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Danny Reisch’s musical journey looks something like this: began recording music on a 4-track, aged 10; played drums in punk bands; earned a Bachelor of Music from Texas State University; toured the world drumming with the bands Shearwater and Other Lives; founded and ran a successful studio called Good Danny’s in Austin, Texas; moved to Los Angeles and made a name for himself as a producer and mix engineer in the music, film, television and gaming world, with credits like Disney’s Peter Pan, AMC’s Interview With A Vampire, A24’s The Green Knight, and Microsoft’s Halo.
Danny sat down to talk to us from his Los Angeles home base, Electric Ear, which he’s in the process of expanding as more projects keep rolling in. Read on to learn about his favorite gear, how his new AEA 1029 compressor impacts his workflow, the differences and similarities in mixing film music and records, why he loves plug-ins, and more.
Tell us a bit about your studio and your vision for it.
Well, I didn't build this room; I came in after building a failed mix room in the studio behind my house here in LA. I had struggled with low-end issues in that room and just could not get the results I needed.
At the time, I was working on a mix for Disney for the Peter Pan score, and I just knew it was not going to work in that space, so I started looking around for other rooms and it was through the folks at Undertone Audio and Barefoot Recording (Eric Valentine's old studio) that I met Gideon Zaretsky, who built this studio.
I came over to Gideon's room and was just overwhelmed with the clarity, detail, punch, and monitoring in the space. I started working here regularly, moving gear in, and doing more and more until we formed a partnership. Now, I just live here 80 hours a week!
Working out of this room is incredible; it's the best-sounding room I've ever been in. Gideon and I are currently in the middle of building a new facility adjacent to Electric Ear, where we'll have much more space for tracking and additional control rooms, so we’re expanding this into a little complex over here in Highland Park.
Are there any recent projects you worked on at Electric Ear that you’d like to highlight?
I mixed the new Dirty Projectors album here, which is an incredible record; I'm really proud of it and of the work I was able to do with Dave Longstreth. It's a really creative album with diverse instrumentation, and Dave's ear for harmony and chromatic melodic movement is just unbelievable.
Dave and I also worked together on the score for an A24 film called The Legend of Ochi, directed by Isaiah Saxon, that came out a couple of months ago; I'm equally as proud of that score.
I have to mention my band Other Lives because we just put a new single out. It’s been a long time coming and I'm really proud of that record. We last put a record out five years ago, and everyone's slowly been working on this one, bit by bit, for many years, so I'm very excited to have some songs out in the world to share with everyone and to start touring with the band again next year.
What drew you to the AEA 1029 compressor?
I had the opportunity to do some op-amp shootouts with Joey Krieger while he was developing the design for the 1029, so I was interested from the very first time I got to hear these different flavors by swapping op-amps out. He and I recorded some drums in here while comparing op-amps, and I was absolutely floored by the difference of swapping single components out and how the character changed in the piece. It is unbelievably 3D and beautiful-sounding! The discrete op-amps that were chosen for it were designed by Fred Forssell (who, in fact, designed the whole 1029 circuit). His ears are incredible.
The 1029 does something very special, especially with drums, and the way it handles crest factor and low-end transients is so elegant. It holds low end together in a really beautiful way. It took a couple of months for me to get my own unit in here, but it had been on my mind the entire time ever since I heard it – I didn't want to let it go. Of course, it was just a breadboard version of it that we were working with, but I've been so excited about getting a real working unit in here to use on my mixes.
How has the 1029 compressor integrated into your studio and impacted your workflow?
The big thing for me is that the 1029 is perfect for when I just need compression. I have a lot of very cool compressors in here that have a lot of character: LA-2A, 175B, Collins, BA-6A, UnFairchild; all very cool compressors, but it's a strong spice. It's like reaching for cumin or coriander, and sometimes you need something that imparts less of a character but does control transients and the 1029 does that in a way that's not bland or vanilla.
A lot of times, with the way I record, I'm usually printing effects and I've got character mics and I've got distortion and all kinds of things printed in the tracking, so I'm not always looking for a compressor to completely change the sound. Sometimes I just want actual compression and it's perfect for that.
It still sounds beautiful and open and transparent and 3D, but it has a way of controlling sound without completely shifting the character and I love that – signal stays true to itself, just with more control. It's very easy to dial in because of the Wet/Dry blend and the three different time constant profiles that are included in it. It’s really fast to use.
Also, for how deceptively simple it looks from the front panel, it's incredibly versatile. It's only four knobs and a few different time constants, but it's been laid out really well and the time constants have been chosen really thoughtfully and with a lot of testing.
It has kind of filled the void for when I don't want a ton of spank or a huge fast release, like from an 1176, or a complete shift in character, like from a tube compressor. It's just really good at managing transients and controlling sound in a beautiful way without overspicing it.
Sticking with the spice analogy, this is not like a spice at all, right? It’s almost like salt, which glues everything together.
[Laughs] Something subtle, yeah! It’s just a little salt and pepper; what you need on everything without completely changing the style.
What was it like working with the team at Vintage King to purchase the compressor?
Vintage King is the best! I've known Kyle Hunt, my rep, for over 20 years at this point. We made records together in Texas when he was in the band Black Angels; he’s loaned me gear for as long as I can remember recording, and he’s been a good friend. Kyle always gives me a heads up if there's an interesting piece that comes in – like a vintage piece – something from the ‘50s or ‘60s that's esoteric and odd and probably German. [Laughs]
The thing with Vintage King is they really know my style and what I'm doing. They help curate and keep in touch about stuff that they know I'll be interested in and that's great. It's not just a generic follow-up sales call on every XLR or pack of guitar strings; it feels very personal. Kyle is the best and I feel sorry for everyone who doesn't get to work with Kyle! [Laughs]
What are some other products by AEA that you enjoy using?
Before I mention the new products that I’ve been enjoying, I should give a shout-out to the AEA TRP500 preamp. I have a large collection of vintage ribbon mics, some of which are from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and the impedance and gain that they need at the preamp stage is so important for getting tone and clarity out of those mics.
Nothing does what the TRP500 can do. It is exactly what those vintage mics want to see and I can get 70 or 80 dB of gain out of it without it being all hiss and noise; that has been a huge game changer for me.
I do love the AEA R44 mic and I use it on brass, piano, drums, vocals…all kinds of stuff. It's a gorgeous mic that just absorbs top end transients in a beautiful way.
More recently, I became hip to the NUVO N28, a stereo ribbon mic that is one of the newer models from AEA. Joey and I used that on our drum recording sessions when we were shooting out op-amps for the 1029, and my jaw dropped at the image, clarity, and tone of using just the single microphone on the kit.
It was tight, punchy, and clear… not what you think of with the typical ribbon mic, which is going to be a little bit slower with transients and a little smooshier on the top end. It was very clear and accurate and just a beautiful capture with that N28
Tell us about some of your other favorite pieces of outboard gear at the studio.
My ride or die is probably the Rupert Neve Designs Master Buss Processor. It’s on the stereo bus of every mix of every record I've done for over 15 years. It's an unbelievable one-stop shop for stereo width, saturation, limiting, and compression and is an incredible tone shaper. I honestly don't even know what my mixes would sound like without that because it's been used on everything for so long. I just can't imagine mixing without it.
It's never been bypassed!
[Laughs] No, it hasn’t! I would, but only to laugh and go, “Wow, can you imagine if I wasn't mixing through this?”
I also want to give a big shoutout to Undertone Audio because I mix on one of their consoles, the LC-24. There aren't many of those out in the world and it is just an unbelievable piece of equipment. The EQs on the console are similar to their channel strip and they are really powerful. I also use their UnFairchild compressor. There's a mkI and mkII in here. Those are almost always on drums or vocals or something on a mix. I love that company and their gear so I have to shout them out.
What are the similarities and differences in terms of gear and workflow, when it comes to mixing and engineering film music versus records?
It's a good question. Ultimately, at the heart of either an album or a film score, we're just trying to tell a story and resonate with the listener emotionally. The path to doing it is a little different with each, but the end goal is the same, which is to make you feel something, so there's more similarity than discrepancy in the processes.
With the film score world, I'm typically mixing in 5.1, 7.1 or 7.1.4 Atmos, and the multichannel aspect of it changes the types of tools I can use versus on a record mix where I tend to be very analog-centric and stereo only.
A film score is almost always mixed in the box because of multichannel stem delivery. In the case of the score I was working on yesterday, I turned in twenty 7.1.4 stems to the re-recording team who is going to take that to the dub stage and incorporate it into the film mix. Also, the timeline on the film score side is so incredibly fast that even if I wanted to print everything in real time and take my time with it, that option just doesn't exist. So I'm in the box on the mix with the film score and I'm on the console and using a lot of analog gear on a record mix.
I do still reach for outboard gear on a film score when I need that color. Sometimes stuff comes in and I just know that, for example, the UnFairchild is going to be perfect on this source so in that case, I’ll use it as a hardware insert, commit it, and then move on.
I engineered the strings and mixed the score for the movie Companion, composed by Hrishikesh Hirway, who also hosts the podcast Song Exploder. The opening cue is a very important moment. It’s the first thing you hear even before the picture starts. Sophie Thatcher hums one of the main melodic themes that keeps coming back throughout the film, so I really wanted the perfect reverb for it and I was able to do some fun tricks with my EMT 140 plate reverb. I printed her voice through the plate in stereo, adjusted the length and changed the pre-delay, added a little EQ on it, printed a second pass and panned that in the rears.
So, in a 7.1 mix, I was able to use a piece of stereo gear but make it pseudo-surround by adding this pre-delay and altering the tone and decay. It gave it a throw to where the back of the room sound was a little darker, had a longer reverb, and triggered just a little bit later than the reverb you hear in the front and the sides. I’ve actually found that working with zoned stereos can be much more immersive than one huge 7.1.4 reverb. So that was a really cool way to bring some of the way I work in the record side into the film score world. Whatever tool is right for the job is what I'm going to use, as long as the workflow doesn't suffer as a result.
It’s often tricky to break down your process, because I’m sure when you’re working, you’re often in a flow state and it's all pretty instinctual, but now I'm asking you to step outside of yourself and analyze the various steps.
It's interesting for me, honestly, because you're right, and I actually realized this yesterday. I was in a sort of flow state on a mix and when I came out of it, it felt like I was coming back to get air from being underwater, like scuba diving for two hours! [Laughs] There was a moment I was like, “Oh, I'm back in my body! I'm here again.” It is interesting talking about it because these things are very, as you said, instinctual and it's all gut reaction. I just move and I'm following the things that I'm following as I'm working, so it's interesting to sort of zoom out and look at myself outside of myself and discuss how these things actually go down.
You mentioned in another interview that there’s no mastering really in film music. Could you expand on that?
The only sort of ‘mastering’ that exists in the film score world would be whatever processing the re-recording mixer does on the dub stage in the final mix of the film to make things work together.
Sometimes it’s about making choices that help keep the dialogue clear. For example, if there's sound design that I didn't hear that comes in, they may take some low midrange out of my mix. If the score is full and warm, with celli and bass and low brass… it's all fine until a bunch of low synthy sound design comes in, and then choices have to be made on what occupies that real estate. I don't know that I would call it mastering as much as I would say it's sort of balancing to make the puzzle fit together for the final mix.
I have a set of linked EQs that are grouped across all of my stem masters, so I'm making broad EQ and compression choices with sidechaining so the mix does sort of behave like I'm mastering in the mix process.
I’m also listening to the mix on AirPods and in my car, because even though these mixes are generally meant for theatrical release, it’s really important that the stereo downmix sounds great, because a lot of people will experience it that way.
The one thing I will say is, when you listen to a soundtrack album on Apple Music or Spotify or wherever you stream music, that has certainly been mastered because it's got to play nice next to, I don’t know, a Phoenix record or something else that's loud.
So the ideal scenario is that I do get a chance, after the film mix, to go back and spend a little time optimizing for stereo and prepping the music for a different level that we’re working at. There is tons of headroom in the film world. I'm not mixing crazy hot, I'm not limiting and trying to squeeze every last dB out of the mix, so there's usually a separate process that goes down before we send it for mastering.
Also, after the film mix has been done, there are separate mix passes that go down. For example, what you hear on an airplane is actually a slightly different mix than what you would hear listening at home. There are a few different iterations of the mix that happen and I'm always interested to hear how it sounds in all these different places. It all informs me about things to consider and be aware of while I'm in the mix process.
Let’s talk some more gear – what microphones do you find yourself using most often?
I like them all! [Laughs] I do have some favorites, but it’s all entirely dependent on the source. I think about these things like pairings: so, for example, I tend to pair a singer that has an incredibly bright voice with a mic that has a slightly more sloped off top end; a dark source with a bright mic ends up with a more naturalistic sound.
There’s a vintage Neumann U67 that I’ve had for many years and it's one of my favorite mics of all time. I feel like that's one of those mics you can put on anything and it sounds great. It has midrange density, it’s not too bright, not too bass-y. It's kind of the Goldilocks mic for me. That said, we have an AKG C12 here that’s great for darker sources; it's really good on drums, and really great on vocals for a little more air.
I also love the Neumann M49 or some of the ribbon mics that I use for a thicker, chunkier, darker, fuller treatment. I wish I could pick a fave, but it's just about picking the right tool for the source, really.
What monitors are you currently using?
I'm fortunate to be mixing on the Meyer Bluehorns. Those are on many of the larger scoring stages and they're incredibly detailed, extremely full range, and super linear, so they’re really good for film music because of the detail on the top end and the accuracy.
The thing I've always struggled with in the past is that I've generally had a pair of monitors that were great for midrange mixing and upper end or detail, but they didn't necessarily have the punch and the low-end fullness that I was looking for. And then the monitors I used for low end weren't very accurate in the midrange, so you end up mixing low end on one, then mixing the rest of the song and making instrument balance choices on the other, and hoping that one plus one equals two. With the Bluehorns, it's the first time I've had it all in one package. I feel so confident working on these. There’s very little that will sneak by you on the Bluehorns – they tell you everything. It's like mixing with the Hubble Telescope! [Laughs]
How do you feel about plug-ins?
I love plug-ins, I love analog gear, I love it all!
It’s all music!
Yeah, it's all music! There are a lot of ways to shape tones and create and manipulate sound. Because of how I came up and the people that taught me, I'm very comfortable with tape and tubes and analog gear, but I also mix in Dolby Atmos and work in multichannel audio, so I'm fully on both sides.
With the advances in multichannel plug-ins in the last few years, I feel like there are a lot of tools that are now available in the score mixing world that there really was no equivalent for. Eventide Audio, for example, now has the MicroPitch Immersive plug-in, which does the classic H3000 or Dual 910 trick of slight pitchshifting on either side to create a wide image out of a mono source. So for the immersive world, with that plug-in, we can take a mono or stereo source and do that same trick, but essentially surround you and put signal up above you.
I used that quite a bit on the synths and sound design elements for the new David Lowery film Mother Mary, which Daniel Hart scored. I’m also using about 30 or so instances of various LiquidSonics reverbs on that mix, which I adore. Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms are absolute staples for me. I can’t imagine mixing a film score without them.
I'm all for any tools that allow me to fill the room and envelop the listener without having a bunch of convoluted busses and multiple tricks with delays and modulation to try to make it happen. In a film score mix, I really like to play with the contrast of sounds being very forward on the screen and music drawing you into the scene, if it's a very real, intimate moment.
Then, when it's a big music moment, I love to fill the theater and make it a really visceral, wraparound experience. It’s sort of like in stereo, where if you’re mixing super wide from the first downbeat, there’s really nowhere to go when the chorus hits!
I should also mention the new Massenburg DesignWorks DRC3 Multichannel Dynamic Range Controller plug-in, which supports up to 9.1.6, I believe. I used that on a score mix in the sort of mastering fashion that we were discussing, where there's a sidechain across all the stems that glues the mix together. That thing is wonderful!
Especially now that people are figuring out creative ways to make plug-ins work for the immersive and multichannel space, I'm very excited to see what else is coming.
They’re so much more affordable now too, which is great, especially for up-and-coming engineers and producers.
Yeah! If I hadn't started collecting gear 30 years ago – if I was starting now – I don't think I'd be sitting in a room full of all of this equipment. You have companies like Universal Audio making incredible emulations and I use that stuff all the time. I have a pair of Pultec mastering EQs here, but I can't put thirty of those on a mix, so I’m all for plug-ins.
It’s the same with sample libraries: there are incredibly powerful tools that are super affordable at this point that just didn't exist 20 years ago. It’s about whatever gets a feeling across; make someone feel something, it doesn't matter how you got there. If you feel something, then it's right.
Do you have a go-to signal chain for recording, or do you use something different every time?
There are very few go-tos… I think that's why I have the 128 box of crayons in here to color with. [Laughs] While working on a record where I'm recording to tape versus a record that might have 400 tracks and synths and electronic kicks… the chains can be so different.
For me, a lot of it is about contextualizing the sound. Is there a stylistic reference point that we've talked about? Are we going for a dreamy 1950s sound? Is this band really into Pavement? Are we making a ‘90s record that’s going to be a bit thinner and harder-sounding? Are we going for soft and pillowy? Do we want extremely open, clear top end in a modern way, or do we want that gently rolled off and to be more midrange-focussed like a ‘60s recording? Is it going to be a plate reverb? Is it a spring reverb?
All of those questions inform the gear I reach for and contextualize where the sound is coming from, so there are no hard and fast rules for me. That being said, I love my Great River preamps; I use those a lot. I love the Undertone Audio preamps because they're so clear. I used those on the choir recording for the Mother Mary score. I also love the Ampex 350s; I'm a big fan of CAPI and Avedis; I've got a bunch of weird old channel strips from ‘70s consoles… there's not a one-stop shop for me, I love them all! It's about what's right for each project.
It's like what you said about microphones – you’re making pairings.
100%! I should also mention that I love the Overstayer Modular Channel; it's like a Decapitator in a box but extremely high-fi. I've been using that quite a bit for guitars and bass. It’s also really cool for drum room mics, for crushing and distorting stuff. There are a lot of flavors of grit and distortion on that box and I've been loving using that to beat things up before they go in.
What’s a typical day in the studio like for you – is there a typical day?
Oh my God, not at all! [Laughs] I’m chasing a zillion emails, talking to my manager, working on six different projects, checking masters out from a mix from six weeks ago, listening to a test pressing from a mix from six months ago, scheduling sessions coming up three months from now, getting prepped for the session of the mix I have that day, doing the actual mix of the session that day, sending files out, getting caught up… It's a three-ring circus in my world, so I just try to keep the plates spinning and enjoy the ride while I'm on it.
Are you working on any exciting projects right now that you're able to talk about?
I mentioned the Mother Mary score that Daniel Hart did; I'm really excited about that and I'll be at Skywalker Ranch next week for the dub on that mix.
I've got a few record projects I'm working on right now as well that I'm really excited about. One is for a new artist named Solya, who has built a huge following from doing bedroom productions on her own. We made a record together that I’m really proud of; I'm mixing it and we should be wrapped up with that soon.
I should also mention the band Tele Novella – Jason Chronis from Tele Novella played on the Solya record and did such a wonderful job. I love that band, I've made a few records with them and we started working on their newest record a couple months ago. We record all of the Tele Novella records on an 8-track – a Tascam 488 cassette machine – so everything has to be committed and captured more or less exactly how it's going to sound in the mix, because I mix that off the cassette with eight faders and my fingers. It’s a really fun challenge and I just adore the singer Natalie Ribbons – her songwriting and lyrics are just incredible.
I'm also mixing the new Bayonne record right now – I mixed the last one as well. I am such a fan of the band, outside of being fortunate enough to work with them; I love those guys.
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