Five Sounds With Joey Raia

Recording and mixing engineer Joey Raia started his career in audio electronics at Apogee and then switched to engineering and mixing while working with mix legend Bob Clearmountain. Since then he’s racked up an impressive discography, working on albums and movie soundtracks, including Disney’s Encanto, for which he won a GRAMMY in 2023.

In this edition of Five Sounds With… Joey takes us behind the scenes of five of his favorite records, sharing mixing techniques, workflow tips, and his favorite gear along the way. 

RUN THE JEWELS

I had been working with El-P for a long time, engineering his solo records and I was the go-to mixer for records he produced as well. So when he produced Killer Mike’s solo record “R.A.P. Music”, I mixed that, and then when El-P and Killer Mike formed Run The Jewels, I wound up working on all those records too. We’ve worked on four albums together so far, and there's a lot of work that goes into those records—they’re not quick records to make. [Laughs] But they're really great to work with and with El-P doing the production, it's always a fun thing to work on.

I usually start with their voices. Whenever you have multiple lead vocals in a song, it's always challenging because you want to balance the continuity of the song but also give each of the vocalists their own personality. You don't want to make things too consistent or too balanced, you do want things to switch things up when the different vocals come in, but you also want to have them sound like it's a group. So it's about accenting each of their voices, but also finding a balance and having that fit within the track. It's a tricky thing to do, but their voices work really well together. For their vocals I tend to keep things in the analog realm, for example, I used the Rupert Neve Designs EQs and compressors extensively on their vocals. 

With El-P's production, in general, there's a lot of aggressiveness and a lot of impact on the music, and their voices also have a similar quality, where things are very dynamic. I try not to squash things too much, so you feel the impact when certain elements go in and out, like drums, synth parts, or vocals. I try not to do too much on the mix bus either, especially lately. Maybe the first record or so, I did more processing with that but now it's a little bit less.

I like the Chandler EQ, I've been using it on the mix bus. I also use the Rupert Neve Designs Master Buss Processor, so I could do some limiting, some widening, and accentuate the center or the width. It also has the Silk processing which I like a lot and that's been on all of those mixes.

Working with someone like El-P is great because he knows how he wants the finished product to sound and the sounds are all there—it's not like I have to work on replacing things or that the drums don't sound good. I just try to accentuate his production and he's really good with Pro Tools so things come to me sounding good and it's my job to take it to the next level and get everything together.

AESOP ROCK

I really like working with Aesop Rock, he’s a very talented producer and vocalist. He self-produces some of his records and he also works with the producer Blockhead a lot. Their productions are similar in the sense that the soundscape is really nice: the drums are breakbeat-ish, the music is very atmospheric, sometimes there are samples, and it all has a really cool effect. It leaves a lot of space to get creative with using effects in the mix if I need to, or letting the drums get bigger and things like that. It's more of a sparse production in terms of sounds, whereas Run The Jewels is usually very thick on the production side of things—a lot of layers of instruments. So working on Aesop Rock records is very different from working on the Run The Jewels records but I really enjoy it. 

On the mix bus, I'll use the Rupert Neve Designs Master Buss Processor and also a lot of different tape saturation effects. I feel it lends itself well to his music style and production, and I almost treat it the way I would mix an indie rock song—having things more gelled together, which I don't like to do if it's going to be something that's a bit louder, something like pop, when you want more separation. With the Aesop Rock records, I tend to make them sound a bit more cohesive, almost like it’s a band playing. 

I also have the SSL Fusion, which I use on the mix bus because it has some good saturation. That's the analog gear, and then with plug-ins, I usually switch it up between different tape saturations: I like the Slate Tape Machines; Waves has an Abbey Road vinyl type processor that I also like, but now there are so many that I usually just try some out and see what works with the tracks.   

ZACK DE LA ROCHA - DIGGING FOR WINDOWS

I remember using the SSL Fusion, which has a transformer/saturation processing, on the bass line of this track. Then I used the mic pre-EQ with the Silk processing on the RND 5088 console—there are two different types, blue and red—and I used the blue one for the bass sound.

The trick to getting bass to translate well to different speaker systems and headphones is using different types of saturation. 99% of the time I use parallel processing and blending just to get some of the upper harmonics in. I don't like sidechaining low 808s with the kick drum; I try to let it all mix in, level-wise, and then parallel process the 808s to have them blend for translation so it works on AirPods and iPhone speakers and stuff like that.

DANGER MOUSE - CHASE ME (BABY DRIVER OST)

The thing I always do with hi-hats is try to separate wherever the esses are—like the sibilance in the vocals—I like to take that out of the hi-hat, or sometimes I'll even sidechain the hi-hats at the frequency where the sibilant part of the vocal is, which could be somewhere between 3k and 5k. I'll sidechain those out of the hi-hat track to get the vocals to feel more present and not take away from the vocal high end.

I find a lot of times when there are parts that get harsh in some of these records, it's because the vocal sibilance and the hi-hats are clashing and it becomes irritating. So I usually just kind of dip that out of the hi-hat either in EQ or with something like the Soothe plug-in, just to take the edge off and that lets me push the vocals a bit upfront without things getting harsh. I'm sure that's what I did on that track; it's kind of like the go-to thing I try to do. 

DISNEY - FROZEN, MOANA, ENCANTO

The hip hop I tend to like working on, and especially the stuff that El-P produces, is definitely a hybrid where there are a lot of live instruments—it's not just programmed, not all drum machines, or soft synths—a lot of times it’s multi-instrumental, with live bass, live guitars and things like that, so I'm kind of used to working in the realm of both electronic and acoustic instruments. 

I've always been into tracking and recording as well, so the work I’ve done for Disney is the side of things where I'm doing a lot more recording, tracking, and editing and things like that, which is great because I love doing that—being in the moment and recording, editing, tuning, all that kind of stuff.

When I'm done with the audio mix for a song I print stems out, which then go to the dub stage for the theater mix and they're able to accommodate whatever's happening on the screen—things like sound effects etc—and they can adjust parts of my mix to leave room for that kind of stuff. I'm lucky enough to be able to work on albums and then also work on music for films, which is really fun; it keeps things switched up and different.

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