Mixing Music

This series, Perspectives On Music Production, collects detailed and experientially informed considerations of record production from a multitude of perspectives, by authors working in a wide array of academic, creative, and professional contexts. We solicit the perspectives of scholars of every disciplinary stripe, alongside recordists and recording musicians themselves, to provide a fully comprehensive analytic point-of-view on each component stage of record production. Each volume in the series thus focuses directly on a distinct aesthetic “moment” in a record’s production, from pre-production through recording (audio engineering), mixing and mastering to marketing and promotions. This first volume in the series, titled Mixing Music, focuses directly on the mixing process.

This book includes:

References and citations to existing academic works; contributors draw new conclusions from their personal research, interviews, and experience.

Models innovative methodological approaches to studying music production.

Helps specify the term “record production,” especially as it is currently used in the broader field of music production studies.

Author Biography

Russ Hepworth-Sawyer has been involved in professional audio for over two decades. Throughout his career, Russ has maintained a part time higher education role teaching and researching all things audio (www.hepworthhodgson.com). Russ is a former board member of the Music Producer’s Guild and helped form their Mastering Group. Russ currently lectures part time for York St John University and has taught extensively in higher education at institutions including Leeds College of Music, London College of Music and Rose Bruford College and has contributed sessions at Barnsley College. He has written for MusicTech Magazine, Pro Sound News Europe and Sound On Sound plus has written many titles for Focal Press/Routledge.

Dr. Jay Hodgson is Associate Professor Music at Western University, where he primarily teaches courses on songwriting and project paradigm record production. He is also one of two mastering engineers at MOTTOsound — a boutique audio services house situated in England, and now Canada. In the last few years, Dr. Hodgson has worked on records nominated for Juno Awards, which topped Beatport’s global techno and house charts, and he has contributed music for films recognized by the likes of Rolling Stone Magazine, and which screened at the United Nations General Assembly. He was awarded a Governor General’s academic medal in 2006, primarily in recognition of his research on audio recording; and his second book, Understanding Records (2010), was recently acquired by the Reading Room & Library of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.