A 2+ hour long interview on the electric guitar for Jamie Gale's Life with Strings Attached podcase has just been released. In this interview, Jamie interviews fellow guitar scholar Steve Waksman and myself about innovation in electric guitar design and playing as well as many other topics. If you're interested, you can check out the interview in audio or video.
The book Popular Music Songwriting as Cultural, Creative, and Economic Practice, co-edited with Michael Ahlers and Knut Holtsträter, has been published! It contains the chapter "Collaboration in an Online Environment: Creativity in Popular Music Production in Times of Covid-19" that I co-authored with Jan Pietrzak.
The chapter explores how musicians adapted to remote collaboration during pandemic lockdowns, revealing an interesting duality: while the shift to online environments disrupted traditional workflows and social dynamics, it simultaneously sparked unexpected creative approaches and solutions. We found that asynchronous collaboration methods offered greater flexibility and creative freedom for many participants, suggesting that online collaboration could become a legitimate alternative to traditional studio-based music production if technical limitations can be overcome and creators embrace new interactive workflows.
Please check out the book here.
An interview related to my book Rock Guitar Virtuosos has just been published with Guitar World magazine. The article drawing on the interview is called '"You better be ready to prove it's something you can do": Giacomo Turra got exposed – but real guitar virtuosos are being wrongly accused of fakery, too' and covers the prevalent issue of fake guitarists. You can check it out here.
We have just signed Open Access Agreements for our two volumes of Heaviness in Metal Music Production with Routledge. This means that both books will be available completely free once published, thanks to additional funding received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Both books, particularly volume 2, will benefit from this, as it means that the figures will be available in colour — making it easier to follow the detailed documentation of the mixing techniques of the eight participating producers. The book contains almost 300 figures.
The book Musik in der spätmodernen Gesellschaft. Analysen, Positionen, Perspektiven with my co-authored chapter "Songwriting-Camps: Kollaborative Songwriting-Praxis zwischen Songwriting-Tradition und musikindustrieller Transformation" has just been published.
The chapter explores songwriting camps as a contemporary form of collaborative songwriting within the evolving music industry. It examines their historical roots in industrialized songwriting practices and their role in the post-industrial, network-driven economy. Songwriting camps serve as creative hubs and commercial enterprises that balance artistic collaboration with market demands. Positioned within theories of creativity and cultural production, they reflect the tension between tradition and transformation. The chapter argues that songwriting camps function as both hit-making factories and networking platforms, exemplifying the shifting structures of music creation in the late modern era.
You can check it out here.
After several years, I now have an updates and news section again on the website. Here I will provide updates on publications, presentations, and other activities going forward.