Mixing Music | Music Production, Audio Engineering, & Music Business

Everyone asks how Serban Ghenea and John Hanes get their low end and vocals to sit so well. Almost nobody asks how they run the business behind it. Starting from the famous Gearspace Q&A thread, Dee Kei and Lu focus on the questions people skip: how work comes in, how files move, and how to stay organized under a heavy workload.
Dee Kei frames it with The E-Myth, which splits every business owner into the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. Most engineers are almost all technician, which means they own a job instead of a business. He shows what systems look like in practice through the relaunch of free mix feedback, including a reviewers handbook, status tags, and a private ticket system for Patreon members.
Then both hosts walk through their own setups: how clients send files, what to ask for (wet stems, dry stems, and the session), and how to set turnaround expectations. They also cover deposits, locking downloads until an invoice is paid, how they handle revisions and spec mixes, and tools like Trello and end-of-day client updates.
Dee Kei closes with a reminder that consistency and efficiency are decisions, not accidents. A little time spent planning your systems gives you more time to be the technician.

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Free mix feedback is back. Dee Kei opens the episode by explaining how the Mixing Music Podcast community now handles it: a Discord forum for public feedback, a private ticket system for Patreon members, and at least one hour every Monday where he personally goes through submissions, often with specific EQ moves and a short demo of what he'd do. (https://mixingmusicpodcast.com/discord )
Then Dee Kei and Lu get into a conversation they've been circling for a while: what AI actually means for engineers, plugin developers, and DAWs. Lu shares what he's been seeing from friends in the industry, people using AI to remove friction instead of skipping the work. Examples include correcting metering ballistics, building MIDI companion plugins so hardware can recall settings from inside a session, and feeding venue tech sheets and manuals into AI to plan a tour. They also react to a recent demo of vibe-coded audio plugins and what it reveals about the gap between an impressive demo and a tool engineers can trust.
From there, Dee Kei lays out his predictions. When almost anyone can build a plugin, the incentive shifts toward selling trust, security, and community instead of just tools. He talks about the real risk of malware in free plugins, why open ecosystems like Reaper look stronger, why Pro Tools has less reason to gatekeep, and his hope that the endless stream of 1176 and Neve clones finally gives way to new ideas. He ties this to a broader thought from This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas: AI will be excellent at imitation, which could push humans to take bigger creative risks.
The core of the episode is why neither host is worried about their job. AI mastering has existed for over a decade, and Lu hasn't seen mastering work slow down. They talk about what clients actually hire engineers for: communication, turnaround, reliability, and being the person who handles the artist, the manager, the A&R, and everyone else so the record gets finished. They explain the difference between being an engineer people rely on and being someone's personal engineer, and why the threshold for professional acceptance is rising. Dee Kei also shares an old IBM training manual idea that a computer can't be held accountable, and why that matters when someone has to put their name and reputation behind one mix out of a thousand.
The episode closes on a more personal note. Dee Kei explains why he's excited about change, why he wouldn't be devastated if the job shifted, and why fear, on a personal level, is mostly wasted energy that keeps you closed off to whatever comes next.
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The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠
The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others.
This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in Los Angeles, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.

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Lu is out on a gig, so Dee Kei is flying solo with something he's been thinking about a lot lately: parallel compression, why he's been reaching for it more often, and how he actually sets it up in his sessions.
The episode starts with a confession. Dee Kei has always loved clipping because it preserves transient punch while removing peaks cleanly. Standard in-line compression is a different trade-off: depending on attack and release settings, it changes the shape of the transient in ways that can pull the life out of a performance, especially on drums. What he's been finding himself wanting more often is the body and the density without the compromise to the attack. That's the problem parallel compression solves.
He gets into the technical side of why it works: the dry signal carries the transients untouched while the heavily compressed parallel path brings up the low-level sustain and average energy, lifting the RMS without touching the peaks. The result is a signal that feels bigger and more present without feeling squashed. He also gets into the routing options he prefers, specifically why he likes having a separate fader for the wet signal rather than a simple wet/dry knob, and why FabFilter Pro-C's dedicated dry level control is one of his favorite ways to do this inside a single plugin without building a full send/return setup. He also mentions Baby Audio's iHeart New York as one of the few plugins that replicates the feel of blending a separate fader.
The phase implications of parallel compression come up too, specifically how slower compressors like optical designs and the Fairchild can introduce phase shift that becomes audible when the wet and dry paths are summed, and why time-aligning the two paths matters more than most people realize.
The second half of the episode is a personal check-in. Dee Kei talks about where he is with his mixing workflow, spending more time on V1s and finding the quality improving as a result, life in a quieter neighborhood, and an open invitation: if you're in California and want to come by the studio, reach out.

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Two people asked Dee Kei the same question this week, one for a school project and one just out of curiosity: how do you actually get more clients? The answer he keeps coming back to, the one he's bought copies of a book to force on his own interns, is not what most people expect. Give more.
The book is The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, 122 pages, readable in a single sitting, and structured around five laws of stratospheric success presented through a simple fictional story. Dee Kei walks through the five laws, with particular focus on the Law of Value: your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. He connects this directly to the mechanics of word-of-mouth in the audio world, where there's no textbook solution to a creative problem and every recommendation is fundamentally personal. People refer who they trust, and trust is built through consistent generosity over time.
But the episode goes deeper than the book. Dee Kei reads from Thinking Fast and Slow again, this time the section on money priming, which covers studies showing that people who have money on their minds, even subconsciously, are measurably less generous, more isolated, and more self-reliant to the point of not asking for help even when they need it. The practical takeaway is direct: an engineer coming from a scarcity mindset, focused on what they're owed and who's not referring them, is less likely to attract the referrals they're chasing because the people around them can feel it.
Lu adds his own layer through the Ben Franklin Effect, the psychological phenomenon where asking someone for a small favor actually makes them like you more, not less, and the two connect it to how genuine curiosity and low-pressure outreach can open more doors than any pitch ever could.
The episode closes on something personal. Dee Kei talks about pushing a stranger's broken-down car six blocks in sandals because their house was six blocks away. Not for credit, not to post about it. Just because it seemed like the right thing to do. And the longer argument the episode makes is that the engineers who operate from that same energy, genuinely and not performatively, are the ones who end up with a career that sustains itself without constantly having to chase it.

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Lu brought a topic this week that sounds simple on the surface and gets complicated fast: gear clones. Are they worth it? Do they sound like the original? And does any of that actually matter?
Dee and Lu start with the basic problem at the heart of every clone purchase — the marketing of a clone borrows the reputation of its predecessor to make the sale, which immediately creates an expectation the product may never be able to meet. Not because the clone is bad, but because the original itself is frequently impossible to replicate. The potentiometers are different. The transistors are different. Even the transformers — often cited as the defining voice of a piece of gear — are designed to be sonically transparent, meaning a significant portion of what people attribute to a unit's sound actually comes from other parts of the circuit entirely, including components that haven't been manufactured the same way in decades.
From there the episode opens into something much larger: the science of how expectation shapes perception. Dee and Lu walk through the McGurk effect — the well-documented phenomenon where what you see physically overrides what you hear — and connect it directly to how engineers experience gear. Lu tells the story of doing a live show where an audience member praised the sound of two Fender amps on stage, not knowing they were essentially muted and the entire signal was coming from a Fractal Audio pedal straight to the board. He heard the amps because he saw the amps. The gear didn't produce the sound he was praising. The belief did.
They also get into the sound of tape and vinyl — specifically how many of the "rules" engineers follow around these formats (mono low end, elliptical filters, tape saturation) were originally physical limitations of the format, not intentional creative decisions, and how over time those limitations became aesthetic preferences that engineers now apply by choice. Dee makes the case that the stories we tell ourselves about our tools — this is a real LA2A, this is a clone, this is a plugin, this is clean, this is warm — have more impact on how we use those tools and what we do with them than any measurable sonic difference between them.
The episode closes on something practical and personal: how to actually develop your ears as an engineer, the value of learning the rules before you break them, and why understanding whether you're psychologically someone who wants to break orthodoxy or someone who needs to follow it will tell you exactly what kind of advice you should be taking — and from whom.

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