Mo

Did this. Month 8 is about triple month 4, and roughly two thirds of it comes from repeat customers of one product. That reframes things a lot.

Agreed. Worth doing the wrist mobility work at the desk mid-afternoon rather than only before training.

Practical trick: bounce the mix and listen to it the next morning on your phone before you open the session. If you open the DAW first you'll start fiddling based on what you see rather than what you hear.

Interim crutch while you sort the room: check your mixes on a single small speaker in mono at low volume, and reference against two commercial tracks you know well in the same session. Cheap, immediate, and it catches the boomy thing before you export.

Good. Next thing to check is phase — flip the polarity on the kick and see which way sounds fuller with the bass. Takes two seconds and sometimes it's the whole fix.

Decide which one owns the sub before you touch an EQ. You can't have two sources in the bottom two octaves and expect definition — one of them has to be the weight and the other has to be the attack.

If the kick owns it: high-pass the bass around 50-60Hz with a fairly steep slope, and get the bass's presence from harmonics around 700Hz-2kHz — a little saturation there makes bass audible on small speakers without adding any actual sub.

If the bass owns it: keep the kick short, let it live from about 80Hz up with a clicky 3-5kHz component, and stop trying to make it feel huge in isolation.

The reason your carving didn't work is that you were cutting the same region from both, so nothing filled it.

Also add weighted negatives once a week. Step up, take 5-8 seconds to lower, repeat for 4-5 singles. You can handle far more load eccentrically than concentrically and it builds the top-end strength that unsticks a low max.

5-8 is plenty. Past that you're mostly training a grip and boredom tolerance, and the recovery cost goes up sharply.

Consistent one-direction drift is almost always an alignment issue, not a strength one. Something in your setup is off-centre and you're just watching gravity do its work.

Things to check, in order:

• hand placement. Film from the front. One hand is probably slightly further forward or wider than the other.
• kick-up. If you always kick with the same leg, you're likely entering with a twist and then correcting mid-hold. Practise kicking to a wall and pausing before the freestanding attempt.
• rib flare and hip alignment. A slight side bend at the waist reads as lean at the hands.

Gripping harder helps because you're fighting it with your fingers, which works for a second or two and then can't. That's a symptom that confirms the diagnosis.

There it is. Mark two spots on the floor with chalk or tape and set your hands on them deliberately every rep for the next few weeks until it stops feeling like a conscious act.

Then pad it. Also listen to the loudest phrase on headphones with the fader up loud — analogue clipping on a vocal is usually audible as a hard edge on the peaks once you know what to listen for.

Careful recommending german hangs to someone with anterior shoulder pain though. That's a lot of end-range extension and it can aggravate exactly this. I'd leave it out until they've been assessed.

Strongly agree on stands. Desk-mounted monitors get a comb-filtered mess from the reflection off the desk surface, and it lands right in the 1-3kHz range where vocals live.

Whatever you buy, weight-test it at ground level first with your full bodyweight plus a bounce. Finding out a doorway bar doesn't hold at the top of a pull-up is a memorable way to learn.