On Friday March 6th, Bandcamp will once again waive their transaction fees for artists, which means that we get a little bit more money from selling our music tomorrow than we normally would. And for the first time in quite a while, I have an album of new music for your consideration:

That's What They Said collects together a dozen of the songs I wrote during FAWM this year. I have given them a bit of a polish (which in some cases led to me completely rerecording the verse vocals) and remixed and remastered them all, because that's the sort of producer I am now, apparently.

I hope you'll give it a listen.

I think the pulled muscle that I've been suffering from for the past week is beginning to heal, because I've stopped yelping in pain every time I turned over in bed. As you can imagine, that's been making sleep even more difficult than usual, and I feel completely exhausted.

I'm hoping that now that the FAWM madness has died down, my mind will stop obsessing about songs and commenting and I can get some rest.

If you've been trying to contact me on my landline recently, you will have been getting a busy signal. That's because I've switched service providers and the "seamless transition" with no interruption to my service that I was promised didn't happen.

The new connection was supposed to go live today, but I've now been told that it's not going to happen for another week. While I've been happy with IDNet's performance as an ISP, their performance in this case has been rather less than stellar and I'm not happy about it.

If you need to contact me, you'll have to ring me on my mobile instead.

I think I managed to pull some muscles in my side lugging a PA cabinet into the pub for Friday night's gig. Moving about hurts. Since Saturday afternoon I have been taking things very easy, because I didn't really have any choice in the matter. So apart from catching up with my listening and commenting I've been mostly sitting on the sofa watching shows that I needed to catch up on, from season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (the 4K box set arrived yesterday) to season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (the first episode arrived on Apple TV on Friday and Kurt and Wyatt Russell were on the BBC's The One Show plugging it yesterday evening).

But I managed to cook a rather epic pork curry on Sunday. I felt a lot better after pigging out on that (I'd used an entire bulb of garlic in the recipe as well as one and a half packets of assorted chillies and a tube of ginger puree, so it was spicy, to say the least). And I had enough left over to put ten decent-sized servings in the freezer (which is now full).

I've not got anything planned at all for the rest of the week. And quite honestly, that suits me fine.

Every year after I finish taking part in February Album Writing Month, I sit down and have a proper think about what I've learned as a songwriter, composer, musician, recording engineer, and producer from taking part in the challenge of writing fourteen songs in four weeks (and this year I managed to do rather better than that, ending up with a grand total of twenty-four).

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the stuff I've been making this year sounds different, somehow. I've been trying to figure out why that is. My initial reaction was that my mixes sound more like they were put together professionally than they've ever done before. There's more separation between instruments, more clarity in the sound, and fewer distractions from the track's intent. In my opinion, anyway.

But as ever, here are the top five things which really stood out for me as a result of working on music intensively for an entire month:

5. DON'T BE AFRAID TO ABANDON METHODS THAT WORK FOR YOU, NOT JUST THE ONES THAT DON'T

Just because you're happy with something that works for you right now, it doesn't mean you should stop looking for alternatives. One of the most obvious changes I made to my work this year was to stop using the "Transient Shaping Enhance" preset ot Ableton's stock Drum Buss plugin on my drum submix. I'd been using it since it was first introduced in Live 10. In fact I've stopped using the Drum Buss plugin altogether in favour of Sonnox's Oxford Inflator (which I picked up in a sale last summer for twenty quid) and the SSL Native Drum Strip. It wasn't that Drum Buss was inherently bad; when I started using it, I liked what it did to my drum sound, as it made it boomy and crunchy. But my ability to hear mix details has changed (more on that in a minute) and after sitting in on a couple of mix sessions at Real World Studios last year and hearing what a proper drum mix could sound like, I realised just how far off the mark my own mixes were and resolved to do something about it. Drum Buss was adding too much distortion and it didn't let the drums breathe. And it was doing that even when I kept its wet mix well under 50%.

I've also changed the default drum kit I use in Superior Drummer to one of the kits from the Hugh Padgham Hitmaker SDX that I picked up in Toontrack's Christmas sale because I love the airy spaciousness of the recording. It lets me get far closer to the ideal drum sound that I have in my head. Again, there was nothing wrong with the previous default kit I'd put in my template, but the Hitmaker SDX just works better for me. I might have reasons for being a bit biased about that, though.

4. WORKING WITH OTHERS IMPROVES YOUR OWN WORK FASTER

Six of the twenty-four songs I worked on last month were collaborations with other FAWMers. That's right: fully a quarter of the music I made in February involved working with other people, and as far as I know that's the largest proportion of non-solo work I've ever been involved with since I first signed up for FAWM way back in 2009. I was actually shocked to realise this just now, even though I've been working with other people a lot over the past year on projects which have nothing to do with FAWM at all. In the last twelve months, collaboration has just become part of my day-to-day music making, and it's been a lot of fun.

But working with others is a completely different ball game compared to writing and recording on your own. Aside from the technical aspects, there are multiple extra levels of context and nuance to negotiate. You have to explain what you're going for, and find out, react to, and then support whatever it is that your collaborators hope to achieve, and work together to make it happen in a way that you're all happy with. That involves learning to see your own work from someone else's perspective; it might not always be what you're expecting, but in my experience that is when you make the biggest advances as an artist. Those leaps will happen more often when you make sure that whenever you can, you're not the most experienced person in the room. Find yourself some teachers!

3. I WAS STILL TENDING TO MIX TOO HOT

I mentioned this as one of my five learning points seven years ago but it still applies: I get better mix results when I turn down the levels on component tracks. This particularly applies to tracks where there's a lot of high frequency information, which is why I found that this year I've been turning down live recordings of things like shakers and tambourines by as much as 25 dB.

It's still possible to record things too quietly, of course. I have a nice selection of recording equipment these days, but all electronic gear has a noise floor, which is the random sound generated by the circuits of the device itself, and if your input signal isn't significantly higher than that, you're not going to get good results.

My mastered tracks don't sound quiet, though; the final item in my mastering chain is the maximizer in iZotope's Ozone plug-in. I have that set at -14 LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) so that each track is rendered out at a more or less consistent volume. I think it's the maximiser that performs better when the sound I'm feeding into it is quieter, but I could be wrong...

2. PEOPLE ARE PUSHING BACK AGAINST AI. LIKE, A LOT

This year on my FAWM profile, I added the following text:

"I don't use any AI tools in my work. Even if you ignore the the fact that they only function because their programmers ripped off the work of thousands upon thousands of creative people without their consent, quite honestly, I just don't see the point of them. If I hand over any aspect of my creative process to what amounts to a glorified plagiarism machine, how is that going to improve my skillset? The answer is brutally simple: it can't. For me, AI is an artistic dead end that must be avoided at all costs. I don't even use iZotope's machine learning mastering wizards when I'm mixing or mastering something; I prefer to rely on my ears."

I was surprised by how many people messaged me in order to thank me for posting that. Apart from one or two users who really like poking the bear in order to get a reaction (see below), the attitude towards relying on AI amongst FAWMers is predominantly one of disinterest, with quite a few (like me) who are openly negative about its validity as part of the creative process. When the bear does wake up, and it has done several times in the forums over the past month, it tends to get very unhappy about the suggestion that using Suno or Udio or tools of that sort is okay. AI's advocates refer to those of us who oppose its use as "skeptics" or even "Luddites" but quite honestly I think we're closer to an angry mob brandishing torches and pitchforks, because the pro-AI folks really don't like it when we start discussing its wider implications, such as the energy costs involved, the environmental impacts, and increasingly contentious issues like water bankruptcy which result from all of the data centers now being built in order to support AI's use. Perhaps it makes them feel uncomfortable about picking the wrong side of the argument, because it damn well should do. You don't hear people who think deforestation is bad for the environment being described as "logging skeptics", do you? There's a reason for that...

I found it particularly telling that FAWM's strongest advocate of using AI music generation tools like Suno is also the most-blocked user on the site; several other users in the top ten muted/blocked list have uploaded work that is almost certainly AI-generated, even though they have not acknowledged that this is the case. It looks like I'm not the only one who just isn't interested in listening to work like that, either, because a lot of the several hundred songs which have yet to receive any comments (and the fact that three days in to March there are still any "zongs" left at all is unusual, all by itself) are big, bland productions which sound to me like they've been made with AI.

1. LISTEN MORE. EXPLORE MORE. LEARN MORE.

If I had to sum up how my approach has changed since last year, those six words are what I'd say to people. Since I upgraded my living room setup to a full Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 system, I've been listening to a lot of things which were mixed for immersive audio. As the name suggests, these mixes place the listener in the middle of the sound, rather than out in front of it. That spreads out the sound and radically affects your ability to make out the individual components of a mix and focus on what's happening, and for me at least, I found that a lot of the methods which were being used to keep the mix balanced and coherent translated well even when you folded them down into just two channels of stereo. As a result, I've become much more fussy about panning, and I've noticed that I now spend much more time moving things around in the stereo field until I find that spot where they pop out strongly. I've become much more adept at automating panning and volume, too; I used to be a keen proponent of "set and forget" for a song, but not any more. It wasn't doing my work any favours.

Maybe it's because I've finally accepted that I have sensory processing issues as a result of discovering that I'm Autistic, but in the past year I've become much more aware of hearing things and of my cognitive and physical reactions to the sounds I experience. That has taken me on a journey of personal exploration which I wasn't expecting. I have ended up thinking deeply about how I navigate the world of sound I'm subjected to, and how it affects me; how I become consciously aware of things I hear and the possible reasons why I might previously have ignored certain sounds; what sorts of noises do I focus in on, and which ones make me recoil? Why does one sound feel warm or comforting when another feels harsh, or even painful? I've also started to pay much more attention when I realise that I'm having difficulty making things out or when I'm becoming overwhelmed so that I can do something about it. The result of all this has been that my recordings sound markedly clearer. I'm not just imagining that, either; I've mentioned before how close my mixes get to the desired eq curve displayed in Tonal Balance Control 2 these days and since I last blogged about it, I've recorded more than a hundred more tracks and remained consistent in being able to dial in a balanced mix just using my ears. Who knew that just listening properly could pay off so much, eh?

I've also been much more active in seeking out information and advice from other people who work with sound. Whenever I visit Real World it doesn't matter who I find myself talking to; if they don't run away fast enough, they are going to find themselves being deluged with questions: "Why did you choose that particular model of microphone to record that?" "What is it that are you listening for when you apply that plugin?" "What did you do to get that vocal to sound like that?" I've been profoundly humbled by everyone's willingness to take the time to explain to a duffer like me what their internal process was, and I'm extremely grateful to everyone who did. But even when I'm back home and alone in my studio, there is a vast repository of useful advice from top-flight artists around the world that's available on YouTube and I've been watching an awful lot of instructional videos and paying very close attention to what's being shown. It all goes in my notebooks.

Finally, I've realised that even the professionals at the top of their game never stop learning. They never stop experimenting with new ideas and tools. Not a single one of the experts I've met (and I've met quite a few now) has ever said, "I already know everything I need to know in order to get the job done." There's always some new technique or device which can radically change your ability to craft the ideal mix which is lurking at the back of your mind. You have to remain open to the fact that no matter how good you are, there's always more to learn.

The FAWM website stopped allowing us to add new songs at noon, and the "Add new song" button has switched over to a "Challenge Over" graphic so that's it for another year. With one placeholder that my buddy Craig is still working on, my final tally for February 2026 stands at twenty-four songs. That's a pretty decent showing for me. Yesterday I toyed with the crazy idea of pushing myself to get to twenty-eight songs (referred to as a "double FAWM") but I just didn't have the spoons left for it. I woke up this morning at 04:30 and had the same idea again, but that was quite obviously insane, so instead I turned over in bed and went back to sleep.

According to Burr, the official final tally is 13,731 songs, which makes it the 3rd most prolific FAWM ever (after 2024 and 2021).

I'm sad it's over; I always am. It's a rush getting so much positive feedback on my work (I got hundreds of comments this year) and I love the immense outpouring of creative energy that lifts everyone up and carries them along in a wave of music making mania. It's always hard coming down from something like that. I'll mull over my experiences of last month for a few days and then post my traditional "What I've learned from taking part"post here on the blog. Listening to the work I did, something sounds different this year and I want to figure out what it is and why it happened.

And the site's still open for listening, of course. I'll fire the studio up later and get some more listening and commenting done, but the most important project I have scheduled for this afternoon is to make a nice big batch of pork curry.

Today marks the beginning of meteorological spring. The weather so far today has followed the traditional pattern for March: one minute it's sunny, the next it's raining. I'm not cold here in the living room right now, but I think I'll be keeping the central heating on its timer for a few weeks yet.

The temperature outside is in double figures, and the local wildlife has noticed. The hedgehogs have been out and about over the last few nights, the blue tits have been raiding the feeder full of suet pellets by the kitchen window, and the local jackdaws have been busy over the last few days adding to their nest in the chimney of the flats at the back of my house with some ludicrously oversized sticks.