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

This episode is a recap — and an expansion — of the six-hour Mixing Masterclass that Dee Kei hosted live in his LA studio. Lu was in the room. The audience brought mixes. Things got real. Now Dee and Lu bring the best of it to the podcast, including the things they didn't get to cover in person.
The first and most important topic: what is the actual value of a mix engineer, and how should that determine your pricing? Dee lays out a position he holds firmly — you should never discount your rate based on stem count, never negotiate yourself down before the client even asks, and never charge by the hour for mixing. Your rate reflects the lifetime of training behind each decision, not the time it took to make it. Like Picasso sketching on a napkin, the price isn't for the five minutes — it's for everything it took to get there. Lu adds the market reality: what your price communicates before the client even hears your mix, and why charging too little signals something you don't want to signal.
From there the episode moves into compression — specifically what happened in the room when Dee deliberately smashed a vocal with an 1176 in "all buttons in" mode and the mix bus with a Vertigo VCA compressor just to prove a point. The reaction in the room said everything: over-compression isn't always wrong. Rules like "don't compress more than 2-3dB" are useful frameworks until the moment the song tells you otherwise.
They also get into the subjective vs. objective nature of mixing — why saying "there's no such thing as a good or bad mix" is actually incorrect, and how to think about objectivity in a field where the tools of judgment are mostly invisible. The Shohei Ohtani analogy here is one of the better ones the show has produced.
The episode closes with a breakdown of how Spotify's LUFS normalization actually works — including the gating behavior that means raising your quieter sections can paradoxically lower your integrated LUFS, and why album masters and single masters should be approached as two completely separate deliverables if you want your music to hold up in playlists.
A lot covered. All of it useful.
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Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:
Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes
Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu
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 North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.

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Fair warning: Dee Kei opens this one by saying he doesn't know if he's going to release it. Congratulations — you found it.
This is a looser, more speculative episode than usual, and that's exactly the point. Dee brings a theory he's been sitting with: that the rise of AI tools and plugin saturation is quietly driving a resurgence in the value of analog gear — not because analog is objectively better, but because it represents something that AI fundamentally can't replicate. Humanness. Randomness. The chaos of a real circuit doing something slightly unpredictable.
Lu, who has personally moved over $157,000 in analog gear sales and spent years tracking sold listings on eBay and Reverb, brings the market perspective. They get into which pieces actually hold their value (vintage preamps and compressors from the right era), which ones don't (anything mass-produced and recently released), and the old idea that buying the right gear is just another savings account you can twist the knobs on while you wait.
From there the conversation opens up into some bigger territory. They talk about the current bubble of vintage mixer restoration and servicing companies popping up, what vibe coding is doing to the plugin marketplace, and how AI tools are being deployed very differently in live sound versus the studio — including a breakdown of the L-Acoustics source intelligence system and how it can achieve up to 40dB of feedback reduction in real time on a vocal channel. The episode wraps with Dee going full speculative: the Gartner hype cycle and where AI actually lands when the bubble pops, what nuclear fusion does to the cost of running AI at scale, and the two technology shifts he thinks will fundamentally change everything about how we make and experience music.
It's the kind of episode that happens when two engineers with too much on their mind decide to just talk. The industry context makes it more interesting than it sounds.

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HIRE DEE KEI
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Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:
Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes
Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu
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 North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Lu brought the topic this week — and it's one of the most universally felt things in audio that nobody talks about directly: the feeling of not belonging in the room. Not because you don't have the skill. Not because you don't have the credits. Just because the feeling is there, and most people let it make the decision for them.
The episode opens with Lu sharing what he keeps hearing in consultation calls — talented engineers at every level passing on sessions they would have handled just fine, because they didn't feel ready. Dee and Lu are direct about it: the gap between someone who is working and someone who isn't is almost never the quality of their mixing. It's almost always confidence and forward motion. They unpack what imposter syndrome actually looks like at different stages of a career — not just at the beginning, but also at the mid-level, when asking for help or shadowing someone starts to feel embarrassing in a way that holds people back just as much.
From there, Dee reads from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow — specifically the chapter on cognitive priming — and the episode gets genuinely fascinating. He walks through the Florida Effect study, where participants subconsciously primed with age-related words actually walked slower down a hallway without knowing it. Then the pencil experiment, where people forced into a smile by how they held a pencil in their teeth rated cartoons as funnier than those forced into a frown — without being aware their facial expression had changed at all. The implication is direct: acting calm and confident doesn't just make you look calm and confident to others. It statistically makes you feel calmer and more confident yourself.
The conversation also takes an unexpected turn into money priming — how the mere presence of money-related imagery in your environment makes people measurably more independent, more self-reliant, and also more selfish and socially distant — and what that means for the environments engineers build and the mindsets they carry into sessions.
It ends where it started: the feeling of not belonging is not evidence of not belonging. Send the email. Ask to sit in. Shadow the session. The only thing making the street look longer than it is, is you.
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HIRE DEE KEI
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⁠HIRE JAMES⁠
Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:
Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes
Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu
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 North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This episode starts with a confession: Dee Kei wants a new compressor. Specifically, he's been eyeing the Heritage Audio Grandchild 670N — a $3,000 stereo Fairchild-style compressor in a 5U rack unit that launched in late 2025. From there, the episode opens up into something much more interesting than a gear review.
Dee and Lu walk through exactly what makes the original Fairchild 670 so mythologized — the tube count, the time constants, the maintenance costs that make owning one feel like buying a second car you're afraid to drive — and why Heritage Audio's approach of distilling the circuit down to four tubes in an affordable, modern form factor is either brilliant or sacrilegious, depending on who you ask. They break down what the Grandchild 670N actually has on the front panel — DC threshold, AC threshold, sidechain filters, mid-side and stereo linking, true bypass — and why $3,000 for two channels of Fairchild-esque compression is a genuinely different proposition than it was even three years ago.
But the most interesting part of the episode isn't the gear. It's what happens when Dee reads from two actual peer-reviewed studies on whether listeners can hear the difference between analog and digital processing at all. The first study tested analog modeling plugins against free non-modeling alternatives across 540 participants — and found that not only did listeners show no preference for the analog mix, the majority who thought they could identify it were wrong. The second covered DAX differences using a loopback method with over 1,300 respondents. The conclusion: people largely can't tell the difference, and the majority who claimed they could were misidentifying what they heard.
So why does any of this matter — and why does Dee still want the compressor? The episode lands on something more philosophical than a gear recommendation: the difference between buying hardware because you believe it's objectively better, and buying it as an act of devotion to the craft. Dee draws a sharp distinction between using gear purchases to fill a hole in your love for music versus buying from a place of already loving it deeply — and how Tony Mazzarati still sharpening techniques at his level is proof that the rabbit hole never ends for people who genuinely want to go deeper.
Gear talk, research, psychology, and the irrational passion that keeps working engineers working. A lot going on in this one.
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HIRE DEE KEI
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Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:
Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes
Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu
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 North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Lu's on vacation. Dee Kei is alone with a page of talking points and one of the most contested topics in audio engineering right now — and the result is one of the most thoughtful solo episodes the show has produced.
This is not an episode about which AI tools Dee uses or recommends. It's about something harder to talk about: how engineers think about delegation, what happens when a probabilistic recommendation gets presented with the confidence of certainty, and why the pro-AI vs. anti-AI binary is the least useful frame anyone could bring to this conversation.
Dee opens with a distinction that reframes the entire debate: there's a difference between assistance tools, delegation tools, and full replacement — and most of the discourse collapses all three into one. He argues that engineers have been using automated decision-making for decades (dynamic EQ, auto release, delay compensation, drum replacement, LUFS metering), so the real question was never whether machines should make decisions. The real question is how much of the contextual, consequential decision-making we're comfortable handing over — and whether we understand what's being lost in that handoff.
From there he gets into the value engineers actually bring that no AI is accounting for: accountability, history with an artist, taste, creative confidence, the ability to hear the same note as a client and understand what they actually mean. He's direct about the economic effects coming — fewer junior engineer jobs, faster turnaround expectations, clients arriving with better rough mixes — but equally direct about what those changes don't mean: that the ceiling of professional audio work is getting any lower.
The episode closes on a question Dee leaves deliberately open: if an AI assistant could eventually make every technical decision as well as a human engineer, what do we actually believe the mixer is there to do?
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!
⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠
Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord!
HIRE DEE KEI
HIRE LU
⁠HIRE JAMES⁠
Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:
Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes
Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu
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 North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy