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Two people asked Dee Kei the same question this week, one for a school project and one just out of curiosity: how do you actually get more clients? The answer he keeps coming back to, the one he's bought copies of a book to force on his own interns, is not what most people expect. Give more. The book is The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, 122 pages, readable in a single sitting, and structured around five laws of stratospheric success presented through a simple fictional story. Dee Kei walks through the five laws, with particular focus on the Law of Value: your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. He connects this directly to the mechanics of word-of-mouth in the audio world, where there's no textbook solution to a creative problem and every recommendation is fundamentally personal. People refer who they trust, and trust is built through consistent generosity over time. But the episode goes deeper than the book. Dee Kei reads from Thinking Fast and Slow again, this time the section on money priming, which covers studies showing that people who have money on their minds, even subconsciously, are measurably less generous, more isolated, and more self-reliant to the point of not asking for help even when they need it. The practical takeaway is direct: an engineer coming from a scarcity mindset, focused on what they're owed and who's not referring them, is less likely to attract the referrals they're chasing because the people around them can feel it. Lu adds his own layer through the Ben Franklin Effect, the psychological phenomenon where asking someone for a small favor actually makes them like you more, not less, and the two connect it to how genuine curiosity and low-pressure outreach can open more doors than any pitch ever could. The episode closes on something personal. Dee Kei talks about pushing a stranger's broken-down car six blocks in sandals because their house was six blocks away. Not for credit, not to post about it. Just because it seemed like the right thing to do. And the longer argument the episode makes is that the engineers who operate from that same energy, genuinely and not performatively, are the ones who end up with a career that sustains itself without constantly having to chase it. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Lu brought a topic this week that sounds simple on the surface and gets complicated fast: gear clones. Are they worth it? Do they sound like the original? And does any of that actually matter? Dee and Lu start with the basic problem at the heart of every clone purchase — the marketing of a clone borrows the reputation of its predecessor to make the sale, which immediately creates an expectation the product may never be able to meet. Not because the clone is bad, but because the original itself is frequently impossible to replicate. The potentiometers are different. The transistors are different. Even the transformers — often cited as the defining voice of a piece of gear — are designed to be sonically transparent, meaning a significant portion of what people attribute to a unit's sound actually comes from other parts of the circuit entirely, including components that haven't been manufactured the same way in decades. From there the episode opens into something much larger: the science of how expectation shapes perception. Dee and Lu walk through the McGurk effect — the well-documented phenomenon where what you see physically overrides what you hear — and connect it directly to how engineers experience gear. Lu tells the story of doing a live show where an audience member praised the sound of two Fender amps on stage, not knowing they were essentially muted and the entire signal was coming from a Fractal Audio pedal straight to the board. He heard the amps because he saw the amps. The gear didn't produce the sound he was praising. The belief did. They also get into the sound of tape and vinyl — specifically how many of the "rules" engineers follow around these formats (mono low end, elliptical filters, tape saturation) were originally physical limitations of the format, not intentional creative decisions, and how over time those limitations became aesthetic preferences that engineers now apply by choice. Dee makes the case that the stories we tell ourselves about our tools — this is a real LA2A, this is a clone, this is a plugin, this is clean, this is warm — have more impact on how we use those tools and what we do with them than any measurable sonic difference between them. The episode closes on something practical and personal: how to actually develop your ears as an engineer, the value of learning the rules before you break them, and why understanding whether you're psychologically someone who wants to break orthodoxy or someone who needs to follow it will tell you exactly what kind of advice you should be taking — and from whom. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dee borrowed some preamps this week. Not to review them — to test them. And what he found was equal parts technical and philosophical, which is exactly the kind of episode this one turned into. He walks through his methodology in detail: running mixes through an AML ez1073, a CAPI VP28, and a Kahan Solid 4000 analog hardware unit, volume matching by perceived loudness down to 0.1 dB increments, and doing his A/B comparisons with a friend named Colin before sharing the results. The findings are candid — some of the differences were more subtle than expected, some gear behaved differently at line level than anticipated, and the process of trying to volume-match accurately enough to do a fair comparison revealed something important in itself: 0.1 dB is audible, and the louder signal will almost always win a casual A/B test, which means most people's preamp opinions are built on flawed methodology. But the episode isn't really a gear review. It's a meditation on why engineers get so emotionally attached to their equipment in the first place — and what that attachment actually costs them. Dee revisits the Jim Lil preamp video not to relitigate it, but to make a more specific critique: not of Jim Lil's conclusion, but of the people who responded to it poorly, including one well-known engineer whose defensive response said more about his ego than about the gear. Dee introduces the concept of "killing the old God to create a new one" — the way engineers who break from one belief system often just build another with equal rigidity — and connects it to Nietzsche's idea of the last man: someone so committed to safety and comfort that they've stopped being able to grow. The Buddhist thread runs parallel: the suffering that comes from clinging to beliefs, whether about analog gear, plugin choices, or anything else, isn't just philosophically costly. It closes you off to actually learning. Dee closes with the Aldous Huxley quote he's returned to before — about righteous indignation as the most delicious of moral treats — and applies it to the gear debate directly: the engineers who attacked Jim Lil most viciously weren't defending the truth. They were enjoying the fight. Don't mistake the finger for the moon. The gear is the finger. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This one started with a DM. A listener named Solomon wrote in describing something almost every engineer has felt but rarely admits to: he'd worked intensely with an artist for a year, and the day they released a new song mixed by someone else, he felt cheated on. He knew it was childish. He said so himself. He asked how Dee and Lu deal with it. What followed was one of the longer, more wide-ranging conversations the show has had — and it never really left the topic, it just kept going deeper. Dee and Lu start with the uncomfortable truth: the music industry is transactional by nature, and that's not entirely a bad thing. At higher levels especially, a degree of professional distance makes feedback easier to give and receive, keeps emotions from overriding the goals of the project, and protects both parties from the kind of over-familiarity that stifles creativity. The artists who rotate through engineers constantly — Dee floats the theory that some of them do it precisely because they know how hard they are to work with, and keeping the relationship professional gives them a way to keep going without the emotional weight. From there the episode turns into a genuine masterclass on how to actually build relationships in this industry — without networking. Dee's core position is that the number one mistake people make when trying to build a network is trying to build a network. The best relationships he's built in LA didn't start with a pitch, a session offer, or a business card. They started with two people who genuinely liked each other and found something to talk about that had nothing to do with work. He shares a story about watching a producer invite a rapper he'd never heard to make a song together — purely because they got along. No music heard. Just vibes. Lu adds the practical layer: how to check in on clients and collaborators in a way that feels genuine rather than transactional, how to use shared interests as an entry point, and why showing up as a full human being with hobbies and passions outside of audio makes you more interesting — and more memorable — than someone whose whole identity is their craft. He also closes with a point about woodworking and acoustic panel building that connects back to the episode on making things: your outside interests are not a distraction from your career. They are part of what makes people want to be around you. The episode wraps on desperation — the one energy that kills every professional relationship faster than anything else, and the one that becomes hardest to avoid when things get hard. Dee and Lu are direct about it: don't come off desperate. Not in your texts, not in your compliments, not in how often you reach out. Genuine relationships don't need to be performed. The person you're trying to keep will feel the difference. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dee Kei is building a compressor. Specifically, a 1176 Rev A blueface/silverface clone from Hairball Audio in Seattle — unsponsored, bought with his own money, and not yet finished at time of recording. That last part is intentional. He wanted to talk about the build process before the result, because the process is the point. He walks through everything: what it was like to approach a kit with no step-by-step guide (just a component list and a schematic), the soldering technique he got wrong early on and had to relearn from scratch, the diode he forgot to solder that intermittently lost power and popped, and the moment Hairball's owner Mike just shipped him a replacement part the next day, no questions asked — one of the better customer service stories the show has heard. Lu chimes in on Hairball's Lola preamp, one of the most respected and affordable DIY transformer preamp kits available, and the two get into what the DIY gear market actually represents for working engineers who want to go deeper than plug-and-play. But the episode's most interesting thread is philosophical. Dee explains exactly why he chose to build the 1176 rather than buy one — and it has nothing to do with cost savings. It's about mysticism. He makes a genuinely compelling case that the magic of vintage gear isn't really in the sound itself, it's in the sacrifice required to have it. The rarity, the maintenance, the story. And for Dee, bragging to a client about how expensive something is feels inauthentic — even Machiavellian. Building it himself gives him a different kind of authority: every part was intentional, every solder joint was his. That's a story worth telling. The episode closes with a broader point about makers: Dee didn't realize until recently that building things — keyboards, tube mics, modified espresso machines, children's books, now a compressor — is simply part of who he is. If that's part of who you are too, this episode will hit differently. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This episode almost didn't get released. Dee and Lu spent 20 to 30 minutes before recording debating whether to even touch this one. They went ahead — and it's one of the more honest, nuanced conversations the show has had about money, ego, and what engineers actually owe each other. The spark: a Facebook post from a professional musician and audio engineer who attended the same college program as Dee, publicly calling out a local arts center for posting a part-time live sound and lighting tech position at $15 to $18 an hour. The post was passionate, pointed, and signed with his full professional credentials. Dee reads it in full, along with the original job listing — which, among other things, requires Yamaha and Allen & Heath console proficiency, QLab and Dante networking experience, 48-channel show operation, set construction, and lighting design, all from one part-time hire. On its face, it sounds like an easy call. But Dee takes the opposite position — not to be contrarian, but because he thinks the framing of the argument is doing real damage to the underlying point. He walks through the math: 25 hours a week at $18 an hour is a part-time supplemental income while you build your own business on the side. He also breaks down why the moral framing of the original post — treating a low offer as an act of injustice rather than a bad offer you're free to decline — weakens a legitimate case about engineer compensation. A low offer is not an injustice. Nobody is being forced. And presenting it as one, Dee argues, is exactly the kind of righteous indignation that Aldous Huxley described as the most delicious of moral treats. From there the episode gets into the structural reason audio engineer unions are difficult to sustain: the supply of people who want these jobs vastly outpaces the demand for them, and the barrier to entry is low enough that any coordinated refusal just opens the door to the next wave of hungry beginners. Lu adds his own experience — the times he's accepted well below his rate because the artist interested him, or because the gig gave him room to experiment — and the two land on a shared position: the number you get paid is not directly equivalent to the value of the job, and fighting for higher wages without understanding that nuance means missing the point entirely. Dee closes with a message to the person directly: the argument is worth making. Clean it up. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This episode is a recap — and an expansion — of the six-hour Mixing Masterclass that Dee Kei hosted live in his LA studio. Lu was in the room. The audience brought mixes. Things got real. Now Dee and Lu bring the best of it to the podcast, including the things they didn't get to cover in person. The first and most important topic: what is the actual value of a mix engineer, and how should that determine your pricing? Dee lays out a position he holds firmly — you should never discount your rate based on stem count, never negotiate yourself down before the client even asks, and never charge by the hour for mixing. Your rate reflects the lifetime of training behind each decision, not the time it took to make it. Like Picasso sketching on a napkin, the price isn't for the five minutes — it's for everything it took to get there. Lu adds the market reality: what your price communicates before the client even hears your mix, and why charging too little signals something you don't want to signal. From there the episode moves into compression — specifically what happened in the room when Dee deliberately smashed a vocal with an 1176 in "all buttons in" mode and the mix bus with a Vertigo VCA compressor just to prove a point. The reaction in the room said everything: over-compression isn't always wrong. Rules like "don't compress more than 2-3dB" are useful frameworks until the moment the song tells you otherwise. They also get into the subjective vs. objective nature of mixing — why saying "there's no such thing as a good or bad mix" is actually incorrect, and how to think about objectivity in a field where the tools of judgment are mostly invisible. The Shohei Ohtani analogy here is one of the better ones the show has produced. The episode closes with a breakdown of how Spotify's LUFS normalization actually works — including the gating behavior that means raising your quieter sections can paradoxically lower your integrated LUFS, and why album masters and single masters should be approached as two completely separate deliverables if you want your music to hold up in playlists. A lot covered. All of it useful. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Fair warning: Dee Kei opens this one by saying he doesn't know if he's going to release it. Congratulations — you found it. This is a looser, more speculative episode than usual, and that's exactly the point. Dee brings a theory he's been sitting with: that the rise of AI tools and plugin saturation is quietly driving a resurgence in the value of analog gear — not because analog is objectively better, but because it represents something that AI fundamentally can't replicate. Humanness. Randomness. The chaos of a real circuit doing something slightly unpredictable. Lu, who has personally moved over $157,000 in analog gear sales and spent years tracking sold listings on eBay and Reverb, brings the market perspective. They get into which pieces actually hold their value (vintage preamps and compressors from the right era), which ones don't (anything mass-produced and recently released), and the old idea that buying the right gear is just another savings account you can twist the knobs on while you wait. From there the conversation opens up into some bigger territory. They talk about the current bubble of vintage mixer restoration and servicing companies popping up, what vibe coding is doing to the plugin marketplace, and how AI tools are being deployed very differently in live sound versus the studio — including a breakdown of the L-Acoustics source intelligence system and how it can achieve up to 40dB of feedback reduction in real time on a vocal channel. The episode wraps with Dee going full speculative: the Gartner hype cycle and where AI actually lands when the bubble pops, what nuclear fusion does to the cost of running AI at scale, and the two technology shifts he thinks will fundamentally change everything about how we make and experience music. It's the kind of episode that happens when two engineers with too much on their mind decide to just talk. The industry context makes it more interesting than it sounds. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Lu brought the topic this week — and it's one of the most universally felt things in audio that nobody talks about directly: the feeling of not belonging in the room. Not because you don't have the skill. Not because you don't have the credits. Just because the feeling is there, and most people let it make the decision for them. The episode opens with Lu sharing what he keeps hearing in consultation calls — talented engineers at every level passing on sessions they would have handled just fine, because they didn't feel ready. Dee and Lu are direct about it: the gap between someone who is working and someone who isn't is almost never the quality of their mixing. It's almost always confidence and forward motion. They unpack what imposter syndrome actually looks like at different stages of a career — not just at the beginning, but also at the mid-level, when asking for help or shadowing someone starts to feel embarrassing in a way that holds people back just as much. From there, Dee reads from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow — specifically the chapter on cognitive priming — and the episode gets genuinely fascinating. He walks through the Florida Effect study, where participants subconsciously primed with age-related words actually walked slower down a hallway without knowing it. Then the pencil experiment, where people forced into a smile by how they held a pencil in their teeth rated cartoons as funnier than those forced into a frown — without being aware their facial expression had changed at all. The implication is direct: acting calm and confident doesn't just make you look calm and confident to others. It statistically makes you feel calmer and more confident yourself. The conversation also takes an unexpected turn into money priming — how the mere presence of money-related imagery in your environment makes people measurably more independent, more self-reliant, and also more selfish and socially distant — and what that means for the environments engineers build and the mindsets they carry into sessions. It ends where it started: the feeling of not belonging is not evidence of not belonging. Send the email. Ask to sit in. Shadow the session. The only thing making the street look longer than it is, is you. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This episode starts with a confession: Dee Kei wants a new compressor. Specifically, he's been eyeing the Heritage Audio Grandchild 670N — a $3,000 stereo Fairchild-style compressor in a 5U rack unit that launched in late 2025. From there, the episode opens up into something much more interesting than a gear review. Dee and Lu walk through exactly what makes the original Fairchild 670 so mythologized — the tube count, the time constants, the maintenance costs that make owning one feel like buying a second car you're afraid to drive — and why Heritage Audio's approach of distilling the circuit down to four tubes in an affordable, modern form factor is either brilliant or sacrilegious, depending on who you ask. They break down what the Grandchild 670N actually has on the front panel — DC threshold, AC threshold, sidechain filters, mid-side and stereo linking, true bypass — and why $3,000 for two channels of Fairchild-esque compression is a genuinely different proposition than it was even three years ago. But the most interesting part of the episode isn't the gear. It's what happens when Dee reads from two actual peer-reviewed studies on whether listeners can hear the difference between analog and digital processing at all. The first study tested analog modeling plugins against free non-modeling alternatives across 540 participants — and found that not only did listeners show no preference for the analog mix, the majority who thought they could identify it were wrong. The second covered DAX differences using a loopback method with over 1,300 respondents. The conclusion: people largely can't tell the difference, and the majority who claimed they could were misidentifying what they heard. So why does any of this matter — and why does Dee still want the compressor? The episode lands on something more philosophical than a gear recommendation: the difference between buying hardware because you believe it's objectively better, and buying it as an act of devotion to the craft. Dee draws a sharp distinction between using gear purchases to fill a hole in your love for music versus buying from a place of already loving it deeply — and how Tony Mazzarati still sharpening techniques at his level is proof that the rabbit hole never ends for people who genuinely want to go deeper. Gear talk, research, psychology, and the irrational passion that keeps working engineers working. A lot going on in this one. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Lu's on vacation. Dee Kei is alone with a page of talking points and one of the most contested topics in audio engineering right now — and the result is one of the most thoughtful solo episodes the show has produced. This is not an episode about which AI tools Dee uses or recommends. It's about something harder to talk about: how engineers think about delegation, what happens when a probabilistic recommendation gets presented with the confidence of certainty, and why the pro-AI vs. anti-AI binary is the least useful frame anyone could bring to this conversation. Dee opens with a distinction that reframes the entire debate: there's a difference between assistance tools, delegation tools, and full replacement — and most of the discourse collapses all three into one. He argues that engineers have been using automated decision-making for decades (dynamic EQ, auto release, delay compensation, drum replacement, LUFS metering), so the real question was never whether machines should make decisions. The real question is how much of the contextual, consequential decision-making we're comfortable handing over — and whether we understand what's being lost in that handoff. From there he gets into the value engineers actually bring that no AI is accounting for: accountability, history with an artist, taste, creative confidence, the ability to hear the same note as a client and understand what they actually mean. He's direct about the economic effects coming — fewer junior engineer jobs, faster turnaround expectations, clients arriving with better rough mixes — but equally direct about what those changes don't mean: that the ceiling of professional audio work is getting any lower. The episode closes on a question Dee leaves deliberately open: if an AI assistant could eventually make every technical decision as well as a human engineer, what do we actually believe the mixer is there to do? SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Before you do anything else, pause this episode and go take the Big Five personality test at https://bigfive-test.com/ — it's free, open source, and it's the entire point. Dee Kei and Lu share their results live on the show, and if you don't know your own numbers, this episode won't hit the same. The Big Five — also called the OCEAN model — is the only personality framework that psychologists actually take seriously. Unlike Myers-Briggs and 16 Personalities, which studies have found are closer to horoscopes in predictive power, the Big Five is clinically validated, cross-cultural, and remarkably consistent over time. Dee breaks down exactly why — the difference in test-retest reliability, the Barnum Effect, and what it actually means to score on a continuous spectrum instead of being dropped into a binary personality type. From there, the episode gets into the part that's most relevant to anyone building a career in audio: what each trait actually predicts in a professional creative context. High neuroticism and how it maps to taking client feedback personally, spiraling on revisions, and undercharging to avoid confrontation. High conscientiousness and how it shows up differently in recording versus mixing workflows. The relationship between openness and musical taste — and why, despite what you might assume, personality and music preference are barely correlated at all. Then Dee and Lu read their actual results out loud — and it gets surprisingly candid. Lu's strengths and blind spots, including the gap between his external warmth and his internal sensitivity to criticism. Dee's near-perfect openness scores, his low cautiousness, and why his directness can sometimes outrun his warmth in ways people misread. The moment where the AI-generated analysis of Dee's personality is so accurate that he and Lu both go silent. It's equal parts psychology, self-awareness, and career development — wrapped in one of the more honest conversations the show has had. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What would Dee Kei and Lu actually do if they had to start their music careers completely over today — same age, same responsibilities, but zero industry knowledge, zero connections, and zero credits? That's the question at the center of this episode, and the answers get surprisingly deep. The conversation starts practical: Lu makes the case for going straight to the top and finding the most credible working professional you can — shadowing, interning, and learning how the industry actually moves before spending a dime on gear. Dee adds his own counterpoint, arguing that hands-on reps with real people, even local ones, build something an internship can't always give you early on. The two go back and forth on the internship vs. DIY debate in a way that's genuinely useful for anyone trying to figure out where to start. But the episode goes further than tactics. Dee pulls from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman to break down how self-control, delayed gratification, and the ability to focus attention are more predictive of long-term success than raw intelligence — and what that means for how you show up in the early days of your career. They also get into the fatherhood premium, what motivation looks like when the stakes are real, and why community college might be one of the most underrated networking moves for someone starting over in their 30s. The episode closes on something more philosophical: the difference between genuinely wanting a career in music and just thinking you should have one — and why knowing that distinction early could save you years of wasted energy or redirect you toward something even more sustainable. Whether you're 19 with a laptop and a dream or 35 reconsidering your path, this episode will challenge how you think about starting. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

LINK TO 20% OFF! CODE: MMPOD Link and code expires 7/21/2026 In this episode, Dee Kei and Lu sit down with Andrew Rynhard — mastering engineer, developer, and founder of Naturl Audio — for one of the most technical and candid limiter conversations the show has ever had. Naturl Audio's philosophy is "evolution, not emulation," and that mindset runs through every corner of this episode. They start at the foundation: what's the actual difference between a brick wall limiter and a high-ratio compressor, and does the distinction even matter in practice? Andrew breaks down how the AL-1 takes a fundamentally different approach — abandoning traditional lookahead design in favor of an original zero-latency circuit, and deliberately avoiding the clipping or wave-shaping stage that most limiters rely on to force a hard ceiling. The result, he explains, is a limiter that stays musical and open under pressure rather than mechanical. Dee walks through how he actually uses the AL-1 in his mix sessions — not just as a loudness tool at the end of the chain, but as a creative shaping device — and Andrew digs into the Optimizer section, which uses upward compression and intelligent makeup gain to add loudness without coloration. The episode also takes some unexpected turns. Andrew opens up about the intense online backlash surrounding the AL-1's launch — including people threatening him over a plugin — and what that toxicity says about tribalism in the audio world. Dee shares a story about being the only engineer in a room full of pros willing to admit he couldn't hear a difference, and why that kind of honest integrity might be the most underrated quality in the business. Andrew echoes it with a lesson he learned from Jiu Jitsu: ego is the single biggest blocker to actually developing your ears, and the engineers who keep growing are the ones who can say "I don't know" out loud. It wraps with a real conversation about clipping philosophy — when to reach for a clipper vs. lean on the limiter, and what Grammy-winning masters actually look like in terms of true peak and LUFS. The answer might surprise you. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

SUBSTACK LINK In this solo episode, Dee Kei reads and expands on his Substack essay — a thoughtful response to the now-viral Jim Lil preamp video that sent the audio engineering world into a frenzy. If you haven't seen it, Jim Lil tested a Neve 31105 against a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and found the audible difference between the two to be far smaller than most engineers would ever admit. The reactions were loud, emotional, and — according to Dee Kei — largely missing the point. This episode isn't really about whether preamps matter. It's about why the conversation got so heated, what that reaction reveals about how engineers attach their professional identity to their gear, and what it looks like to hold your preferences with confidence without letting them harden into ego. Dee draws on philosophy — Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming and Nishitani's idea of emptiness — not to be abstract, but to give language to something engineers feel but rarely articulate: the difference between having taste and needing your taste to be doctrine. He also calls out the logical fallacies that flooded the reaction videos, breaks down what Jim Lil's test actually proved versus what people claimed it proved, and ends with a distinction that every working engineer should sit with — the difference between a confident engineer and an egoic one. This is one of the more unique episodes in the show's catalog. Equal parts audio philosophy, industry critique, and professional development — and it's the kind of conversation the mixing world needs more of. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! ⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠ Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast’ Discord! HIRE DEE KEI HIRE LU ⁠HIRE JAMES⁠ Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media: Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixes Twitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu The Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠ The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others. This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy