Mixing is entirely about eeking out every bit of emotional impact from a recording – it’s great to have a great arrangement & production to begin with, but the goal of a great mix is that extra lift to make sure that your music shines in as many lights as possible.
In other words, a recording needs to sound just as impactful on airpods or crappy bluetooth speakers as it does out of a £12k hifi system.
A song’s ultimately a story, and a recording & mix should always exist to make you feel that story. That can be to rile you up with some hard-hitting, distorted rock sound, or to pull on all your heart-strings by giving the impression that a folk artist & orchestra are performing right around you.
What’s super cool is that, When this has been nailed, it tends to become completely unnoticeable that something’s moved out of the way for something else, or that something’s popped in to keep your ear tickled – you’ll kinda just move with the music.
If you’d like to get your music moving, let’s talk!
I work primarily from my studio just outside Folkestone, which is a space I’m very proud of. I’m able to draw on my beautiful analogue console and range of gear (such as tape machines, guitar pedals, and other silliness) to spice things up whenever needed or get saucy “in the box” using an array of very fancy (and some boring) plugins – essentially whatever gets to the sound I’m feeling.
I’ve built a ton of room treatment to get the room to a mastering-grade neutrality – which, in short, means that there’s a whole lot less tail-chasing when it comes to what I’m hearing out of my speakers. If you’ve ever worked with a mixing engineer with foam pads on their walls and wondered why it took 9 rounds of mix revisions, it’s because you were fighting their room/speakers/headphones, not working on the mix itself!
Because of how much time it takes to set up a full mix through an analogue console (which is also not possible for larger track-count productions), I’ll tend to use the console as a ‘summing mixer’ – which essentially means that I run a mix through it at the end to get some colour without having to spend hours routing signals. This means I have all the benefits & versatility of plugins and in-the-box-processing as well as the rich, analogue sound of the console.
Remote online mixing allows you to work with the right engineer for your project. Because the internet’s made it easier than ever to communicate across the whole world, I’ve been able to work with numerous artists from the USA, Canada, South America, Europe, and further afield in the UK.
I can easily take international payments securely via my Paypal Business account – which also sorts out all the headaches we used to have with international transfers.
Mixing is such an emotional task, so working with the right mixing engineer is like working with the right band – when you’re all on the same wavelength, the end result is much more powerful.
If you’d like to chat about a project, drop me an email!
Please send me both the multitracks for a song, as well as a rough mix of it for my reference. It often helps to have 1-3 reference songs that you’d like your song to fit well with on a playlist!
So now some terminology:
The individual tracks in a recording are often incorrectly called “stems” – but the term “stems” actually refers to groups of tracks (i.e. the Keys Stem contains all the keys instruments in the production). If you’re working with a recording engineer, you’ll need to ask them for “the multitracks” – which means all the individual tracks in the production.
Most modern productions have quite a few tracks, so it helps enormously for me to be given sensibly named files. Something like “Kit – Kick IN” and “Kit – Snare TOP” is much more helpful than “DD2804F.wav” or “audio87.wav”. Ideally, everything should follow a logical naming convention that should group the element within a broader group, even just for organisation purposes – i.e. “Vox – BV 1”, “Vox – Harmony 3”, “Perc – Shaker Left” etc.
Reference tracks are super helpful because they let me get a feel for where you want your songs to end up. The aim isn’t necessarily to copy the sound of another song, but to keep the other songs in mind so that they’d fit nicely together on a playlist. Think of it as “same ballpark” references rather than copycat references.
Some mixes come together very quickly, and some take a lot more massaging to bring to life – this depends on the complexity of the song itself, as well as the arrangements & production. I’ll usually be able to get mixes back to you within a week or two of receiving them, but will let you know when I expect to be able to work on them as this depends on my current workload.
I think the hardware/software debate oversimplifies things when it comes to mixing modern music. Not to mention that there’s a lot of bad hardware in the world, but there’s now a lot of really decent software. The best plugins may still only be 95% as good as the hardware they’re modelling, but that extra 5% comes with a heap of burdens: hardware is expensive to buy, needs constant maintenance, is bulky to store, and is time-consuming to react to feedback with because you need to “recall” all of your settings every time you need to make a tweak to a mix.
You could easily spend £20,000 and bag yourself four compressors. These are likely to sound beautiful, but you tend to need a lot more than four compressors in a modern mix.
The surgical precision and instant recall of in-the-box plugins offers such a massive workflow benefit that it’s hard to justify investing in so much hardware purely for mixing. It’s why some of the highest profile mixers in the world (like Andrew Schepps) are mixing primarily in the box these days.
That said, where you’re always going to want good hardware is in the recording phase. It wasn’t until I started investing in some really high quality mics, preamps, and audio interfaces that I realised how much of a difference the source makes. It was literally night and day. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a noticeable difference on my first day of recording but, by the time I learned enough to justify the upgrades, I understood why it’s worth getting it right at the source (and why studios with great quality hardware can be so expensive!).
