.” Many of them have steadfastly decorated their desk with accoutrements: nice speakers, a big screen, a sizable MIDI keyboard. Each upgrade makes the production workflow a little smoother. In total, they do something else: they anchor our bodies to one position in the room.

This isn’t necessarily a problem when making music by yourself. Yet problems abound when trying to make music with other people.

I can’t count the number of times I have been in a room with this exact configuration: a room whose centerpiece is a desk, a chair facing that desk, a set of speakers up against that desk, and a producer, his back turned away from the other people in the room, hunched over that desk.

Add an obligatory couch that’s directly behind that desk, where guests sit—far away, on the back wall. Easily 95% of the rooms I’ve visited are set up like this.

This layout leads to a host of problems that universally affect the experience of our sessions:

1. Lack of sight lines between collaborators: We musicians are social beings. We look at each other for cues; we sneak glances at what chords the other is playing. We watch for tiny reactions, a change of posture, a head bob. We challenge each other, play around, provoke laughter. Stir up emotion. The modern studio isn’t designed for these interpersonal moments to happen.

2. Centralized decision-making: He who sits at the desk and operates the computer, by default, has all the power. This power is theirs to grant or else jealously hoard, permitting no ideas beyond their computer and studio monitors. As a matter of course, those on the couch are relatively helpless, except to call out suggestions, trying to be heard over the 6-inch speakers the producer has next to their ears.

3. The one-man band: The rules of the desk-dominated command center are clear: every instrument, in arm’s length of the spacebar. Others shan’t come near. I’m reminded of the tottering one-man band, strutting down a busy thoroughfare, blaring horns and accordions. On social media, I’ve seen desk zones so maximalist as to strain belief: a cramped rotunda of synths piled five levels high, with barely enough room for one producer to inch their ergonomic chair. When I see these rooms, my first thought is, “What’s it like to collaborate with this person?”

4. Backseat driving: How does it feel to have someone in the backseat of your car, telling you where to turn? How about when they’re sitting in the passenger’s seat, next to you? One feels significantly more hostile and aggravating than the other. In our studios, we’ve created an environment in which every producer—back turned to the artist—feels slightly annoyed (at the very least, disrupted) at every request the artist makes of them, and every artist feels slightly shy to speak up.

Why does this happen? Why do I keep walking into studios—from million-dollar affairs to modest bedrooms—which seem to be oriented around the convenience of a single, chair-bound person?

It’s all back to the computer. By default rather than conscious choice, the computer is where all major creative decisions get executed. We rarely sketch ideas without immediately recording them to the computer. As long as we write, record, and perform all at once, it’s all too easy for the person who controls the mouse to control the whole process.

I hardly blame the artists who spend these sessions on the couch, scrolling listlessly on their phones. If you don’t feel included, why bother paying attention?

it doesn’t have to be like this

Consider another place where musical ideas are worked out, though increasingly rarely: the rehearsal space.

A modest rehearsal space isn’t much larger than a typical bedroom studio, but it’s oriented completely differently. It’s essentially a large living room used for laying out setups, playing together, and trying out ideas.

Here, band members disperse. They take over corners of the room to set up little stations, their own mini ecosystem. The guitarist has one. The drummer has one. Even those Ableton wizards man their own station, one part of the ensemble.

Sight lines take priority. People orient their rigs so they can see what everyone else is doing. They can talk to each other easily and make decisions together.

Musicians play with small amps, floor monitors, or adjust their playing so they can hear everyone else. The floor plan encourages listening, playing for the group, and musicality.

I think it’s no accident that some of the most creative bands credit their collective breakthroughs with hours sweating away in rehearsal rooms.

a way out

I’ve thought about this problem a lot in my time as an artist and producer. Desk-centric spaces are so ubiquitous that people don’t notice the many problems.

Nonetheless, among seasoned producers, you will hear chatter about these issues. How do you connect with an artist whom you’re rarely facing?

I’ve heard of a few tactics: a screen by the couch, mirroring the one at the desk, to give the artist an unobstructed view of what the producer is doing (not a bad idea). A rearview mirror by the desk, to better make eye contact with the artist (a producer friend of mine is known for doing this).

In the past, I’ve brought lengthy USB cables to hook my laptop to the studio interface, which lets me swivel my body around and face the artists as I work (what a difference!).

But the permanent solution I’ve found, thanks to some recent advances in technology, is so easy—so accessible—that I really think every producer or engineer with a room and frequent sessions should try it.

Here’s what I’ve found, and how you can set up your room to work this way, too.

a DAW that can go anywhere—with screen sharing

It is rare for a new technology to solve the problems that technology itself has caused. But occasionally, it does just that.

In my room, I have a second laptop. It’s a small, inexpensive MacBook Air, and it has one job: to run the whole studio from anywhere.

Be not confused: my main studio computer is still plugged in, dutifully minding the interface and its many USB connections. But these days—80% of the time—I run the studio wirelessly from my MacBook Air. I do it nearly every time I’m in a session with an artist.

The remote computer is showing me a 1:1 duplicate of the main screen, and I can record and produce as if I were sitting in front of the desk. Due to recent advances in both hardware encoders and software, you can get latency that’s so low (and a picture so crisp) that it feels like this laptop is the whole studio. Effectively, it is.

(In Part 2 of this post, I’ll detail the exact software I use to make this work, why I’ve settled on this specific software, and some of the implications and corollaries of having a wireless studio. You can subscribe here to get it in your inbox.)

This means that I can go anywhere. I can sit at the drums and track drums all day, without needing someone to helm the computer and push record. I can hyper-focus on tracking piano on an idea for hours, without returning to my desk.

With a wireless studio, you don’t just free the engineer, producer, or artist from the shackles of the desk; you introduce new ways to collaborate with each other.

When your collaborators want to make a change, you just pass them the laptop. Or let them hold onto it, and you can both work on the track in tandem. This leads to a very natural, playful switching-off—one of your collaborators can take over when you get tired and need a break.

If you work in my studio, you will almost never find me working with my back turned to you. I like to sit on the couch myself, or in a far-off chair, opening up the room to suggest that anywhere (and any instrument) is fair game. Oftentimes, my collaborators like to sit at the desk themselves, listening critically as I sit on the couch and edit the parts we recorded.

It also has let me radically redesign my room, spacing out my instruments far more generously than I ever have.

My ideal studio space is becoming much more like a rehearsal room: little stations all around it, some very far from the desk. The “desk” part—with the patchbay, preamps, and interface—is an area of the room. But it’s just one station; it can be ignored if desired.

This method doesn’t call for dismantling the desk and throwing it in a closet. But it dramatically reduces its importance. The desk is there for mixing or for more critical, solo work. I’ll be honest—I don’t spend too much time there! These days, I’m much more on my feet, playing “band practice” in the band we’ve made for that day.

It’s an exhilarating feeling to have back.

In Part 2 of this post, I talk about all the details yo’ll need to set this up, and the implications I’ve found for my own work. For more like this, stay tuned!

Subscribe now