Stories

For years, I thought of guitar as an instrument built around chords, strumming patterns and the occasional dramatic solo. I could follow a basic progression,…

A decade reshaped what music could do. From Greenwich Village coffeehouses to stadium rock stages, from flat parties in Fitzroy and Carlton to record racks in…

I keep coming back to the blues scale because it has survived every wave of rock without losing its usefulness. Pick up a guitar, hum a line built from it, and…

My top five songs that use unconventional instruments are not simply clever studio experiments. Each track makes an unfamiliar sound feel emotionally…

It started, somewhere between Melbourne's inner north and a long drive back through the Yarra Valley. I had flicked through a playlist on shuffle while…

I started mixing my album in a bedroom because it was the room I had, the gear I could afford, and the only place where I could work without booking time or…

Synth pop has always felt like music that makes technology sound human. A sequencer can be rigid, a drum machine can be clinical, and a synthesiser can produce…

There is a particular electricity in a live recording from the 1950s that studio polish can rarely reproduce. The sound may be narrow, noisy, or slightly…

A great drummer can disappear inside a song. The bass may get the low-end credit, the singer carries the lyric, and the guitarist receives the photograph on…

There's a particular kind of track that lives in the shadows of any respectable playlist. The one you skip past when friends are watching, the one you queue…