Produce Like A Pro

Happy 20th wedding anniversary to my beautiful wife Kasia!
We met on a plane at 30,000 feet when I was flying one of my best friends to Nashville for treatment. Kasia was my angel on that flight and she has been my angel ever since. Helping to save one person’s life ended up giving me mine.
Twenty years later we have our two wonderful children, Lucy and Charlie and a life together that I am endlessly grateful for. Kasia, you are the best mother they could ever have and the most loving, supportive and wonderful wife.
We had the most amazing three days in Puglia celebrating this incredible milestone together. Beautiful places, incredible food and precious time to reflect on everything we have shared.
I love you more than ever, Kasia. Happy anniversary, my love.

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3 days ago | [YT] | 1,431

Produce Like A Pro

Bonnie Tyler had one of those rare voices that felt instantly human, raw, powerful, emotional and completely unmistakable. From her early success with “It’s a Heartache” to the worldwide phenomenon of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” she gave us performances filled with grit, drama and soul. Her voice didn’t just sing a lyric. It lived inside it.
Born Gaynor Hopkins in Wales, Bonnie rose from humble beginnings to become one of Britain’s most beloved and successful recording artists, earning Grammy and BRIT nominations, selling millions of records around the world and receiving an MBE for her services to music. Her legacy is immense, but what stays with me most is the sound of that voice, wonderfully husky, beautifully emotional and impossible to imitate.
As a lifelong fan, I had a lot of joy creating a video celebrating “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a song that remains one of the most dramatic and iconic vocal performances ever recorded. It is a reminder of Bonnie’s extraordinary gift: she could take a great song and turn it into something timeless.
Rest in peace, Bonnie Tyler. Thank you for the music, the passion and that incredible voice.

3 days ago | [YT] | 50

Produce Like A Pro

Today would have been Bon Scott’s 80th birthday.
I first heard AC/DC when I was a wee young lad, and I even managed to sneak into a show during the Highway to Hell era with a friend’s older brother. I was far too young to be there, but it became my first real rock and roll experience and left a huge impression on me. The sound, the energy, the songs, Malcolm and Angus’s guitars, and Bon’s unmistakable voice were absolutely life-changing.
Bon Scott was one of the greatest rock singers of all time: raw, powerful, cheeky, fearless, and completely unique. Happy birthday, Bon. Thank you for the music, the attitude, and the rock and roll bliss.
To celebrate his legacy, Neumann has released a limited-edition U 47 fet Bon Scott microphone, honouring the mic Bon famously recorded through on those classic AC/DC albums. Only 300 have been made worldwide. This is much more than simply putting Bon Scott’s name on a microphone.
Neumann has created just 300 of these U 47 fet Bon Scott Editions in conjunction with Bon’s family to celebrate what would have been his 80th birthday. Part of the proceeds will also support an Australian mental health charity.
Bon died in 1980 and while he still means the world to so many of us there is a whole new generation that may not fully know his story, his humour, his charisma or just how extraordinary his voice was.
This is a celebration of Bon and a reminder of the incredible music he left behind. I think it is wonderful to see his family and Neumann honouring his legacy in such a thoughtful way.
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTQq...
Learn more about the mic here: www.neumann.com/en-us/products/microphones/u-47-fe…

3 days ago (edited) | [YT] | 158

Produce Like A Pro

Most people who love music have always wanted to know how records are really made.

Not just how to play the chords, but how a song becomes a record. How a vocal suddenly feels emotional. How drums come alive. How guitars, bass, keys and harmonies all fit together. How a rough idea turns into something you are proud to share with the world.

That is the joy of making music.

And yes, AI can generate something quickly. It can imitate styles, suggest ideas and fill in blanks. But it cannot replace the feeling of hearing a take come together, moving a fader and suddenly feeling the chorus lift, or discovering a sound that gives you goosebumps.

That is what recording music is really about.

It is creativity. It is discovery. It is community. It is learning little things that suddenly open huge doors. The more you understand production, mixing, arrangement, tone and performance, the more fun the whole process becomes.

That is why I created Produce Like A Pro Academy.

It is a place for musicians, producers, engineers and songwriters who want to enjoy the process of making better records, with real guidance, real multitracks, real feedback and a supportive community of people who love music as much as you do.

For the 4th of July, you can join Produce Like A Pro Academy for just $99 for the year.

Here is what is inside:

1. Step by step production and mixing tutorials
2. Multitracks and real session breakdowns
3. Live feedback, Q and As and expert guidance
4. A supportive community of passionate musicians and producers

Join here: producelikeapro.com/academy

Make music. Record more. Learn the craft. Enjoy every step of the journey.

1 week ago | [YT] | 201

Produce Like A Pro

From Teenage Dream To Recording With Ace Frehley And Slash

Every musician starts out with those big, almost impossible dreams.
You know what I mean—you’re sitting there staring at the back of your favorite records, reading all the names of the musicians, producers, engineers, and studios, and thinking… how does anyone actually end up in those rooms?
I remember feeling exactly like that.

And then, years later, I found myself in one of those moments while working on Ace Frehley’s Origins Vol. 1.

The album is full of songs that influenced Ace—Cream, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf… all the greats. And while we were recording Thin Lizzy’s “Emerald,” something pretty wild happened.

Slash walked into the studio.

Next thing you know, he and Ace are standing there, facing each other, trading guitar solos live in the room. Ace on one side, Slash on the other, both plugged into Marshalls, cranked up loud. No pedals, no tricks—just incredible players, great amps, and a couple of mics on the cabinets.

It was one of those moments where you kind of step back and think… is this really happening?

And then, after they finished their solos, Ace turns to me and asks me to play the harmony guitar part.

For a kid who grew up in a small village in England with no connections to the music industry, that was pretty surreal.

But here’s the thing I always come back to—moments like that don’t just appear out of nowhere. They come from years of learning, putting in the work, showing up, making mistakes, getting better, building relationships… and just sticking with it because you love it.

That’s really why I created Produce Like A Pro Academy.

Most of us don’t start with connections or big studios. We start with a guitar or a laptop, maybe a small room, a couple of mics, and a stack of records we love. And we’re just trying to figure it out as we go.

The Academy is there to help you grow from wherever you are right now. It’s a place where you can learn, ask questions, share your mixes, get feedback, and be part of a community of people who are just as passionate about music as you are.

Whether you want to record better songs, improve your mixes, understand production more deeply, feel more confident in the studio, or just finally finish music you’re proud of—it’s all built around one simple idea:
Make better music and have a marvellous time doing it.

If you want to hear the full story about recording with Ace and Slash, you can watch it here.
And right now, we’ve got the Produce Like A Pro Academy Summer Sale going on.
You can join for 50% off—just $99 and become part of this global community of musicians, producers, engineers, and songwriters who are all learning and growing together.
Here’s the link if you want to check it out:
producelikeapro.com/academy/
Keep learning. Keep creating. Keep showing up.
You never know where it might take you.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 26

Produce Like A Pro

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there! My children have shaped who I am more than anything else in my life, and this one is very close to my heart, the code DADDY26 was actually my daughter’s idea. Haha. To celebrate, you can get 50% off Produce Like A Pro Academy with code DADDY26 here: producelikeapro.com/academy/

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 156

Produce Like A Pro

When we were making The Fray’s second album, “You Found Me” was actually the very first song idea the band brought in.
At the time, it didn’t have a chorus yet and the song was simply called “Amistad,” taken from the first line of the first verse: “I found God on the corner of First and Amistad.”
The melody and lyrics weren’t finalised until the last few days of recording the album. It took months of writing, rewriting, shaping and living with the song before it finally became what you hear now.
That process can be frustrating, however sometimes the best songs need that time. They reveal themselves slowly.
“You Found Me” became the first single from the album and went on to be a huge hit, so all of those months spent chasing the final version were absolutely worth it.
Have a marvellous time recording and mixing.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 232

Produce Like A Pro

The Record Opens the Door, The Live Show That Brings Us Together

I found these old ticket stubs recently and they reminded me why live music is still the future of the music industry.

Neil Young at Wembley Arena. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells at the Town & Country Club, The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Tower of Power, Albert King, Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall.

As a kid, those shows were not just entertainment. They were education. They taught me feel, phrasing, tone, dynamics and the sheer power of being in a room with people making music in real time.

So much of the music conversation now is about recorded music, streams, playlists, algorithms, catalogue value and short-form content. All of that matters, of course it does, after all I have spent my life making records!

However, the record is the invitation, the live show is the communion.

When people get together with music, something remarkable happens. Every performance is unique. The room is different, the audience is different, the band is different and the moment can never be repeated in quite the same way.

That is also why live music matters even more in the age of AI. AI can imitate sound, it can generate endless recorded material. However, it cannot stand in a room with you. It cannot feel the audience inhale before the first note. It cannot create that one night where something happens that nobody planned.

Artists also need to understand scale. Not every tour is going to make hundreds of millions. Not every artist should be chasing arenas. A 150-cap room can be a triumph. A 500-cap theatre can be life changing. A small, intentional event can build a deeper fanbase than a huge show that loses money and leaves everyone exhausted.

The future is not just bigger shows. It is smarter, more human experiences.
Because when people get together with music, something magical happens.

1 month ago | [YT] | 153

Produce Like A Pro

AI Music Is Not the Future of Creativity. It Is the Future of Convenience.

The argument for AI music usually arrives wearing very attractive clothes.

It promises access. It promises speed. It promises that anyone, regardless of training, money, background, or technical ability, can suddenly make a finished song. That sounds wonderful on the surface. Who would not want more people to feel connected to music?

However, underneath that promise is a far more troubling idea: that music is not a craft to be learned, shared, struggled with, and passed down, it is a consumer experience to be packaged, gamified, monetised, and sold back to us.

That distinction matters.

Suno, one of the most visible generative AI music companies, has positioned its vision of the future around the idea that music should become more like video games. Its CEO, Mikey Shulman, has repeatedly suggested that music is too passive, that it needs to be more interactive, more engaging, more social, more like Fortnite.

On one level, I understand the sales pitch. Video games are active. They are immersive. They generate enormous revenue. Investors understand them. Venture capital understands them. If you can turn music into something users do every day, pay for constantly, and spend hours inside, you have not just built a music tool, you have built a platform.

However, music is already interactive.

It is called playing an instrument.

Music is already multiplayer.

It is called being in a band.

Music is already a deeply engaging experience.

It is called singing with people, playing in a room, writing with a collaborator, arguing over a chord change, finding the right groove, making mistakes, trying again, and finally feeling something click.

The problem AI companies are trying to solve is not that music is passive. The problem they are trying to solve is that craft takes time, and time is difficult to monetise at scale unless you can compress it, automate it, and turn it into a subscription.

That is where the language gets revealing. The AI music pitch is full of words like speed, iteration, engagement, experiences, interaction, and consumption. This is not the language of musicians. It is the language of product design. It is the language of apps, growth curves, investor decks, and customer behaviour.

When you apply that language to music, the danger is obvious. The value of the process disappears.

A song is no longer the result of years of listening, learning, practising, failing, absorbing influences, developing taste, working with others, and discovering a voice. It becomes an output. A result. A finished product generated as quickly as possible.

That might be useful in some contexts. It might even be fun. However, we should not confuse convenience with creativity.

One of the most important points raised in the transcript is that when users were asked what Suno allowed them to do that traditional instruments or DAWs did not, the most common answers were not musical. They were practical. It saves time. It saves money. It works like a collaborator.

That says everything.

The selling points are not harmony, melody, groove, feel, emotion, taste, or expression. They are speed, cost reduction, and the replacement of other people.

That is a profoundly lonely vision of music.

Real collaboration is not just having something give you options. A collaborator challenges you. A collaborator brings their own taste, history, limitations, brilliance, and stubbornness into the room. A collaborator can tell you when something is not good enough. A collaborator can frustrate you, surprise you, and make you better.

AI does not do that. It flatters. It produces. It gives you something back. You accept, reject, regenerate, and continue. There is no negotiation. There is no accountability. There is no human being on the other side whose instincts you have to respect.

That is not collaboration. That is ordering.

And ordering food does not make you a chef.

The same is true of the argument around taste. We are increasingly told that skill matters less now, because taste is what really counts. That sounds sophisticated, especially when people bring up someone like Rick Rubin, who is famous for saying he knows what he likes and what he does not like.

However, that argument badly misunderstands what taste is.

Taste is not something that floats above craft. Taste is developed through craft. You hear differently after years of recording. You hear differently after trying to play like your heroes and failing. You hear differently after tuning vocals, editing drums, choosing microphones, balancing a mix, writing a chorus that does not work, rewriting it, then finally finding the line that does.

Taste is not merely selection. Taste is perception shaped by experience.

That is why role models matter. Musicians grow by looking up to other musicians. We hear Jimi Hendrix, Jaco Pastorius, Stevie Wonder, Queen, The Beatles, Prince, Joni Mitchell, or whoever opened the door for us, and we think, “How did they do that?” That question is the beginning of a life in music.

AI prompting often removes that question. There is no hand to watch, no breath to hear, no room to imagine, no human decision to study. There is only output.

That is why the issue of deskilling is so serious. If musicians start relying on AI systems to make creative decisions for them, the danger is not simply that the work changes. The danger is that the musician changes. The muscles of decision making weaken. The ear becomes passive. The instinct becomes outsourced.

In music, the slow part is often the meaningful part. Learning patience is part of learning how to make anything worthwhile. Sitting with an idea, wrestling with it, getting annoyed with it, abandoning it, returning to it, and finally understanding what it wants to become, that is not wasted time. That is the work.

AI culture often treats friction as a problem. However, in art, friction is frequently where the identity is formed.

Of course, there may be ethical and interesting uses for generative AI in music. As a memorisation tool, it could help people retain information through melody. In certain therapeutic contexts, it may provide comfort or connection. For someone who has always felt ashamed to make music, AI might even act as a doorway into creativity.

Those possibilities should not be dismissed.

However, they also should not distract us from the larger business model. This is not simply about helping people sing again. This is about building platforms that own the tools, control the experience, shape the behaviour, and monetise the user’s desire to feel creative.

That is not democratisation in any meaningful sense. If the people do not own the means of production, if the platform can disappear, change the rules, raise the price, restrict access, or decide what kind of music gets promoted, then we have not democratised music. We have rented creativity from a tech company.

Real democratisation would mean funding music education. It would mean giving children access to instruments, teachers, rehearsal spaces, choirs, studios, and communities. It would mean rebuilding the casual, communal relationship with music that so many people lose as they get older.

The tragedy is that the social problem AI music identifies is real. Many people feel locked out of music. Many people believe they are not talented enough. Many people were shamed out of singing, playing, or creating. That is heartbreaking.

However, the answer should not be to sell them a machine that does the work for them.

The answer should be to remind them that they are allowed to make music badly at first. They are allowed to learn. They are allowed to be beginners. They are allowed to develop a voice. They are allowed to discover that the joy was never only in the finished song.

The joy was in becoming the kind of person who could make it.

That is what AI music, at its worst, threatens to remove. Not just jobs. Not just income. Not just copyright. Those are huge issues, of course. However, the deeper threat is philosophical. It asks us to accept a world where the appearance of creativity is enough, where the result matters more than the person, where convenience replaces craft, and where human musical experience is reduced to a meaningful consumption experience.

Music deserves better than that.

Musicians deserve better than that.

And listeners deserve better than that.

The future of music should not be built by people who think the problem with music is that it is not enough like a video game. It should be built by people who understand that music is one of the oldest, deepest, most human things we do.

Not because it is efficient.

Because it connects us.

1 month ago | [YT] | 1,076

Produce Like A Pro

R.I.P. Sonny Rollins.

One of the true giants has left us.

I first heard Sonny Rollins as a little kid, pulling records from my Dad’s collection. A Night at the Village Vanguard was one of those albums that made an impression before I could even properly explain why. There was something so direct, so fearless and so alive in his playing. Just tenor saxophone, bass and drums, no piano, no safety net, just pure invention.
Sonny had that rare thing all the greatest musicians have. You could hear his personality in the first few notes. Huge sound, incredible rhythm, total command and yet always searching.

A couple of years later, like millions of people, I heard him on The Rolling Stones’ “Waiting On A Friend.” That solo is beautiful, lyrical, effortless and completely unforgettable. I remember how impressed my Dad was that the Stones had brought in someone of Sonny’s stature. It was one of those wonderful crossovers where the worlds of jazz and rock met, not as a gimmick, however as a genuine musical statement.

That meant a lot to me. I grew up loving music across all boundaries and Sonny Rollins was one of those artists who made the boundaries feel irrelevant. He could be deeply sophisticated and completely human at the same time.

From Saxophone Colossus to A Night at the Village Vanguard, from “St. Thomas” to “Waiting On A Friend,” Sonny Rollins gave the world a lifetime of music that will continue to inspire musicians, producers, engineers and music lovers forever.
Rest in peace, Sonny. Thank you for the sound, the spirit and the endless pursuit of something deeper.

1 month ago | [YT] | 527