Mixing & Mastering

Q: Which artist would you like to work with and why?

A: Chris Addler, Miles Kennedy, great musicians, incredible dynamics, would make some out-of-this-world music.

Q: Can you share one music production tip?

A: Invest in acoustic treatment first, instead of buying expensive gear. No matter how good your monitors are, if your room is very badly treated you won't hear what's coming out of them correctly. Try to hear what you're working on, not just looking at what the parameters of your processing are showing.

Q: What type of music do you usually work on?

A: We have most experience working on heavy rock. We do occassionally get the singer-songwriter pop, or R&B blues and jazz clients, however our specialisation lies in heavy guitars, huge drum sounds and aggressive vocals.

Q: What's your strongest skill?

A: Our strongest skill is that we work with our ears and not our eyes. A lot of engineers tend to focus on what the level on the fader is or what the eq curve looks like. We try not to focus on that, but instead use these tools to sculpt the sound that sounds good to our ears.

Q: What do you bring to a song?

A: We bring our years of experience to a song. According to the clients' needs we bring the bring out the best in the song by dedication to the core elements of the song.

Q: What's your typical work process?

A: For mixing - Before receiving the files we ask the client what they want to sound like and what direction they're hoping to go in. Then we import the files in Logic, and get a rough mix. We send it back for confirmation (not counted as recall) and then we continue mixing it which usually takes around 10-12 hours total. We sleep on it and listen with fresh ears to catch any mistakes we made, then we check on various different sound systems (headphones, car stereo, etc) and then send it, recalls happen as needed. Mastering process: First we listen to the rendered mix tracks multiple times using different speaker systems. Then we start adding processing tastefully, working out the different problems across frequencies and making the dynamics of the track pop and bringing the level to industry standard.

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: We mainly mix and master in the box (with the exception of the Art Pro VLA II tube compressor) with a variety of izotope and waves plugins . We're running Logic Pro X.6 and using a DAW controller to give us more feel for the mix. We use the Scarlett 18i8, the output going into a pair of Yamaha HS5s.

Q: What other musicians or music production professionals inspire you?

A: We're always inspired by the musicians who come to us with confidence that we'll deliver the best product. We also look up to engineers and producers like Chris Lord Alge and Rick Rubin.

Q: Describe the most common type of work you do for your clients.

A: We are mix and mastering engineers, although we also help out with editing tracks for clients' productions

Q: Analog or digital and why?

A: Analog! The saturation you get from pushing analog gear to its limits is just unreal.

Q: What's the biggest misconception about what you do?

A: A lot of lay-people tend to think that they can send us whatsapp voice messages and we can make them sound like Celine Dion.

Q: What advice do you have for a customer looking to hire a provider like you?

A: Don't get into the mentality of "we'll fix it in the mix". Good quality recordings are what makes a song great.

Q: If you were on a desert island and could take just 5 pieces of gear, what would they be?

A: Laptop, interface, guitar, speakers, and a solar set-up to power everything.