Daily intelligence for the people who keep live shows running.

You can't hear it when it's right: compression from the first knob to the mix bus

The Woodshed. Weekly long-form, July 2026. For anyone on the crew who owns a threshold knob. Compression is the most-used and worst-understood processor in live sound. Every channel strip has one. Most engineers learned it by copying a screenshot of someone else's settings, and a

One resistor, one capacitor, and a knob that's lying to you: how an analog EQ actually works

Forget the mixing tips. This is the electronics: what really happens when you sweep a mid, why a Pultec can boost and cut the same note at once, and the op-amp cheat hiding inside almost every console built since 1970.

Four hundred channels and one piece of dirt: how festival RF coordinators actually do the math

What festival RF coordinators actually do: the tool stack, the advancing, the unspoken hierarchy, and the intermod math. Part 1 of 3.