Mixing is the process of taking your raw recordings and polishing them up to sound cohesive. A mixing engineer was originally called a “balance engineer” because the core goal was just balancing the recording.
Modern professional mixing, however, isn’t just about balancing but about creating movement throughout a piece of music. The aim here is to make sure no elements are standing on the toes of other elements, but then to also shine a spotlight on certain elements at the right times in order to create some sort of sonic emotional experience for a listener.
That experience can be to rile you up with some hard-hitting, distorted rock sound, or to pull on all the heart-strings by making you feel like a folk artist & orchestra are performing right in front of you.
Music is primarily an emotional medium, and good mixing is all about making sure the emotional intention of the song is effectively expressed.
And the best bit is that, when this has been nailed, it tends to become completely unnoticeable that something is getting louder for a section or that something’s ducked down to make space. Unless you are yourself a mixing engineer, you tend to not “hear” a great mix, you just feel the song.
I work primarily with Folk (traditional & modern), Country/Americana, Pop, Indie, and Rock artists, mostly because that’s where my own creative sensibilities lie (I’m a folk musician). Recording folk music, whether it’s trad folk or contemporary, is fundamentally all about capturing an authentic performance and an authentic moment in time – a feeling that you’re there with the artist(s). And I aim to bring that same sensibility to my mixing, just simply adapted for the needs of the song.
Here’s a selection of songs I’ve produced, mixed, and mastered:
My mixing rate is very affordable – it starts at £50 for a stripped down production (such as solo acoustic guitar & vocals) and varies based on the complexity of your production & song. So the best option is usually to get in touch via my email or contact form to discuss what the song needs.
The options here aren’t priced based on me caring less about the mix if it’s, for example, only a 4-track production – it’s priced on it simply taking less time to mix 4 tracks together versus a 100+ track modern whole-band production.
Remote online mixing allows artists from anywhere in the world to work with mixing engineers who are a great fit for their sound – because the internet’s made it easier than ever to communicate!
Because mixing is such an emotional task, 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.
I mix primarily from my home studio, which helps to keep costs down because we don’t have to worry about hiring expensive studios for the mixing process.
I use a huge range of plugins from the best providers like Universal Audio, Softube, FabFilter, Soundtoys, and others as well as a hardware controller so I can be hands-on with my mixing. This hardware controller does a great job of emulating a console workflow to get a fairly authentic analogue tone across a mix while also being able to get the benefits and workflow advantages of digital mixing.
As with my mic collection, I’ve invested in thousands of pounds’ worth of the best plugins (after trialling them first) because they help me to achieve the sound I want in a way that’s tweakable. This is a massive benefit when working on revisions to a mix after feedback.
Scroll down for FAQs & further thoughts on this!
If you’d like to chat about a project, feel free to get in touch either via my Instagram page (below) or by using the contact form.
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!).
