My Mixing Philosophy

I started in the music business in the1980's. Back in the analog days when if you wanted to edit something you better be good with a razorblade. I spent a good 6 years at that first studio learning my craft of sound engineering.  I was incredibly lucky to have a well-established and popular sound engineer teaching me how to do things right, but to never except that you should be limited by rules.  In the 1990's I picked up doing sound design for live theater for fun, I started to get really into just how much you can do with sound to help tell a story and affect the audience's emotions.  In 1995 I purchased my first DAW Sonic Solutions which at the time was far ahead of ProTools because it was actually 24bit.  You could hear the difference at that time between DAW's.  I was still working in music as my main income. Theater could never pay me enough to make it financially feasible to pay for my new toy, so I moved to film sound design.  After doing three feature films I was approached to get involved with professional theatre.  Since that time, I have done over 300 professional theater productions. 

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I don't know if it was boredom or just that I missed music, but I decided to move back to doing music as my main job.  My main focus at that point was mixing.  It took me awhile to realize that everything I learned in theater and film could actually be applied to music.  Sometimes we forget that music is storytelling as well.  So, my focus has been on how I can take music to another level through the use of emotion created by the music as well as the way the music is mixed.  Listening to great mixers like Bob Clearmountian talk about mixing inspired me to really hone my skills on the storytelling and emotions of mixing music. 

 

Sound design in film and live theater is all about moving your audience with sound to help tell the story.  Understanding the storyline and emotion of a song is just as important as the frequencies of the instruments in that song.  As a mixer I want help the song writer's and artist's vision of the song to make an aural imprint on the listener and really excite their emotions. Too many times I have heard a mixer say they lost a mix to someone with less experience.  Why is that? Simple, the less experienced mixer who is more in tune with the emotion of the song will beat out someone who can easily make the song sonically better.  That is why I want to give you the best of both worlds; a great sounding song as well as a song that will move the audience emotionally and keep them engaged with the song from start to end.