Shop New October Deals
Colombian engineer/producer Alejandro Patiño, aka Mosty, has built an impressive discography in a few short years, working on chart-topping hits for global heavy hitters including J Balvin, Juanes, Karol G, Maluma, and Ed Sheeran, and winning four Latin GRAMMY awards by the age of 25. As his career grew, Mosty began collecting gear that would help shape the sound of reggaeton that he has become known for. In this conversation, he takes us inside his studio for a look at the tools he uses and loves, with one name appearing several times: Dangerous Music.
Read on to find out why Mosty loves Dangerous Music’s compressor, converter, monitor controller, and summing mixer; his overall goal when mixing a song; and what new projects he's working on right now.
Tell us a bit about your studio and what you've been working on lately that you've enjoyed.
I have a hybrid setup at my studio. I try to work with certain sounds when I'm at the studio, and then, when I'm traveling, I try to replicate my chains using plug-ins, but there is one piece of gear that I have here that I can't replicate in any way, and that is the Dangerous Music COMPRESSOR; it’s very hard to find something that works like it.
Basically, what I have here is an Apogee Symphony with 32 I/O, going into the SSL Sigma, and after that I go through different processors. I have some vintage gear as well: a Quad Eight Console EQ that I got from Rafa Sardina, the Dangerous Music BAX EQ, then the Dangerous COMPRESSOR, innerTUBE Audio’s Atomic Squeezebox, and then conversion through the Crane Song HEDD Quantum converter – that is primarily my analog chain.
I’ve been working on a project that I’ve got a lot of good comments on – an album called AFROROCKSTAR by an artist called Hamilton from Cartagena, Colombia. It was his first album, and I was trying to give him something different because I felt like Latin Afrobeat producers were doing the same repetitive things, so for his tracks, I tried to change the way it sounded.
I know a lot of the technical aspects of mixing from a physics and maths perspective, but I don't really think about it when I’m mixing; I'm just focused on the emotion, and I like to create a very open sound with my chains.
I’m also always thinking about psychoacoustics and compression – those are two concepts that I’m always exploring. The frequencies and the movement of the sound change people’s perception; you can give them something very uncompressed that's a little more melancholic or something more compressed, and it can feel more energetic; the movement of the compressor lets the music breathe and also helps understand silence, which is probably the most important part of the track. That’s where you understand groove – it’s like contrast, like yin-yang, or however you want to describe it.
Tell us about your early Dangerous Music purchases.
Early in my life, a friend of mine distributed Dangerous Music here in Colombia. He passed away around six years ago, but he was the first guy that gave me the opportunity to try different things by lending me pieces of gear – he sent me the BAX EQ, and that converted me – so when I started with Dangerous Music, the first thing was curiosity.
I have the classic D-BOX Studio Monitor, the one with the silver face. I was listening to artists I liked and mixing the first J Balvin album, La Familia, at the time. I bought the D-BOX and used it with one of the early Apollo interfaces – this was at the starting point of a new era of music, in which we now have a lot of evolution. At the time, I didn't understand converters too much, but when I went through the D-BOX, it felt different – it was better and easier to mix.
I still felt like my sound wasn't there yet, though. I was mixing an album for Juanes with Josh Gudwin, and I asked him, “What do you think about taking a summing box and trying to do a hybrid setup?” so then I got the Dangerous Music 2-BUS LT.
With the D-BOX, what was interesting for me was that I was using the D-BOX for summing at the time, going to a compressor, but also, I was just mixing drums separately in the D-BOX – the drums and bass in the D-BOX, then a compressor, then it was going to one channel of the 2-BUS LT, and everything else was music, effects, and things, and for real, I could feel the separation was special.
How did the Dangerous COMPRESSOR become part of your collection?
Compression was a mystery to me when I first got it, but I gave the Dangerous COMPRESSOR a chance and ordered it along with the BAX EQ, whose sound I already knew. The compressor made a huge difference and was the piece that had the most impact on my sound. Also, the beautiful thing about this compressor is that it helps me understand how I should compress in the box when I'm not with it.
I started thinking about how things should sound and tried to replicate the sound I was getting from the Dangerous COMPRESSOR with every compressor I was using, and, of course, it was not even close. When I opened a session, I would say to myself, “Let's do this in the box; I'm going to do this fast.” But it took me more time to get to the sound I wanted to achieve by doing it only in the box. The dynamics and the way the transients kick on the compressor are amazing – it’s hard but never snappy.
I have a specific way of listening – I describe it as granular – so I hear little particles moving; that's the way I understand it. My ear memory has also improved, so when somebody plays me a mix someone else did, I need to listen to it only once or twice, and then I can go to my session and understand how it should sound without going back and forth; I remember the tonality and the frequencies that were present. It's a very interesting thing that Dangerous Music opened up for me through the path of analog gear; I think my ears have been evolving using the gear from Dangerous Music.
My monitor controller is the D-BOX, so I’m familiar with the D/A conversion from Dangerous, which is the one I enjoy the most for mixing, so it's the different aspects of Dangerous Music that create the blend between everything else I have.
My compressor settings are pretty much always the same – I use the classic Dr. Dre settings: manual attack and release, and the release, which is the most important to me, is 30 ms, which is Dr. Dre time! I have the ratio at 2:1 for very light compression, always stereo, and a soft knee. I don't use Smart Dynamics for mastering because sometimes it tames the transients too much; I use Sibilant Boost and Bass Cut, but no External Sidechain.
Like every engineer, I do try different things. I use it like a dual compressor sometimes – first, for taming, kind of like a Tube-Tech with a very quick catch – and then with a slower release so it gets more flow into the recording.
My concept, while mixing, and what I like about the Dangerous COMPRESSOR, is that I like songs to breathe all the time. I don't enjoy overcompression… compressors are designed to smash, but it doesn't mean you have to smash them. [Laughs]
What are your thoughts on the CONVERT AD+?
Overall, I realized that converters made the biggest difference in my sound. The converter makes gear better because the gear is receiving a signal with more content to work with. Once I started listening to converters like the AD+, I thought, ‘Okay, there's something new here’.
When I went through the AD+ directly into Pro Tools, it definitely helped me get the cleanest vocal I’ve ever recorded; there's something cool on the converter – it's very airy, but not harmonically; it's more like filtering. In the conversion step, there’s a very clean management of the oversampling and frequencies that can lead to artifacts. When you're in 44.1 kHz, you hear the sound like it's working at 88.2 kHz or higher, even, like 96 kHz, because of the crystal clarity it gives in the top end.
For the low end, it is more dramatic because the transients feel like the analog and digital world together, but in one piece. You need to understand the principles of conversion to understand what you can achieve with the converter, and, at the end of the day, it's about taste.
Let’s take an example where you have recorded with different converters, and you apply a Pultec EQ plug-in in the box. If I push the Pultec at 16 kHz, with the Avid HD I/O, I'm going to raise noise (that’s what I hear); on the Symphony, I'm going to raise crispness (a lot of particles). When you get to the HEDD Quantum, you're going to elevate harmonics, but when you use the AD+, you're going to feel controlled air. It's about different tastes; you can choose whatever you want, but that's the way I can describe it.
I would like to have different converters for different genres, so I have what feels like the whole retina display from Apple – every color you can find. It’s like I'm blending things in the kitchen – sometimes you use Himalayan salt, sometimes you use sea salt, to taste.
Also, sometimes I don't want to use the whole chain; sometimes I want to use two compressors, but I don't want to mess with each one, like turning off the bypass. My entire life I’ve looked at the Dangerous Music LIAISON because I have a lot of cables here and the patchbay can be stressful; sometimes cables start to fail, and one channel is louder than the other.
I would love to add the LIAISON to the mix, because then I can put on the Crane Song STC-8 compressor, for example, and compare it to the Dangerous COMPRESSOR and decide which song needs which compressor. The Dangerous is perfect for everything right now, but let’s say I have the tonality of blue, and I want either a sky blue or a dark blue; I don’t want to have to stick with any one without having the chance to move to the other one and see what it brings to the song.
At the end of the day, I'm working in music and music needs to be felt in every direction; you give your energy to the song, and the song gives you energy. That's the process for me – it's like the electricity that goes through the cables has way more emotion than super high-end machine computing.
How does the Dangerous Music gear impact your workflow?
The simplest answer is that it taught me how to listen; that's the most important thing for me before starting to talk about workflow even. Then, when you think about workflow, Dangerous Music has – I'm just guessing – it has a mission of connecting the digital world to the analog world in the simplest way, for people to enjoy it and not feel overwhelmed with everything that it involves.
The pieces are very compact and simple to use – not too many buttons, not too many things on the gear that you don't know how to use or what they are for – every button or knob that you move, you can hear; it's specifically placed there for a perceptual or functional reason, it’s not like a happy accident, which is cool.
It gives you control over your emotions as a mixer because sometimes you just get lost in the gear, or the gear starts to fail, and it’s frustrating, so you start feeling emotion that doesn't allow you to do your job. For example, I love the sound of the tube compressor that I have, but I hate that I need to change the tubes – it should stay the same forever. [Laughs]
My D-BOX came to me around 2013, and I'm still using it as my monitor system. The only thing I had to do was replace the volume knob, and I did it myself. I just opened a unit to solder it, and it worked! It’s probably not the cleanest job, but I did it, and it’s still working – it's like a rock.
So for me, workflow is impacted by the simple things – the easier you can get to something, it’s also the most creative way for you because you can just free up your mind to think about things like ‘What if I do this or that? What if I change one thing?’ Those possibilities are creative. But when you start thinking, ‘Okay, I need to unplug this cable,’ ‘Is this the right cable? ‘Is it going to the right patch?’ that is overwhelming. If you have a huge studio, with runners and things, you can call a technician, and they can do that for you, but that workflow is meant for old studios, and even they don't work the same anymore.
The new world and this workflow was visualized by Dangerous Music for a long time, and now it's happening. A lot of the people that love to mix, when they think about a system they can have for summing, the first thing they get is the 2-BUS LT or the SPL MixDream, which is a very common unit also. I see Dangerous Music everywhere, like the monitor control or the BAX EQ, for example. There’s been a transformation in this era, especially after the pandemic, and it’s evolving.
It’s a very stable brand. I don't think there’s that much marketing; the marketing is the gear itself, working well. People ask, “Is the gear working good?” And the answer is always “Yeah!” It’s not damaged, and it’s not failing.
I'm collecting pieces, and I have the D-BOX, the 2-BUS LT, the Dangerous COMPRESSOR, and the BAX EQ working right now. I wish I had more, but we don't have more yet. [Laughs]
Is there something exciting that you're working on that you are able to tell us about?
There’s my mixing career that I’ve been doing for so long, and the other one is the production side that I don’t put out too much, but right now it's taking over the mixing side because I've been producing a lot of music recently. And then, I'm also working on my own private teaching platform.
There’s a very special project I’m working on with a new artist from Puerto Rico called Jotaerre. Warner Music is putting a lot of resources into that project, and I'm also going to mix the next album from Hamilton.
It’s exciting to me to work with new artists and get them to a certain level because I have this concept: you can have the greatest song of all time, but to compete, you have to level up the sound you've got. You’ve heard songs that are not as good as some other songs, but if they sound better, people will listen to them more because of psychoacoustics; people hear the difference, so we try to understand the emotion that an artist has in a song and work hard on translating those ideas to the public.
