Sound Design/Mixing/Mastering

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

A: My focus lies on working with independent artists, so for, metal, acoustic/singer-songwriter, pop-rock and ambient style music but I’m always eager to learn and push my boundaries.

Q: What do you bring to a song?

A: Most important for me is to work out the vision of my client, ideally in close collaboration with the artist – mixing is all about revealing what the artist intents to share with the listener and to create a powerful emotional experience out of it – and I’ll do my best to provide that!

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: I’m currently working completely ITB, using Reaper as my DAW of choice, as it perfectly fits my technical nature and, most importantly, gives me full control over my routing, workflow and ideas. I use my pair of trusty Equator D5 MKIIs as my main monitors as well as a pair of Beyerdynamic DT-880 and Sony MDR 7506 as headphones for detail work.

Q: Tell us about a project you worked on you are especially proud of and why. What was your role?

A: My first offical mixing project, mixing the track “She is the Dark” for the collaboration project “Vita Dolorosa”, featured on the tribute album “A Lake Of Ghosts: The Long Shadow Of My Dying Bride”, was quite a start for me, featuring clean and growled vocals, orchestral instruments and a lot of material from three different remote artists, combined in a 9 minute long track.

Q: What's your strongest skill?

A: Besides being flexible in adapting to my client’s vision, I know my tools and when to apply them. In an audio world that is dominated by audio processing plugins and virtual instruments, it is more than ever important to know where to reach to realize the vision of an artist, instead of slapping together a tool-chain of standard templates. I’m eager to learn and to hone my skills, to optimize my workflow and, most of all, my understanding of what makes a song tick.

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

A: I feel inspired by Neil Kernon for his versatility in working with many different artists and especially for his works in the metal genre, which sound heavy and to the point but always open and never sterile, overcompressed or overproduced – just give Nile’s “Annihilation of the Wicked” a spin…

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

A: My focus lies on mixing work but I also finished some editing, recording (mainly drum recording) and mastering jobs in the past, plus some technical consultation.

Q: What are you working on at the moment?

A: I’m mixing the massive solo album (singer-songerwriter with complex songs and arrangements) of a friend of mine, and a death metal ep of the solo project of a local drummer.

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

A: That it is no problem to just “fix it in the mix” – a poorly recorded audio track will always lack something, no matter how much editing or processing skills you throw at it.

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

A: I like to work closely with my customers to find out his vision for his music. At least, this means having some reference artists or albums which give me a perspective on the material I’m going to work on.

Q: What was your career path? How long have you been doing this?

A: I’m playing bass and electric guitar in different for more than 10 years now, but my turning point came when I started exploring synthesizers – this opened up my thinking for sound itself and consequently brought me to start mixing.

Q: Analog or digital and why?

A: I work completely in the box for now.

Q: What's your 'promise' to your clients?

A: I’m a perfectionist – I will always do my work to the best of my knowledge and skills.

Q: Can you share one music production tip?

A: Correct gain staging is the best way to keep you from fooling yourself into thinking something sounds better while it in fact just sounds louder!