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LA-based producer/mixer/songwriter Keith “Ten4” Sorrells has been hard at work in the studio, fueled by the pursuit of great sound and an endless supply of coffee. As part of GRAMMY-winning producer Oak Felder’s protégé production group The Orphanage, Keith has worked on hit singles for leading artists such as Demi Lovato, John Legend, Anne-Marie, Kehlani, and more.
We sat down with Keith recently to get a closer look at his studio setup, where two Dangerous Music products now have pride of place. Read on to learn about his journey in music, why he loves the Dangerous Music 2-BUS+ summing mixer and Monitor ST, his favorite microphones, and what he would love to hear in pop music in the new year.
How did you get started making records?
My dad was a musician, so I was always around music. When I was 12, I started messing around in GarageBand, covering songs that I loved. That led me to meeting Trevor Brown, and we started producing local bands together, which was really fun.
Trevor then met Oak Felder and introduced me to him and I was his assistant for a while. I’d been making rock music pretty much exclusively up until that point and had no idea how to make pop music – Oak taught me how to do that. So my journey in music involved having fun, making music with friends, and crazy connections – you never know what can happen!
Who were your musical influences growing up?
It was definitely a lot of my dad's favorite stuff which then turned into my favorite stuff: I’d say The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Stone Temple Pilots are definitely the top three for me. I was obsessed with The Beatles! [Laughs]
That's perfect training for pop music!
Yeah! They're probably the greatest pop group of all time.
Tell us about your current studio setup.
I run everything off a silicon MacBook Pro, and then I have an Apogee Symphony MKII Special Edition, which is the brain of the setup.
Shoutout to Patrick Carpenter at VK for the Apogee! I told him I wanted the best converter. This was around the time they had just started releasing the Apogee Special Edition, so I think Oak and I were two out of three people who had it when it first came out, which was really cool. And Bob Clearmountain is such an awesome guy! He's basically the person who invented the job description of mixing. [Laughs]
The Apogee goes out to a Trinnov ST2 Pro, which was a game changer for me, and that goes out to my NS10s with a Bryston amp, and I also have ADAM Audio monitors for the mains. That’s the basic monitoring/creative setup.
What drew you to the Dangerous Music 2-BUS+ summing mixer?
It's so great! Shoutout to Patrick again, by the way. He helped me get started on the journey of having a mix setup that would get me what I was hearing in my head and the mixing goals that I wanted to achieve.
Patrick suggested the 2-BUS+ to be able to use some outboard gear and also get the space and dimension that you get from going out to an analog summing mixer. I ended up getting two of them: one for drums, which is then patched into another one, that is the main one that has everything else in it. I use those two together and they're great!
Tell us about its performance. Also, how is it an improvement on mixing in the box?
I definitely hear a lot more separation when I send stuff out to it, just because you have different things running on actual analog channels instead of it all being summed to two digital channels. I mean, there are definitely ways to do it in the box, but I feel like things get kind of flattened out and you have to work harder to get that space in the box.
With something like the Dangerous Music 2-BUS+, it's not reinventing the sounds that you have, but it's helping each stereo channel; I can tell where that instrument is sitting in the mix.
It also has to do with the volume I’m trying to achieve in my mixes. Once you start getting loud, it’s harder to have things separate. I feel like with the 2-BUS+, it’s easier to get clarity when you're trying to get really loud with stuff, so that's been awesome.
Do you use the three onboard tone circuits – Harmonics, Paralimit, and X-Former?
Yeah, I'm so stoked that they have those settings! It’s just a little more sauce that you can use. On its own, the 2-BUS+ is really transparent, which I love because I don't want it to be changing things too much, but if I'm feeling like I want some extra color, I love to engage the X-Former right after the mix bus compressor that I have on my main 2-BUS+. I have the knob all the way down, but I just turn it on and it tightens stuff up; it’s a little squishier, which is nice.
I use Paralimit on drums just a little bit – especially on rock stuff, when it’s live drums, parallel compression sounds really nice. It is so cool that they included those features, just for that little more squish! [Laughs]
Tell us about integrating outboard gear into the 2-BUS+.
The Ext. Insert makes it really easy. I have the Smart Research C2 for some drum compression, if I want things to sound more glued together. I also use the WesAudio _RHEA compressor after that on the chain, which sounds so sick on drums! I don't compress at all with it, I have it on as another color option. It’s also nice that I could do some more volume control with that in the box with the plug-in if I want to automate the drum bus volume and things like that. Shout out to WesAudio for being dope and having that kind of stuff!
On the main mix bus, I have the SSL XLogic G-Series, the 1u racked one, which sounds amazing – I feel like it excels at getting energy out of a track in any genre. That’s mainly the pieces that are on the inserts.
What other Dangerous Music gear do you use?
I got the Monitor ST a month ago, and it's so great. I was just using the digital volume control going out of the Apogee and when I wanted to turn the volume down a lot for mixing, it’s not going as hot out of the converters, but it still sounded okay. With the Monitor ST, I could have full volume conversion going on and then just use that for volume and I feel like I don't lose any of the image or any of the front-to-back depth of what the mix is doing when I go to those low volumes for mixing.
Also for the booth setup, it's really easy to send the output of the cue there instead of making the Symphony run on two extra channels and then having to switch them when it's time to mix. It’s really nice to be able to have your whole setup based in the Monitor controller. Dangerous Music makes it easy – it literally sounds like it's not there, which is great. This is what you want – to really hear what you’re doing! This was another game-changer.
What are some of your favorite microphones?
The Neumann U 87 – that was my first mic and I love it, especially for vocals. It sounds great on pretty much any source that you put in front of it and you can sculpt it to sound however you want with other pieces of gear as well. It has a lot of energy and doesn't initially sound too dull or anything.
I also got a U 47 FET for guitar and kick duty a couple of weeks ago from Patrick, which has been super dope, especially with heavier stuff where you need the low-end response that the FET has. I've been using that, blended with an SM7, on cabinets for heavier tones and it sounds great. So, thank you again, Patrick, for saving my life as usual! [Laughs]
I got an AKG D12 for kick as well and that was really cool too, so those are the most recent ones that I’ve been stoked about.
Do you have a go-to signal chain for recording, or do you use something different every time?
The BAE 1073D 500 series module is great – I just rock it out for pretty much any source. I go from that into the AudioScape Pultec EQ, which also sounds amazing on everything.
For vocals or really washy, ambient guitars, I'll use the Retro Instruments 176 compressor – I love it so much. It adds more squish, which is good! [Laughs]
For drums, I have the important stuff running through the UTA MPDI-4. It sounds amazing and you can design whatever kind of preamp style you want because there are so many different options. I usually have it on the Neve-type setting for drums, which is great. We also use Vintech preamps for drums – more Neve-y stuff. Neve is just the greatest – you can't argue with Neve! [Laughs]
What's it been like working with Vintage King over the years?
It’s been really great! I don't even know how long it’s been – I want to say three years now – so it’s fairly new, but I feel like Patrick has been my homie for my whole life! [Laughs] We wanted to upgrade Oak’s A room, especially for the drum setup, and also monitoring and some outboard pieces that we were thinking about. After using his room to track and mix the Demi album ‘HOLY FVCK’, which was really fun, I wanted to upgrade my own room and that's when Patrick helped me figure out what pieces would be essential. He made it so easy and fun to get new gear. I really appreciate VK and Patrick for making stuff easy and for just being awesome humans!
How do you feel about plug-ins and which ones are you liking right now?
Plug-ins are great! The possibilities are truly endless, especially with the AI-driven stuff. I’ve recently been using plug-ins from Schwabe Digital; I just started messing around with Gold Clip and it sounds so cool!
Make Believe Studios are also incredible. That company probably makes the best-feeling and best-sounding plug-ins I've ever used in my life! I love their Sontec MES-432D9 EQ – I can't tell that it's a plug-in! With some other EQ plug-ins, I feel like I'm making moves but it’s not as tight as I wanted. But with the Sontec, it does exactly what I'm asking it to do at all times. It lives on my mix bus forever. I love that plug in.
Make Believe also makes this plug-in called MixHead, which is great. It's the secret sauce SPL hardware that a lot of mixers have had on their mix bus and it sounds so sick, especially for pop stuff; it’s an incredible sheen-y color box.
What's a typical day in the studio like for you?
I get to the studio, make a ton of coffee, because I need to always be drinking coffee! [Laughs] If it's a writing day, then me, the artist, and the writer chill and just kind of hang out together as we work. Recently, I feel like I've been locking in with the people in my circle who feel like my friends, but we're doing music, so a day in the studio just feels like hanging out with friends, which is a great place to be. So we start a vibe and usually, the song is completely done that day.
After the artist and writer leave, I'm obsessed with doing ‘day of’ bounces – I hate having a backlog, which means that I don't sleep that much. [Laughs] So I work late into the night, doing all the small tweaks that have to be done to get the production to be perfect and send it out.
Where I am right now, I don't want to sacrifice any of the excitement of the day, so even if it's 3 am, I want to make sure they see it the next morning like it's a done song, sounding exactly how we wanted it. That’s really important to me.
I see why coffee is so essential to your process!
[Laughs] Yeah, it's definitely wild, but I love making records, so it is what it is!
You’ve talked about how important sound selection is for you when you start working with an artist – what does that process look like?
Like all creative producers, I want to do something that's never been done before, so I want to use sounds that are exciting, cutting-edge, and unique, and I strive to do that. But hey, if the song calls for a generic Linn drum kick, for example, then that's what it calls for and it's all good!
I think it's more about what the artist wants to do – our philosophy is designing, from the ground up, something that's exactly like what their vision is. We like to design each song from scratch and we have our own sample libraries and presets, which is really fun. But you know, it's so funny because we're in a time where some of the biggest songs in the world are made from Splice loops, and I think that's dope too. There are no rules! Anything can be a song – if it feels good, it is good.
Do you have a wish for what you'd like to hear in pop music in 2025?
Wow, like something stylistically in pop that's not out there right now? It would be incredible if heavier styles of music were in pop – this comes from my early 2000s fanboy dream. [Laughs] I absolutely love what metal and metalcore are doing right now; the genre is combining so many different sounds, from shoegaze to hyperpop to movie score stuff. I am so inspired by that, and with all of that bias, I hope that that would make it into mainstream somehow, just like pop-punk did a few years ago. That would be so sick!
Let's put it out there! Finally, are there any exciting projects you're working on that you're able to talk about?
A record just came out that I mixed called ‘I Hate Your Ex-Girlfriend’ by BANKS featuring Doecii, which was so much fun to work on. Shoutout to Trevor Brown and Zaire Koalo for slaying that production! Also my bro Jutes’ project ‘Sleepyhead’ has been blowing up. It's been so amazing that he and I are having success with that project by making music that we actually want to make instead of trying to appeal to trends.
I’ve also been working with an artist named Charlotte Sands, who I’m really excited about. Shoutout to my boy Oscar Linnander who I worked with on that. Oh, and on the Jutes project, shoutout to Alex Nice – got to give a shoutout to all the boys, you know! [Laughs]
And, of course, a huge thank you to Oak for bringing me and the boys onto some of the projects he’s working on. We’ve done a bunch of records together this year, including some with Bea Miller and also Matt Hansen that I’m really excited about!
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