Who’s writing this
I’m a producer and mix engineer, and I’ve spent most of the last two decades in rooms where the computer was the least interesting object but the thing that kept breaking. I don’t gig much anymore. I don’t do the conference circuit. I sit in a small treated room and work on records, and when a driver update eats an afternoon, I usually write down what happened.
Why the Hilda archive
I inherited the Hilda Garman archive from a family connection; boxes of DATs, burned CDs, a notebook of patch lists in handwriting I can barely read. Hilda made electro, remixes and disco edits through the late seventies and eighties, and a lot of it was never properly catalogued. I’ve been restoring and sequencing it since, which means I’ve spent years fighting old samplers, dying hard drives and plugin formats that stopped being supported before I was born. The archive is the reason this site exists. I needed somewhere to put the notes.
What I actually write about
Signal chains, mostly, and the mundane machinery under them. Which plugins I reach for and in what order; why a certain interface driver drops buffer sizes under load; the specific installer that has to run before the other installer or the whole thing falls over. If you’ve ever reinstalled an audio stack at two in the morning because a session wouldn’t open, this place is for you. The Hildadisco years taught me that the unglamorous plumbing is what lets the music happen at all, and I still believe that.
What you get
Plain write-ups from someone who has broken things and fixed them. Plugin chain breakdowns, driver quirks, setup notes for older and stubborn hardware, remix craft observations pulled from Hilda’s own multitracks, and studio utilities I actually use. No sponsored anything; if a tool is awkward I’ll say so. Dry, concrete, occasionally nostalgic. If something here is wrong or you have a question, the contact page is the place to reach me.