Top 5: Davey Badiuk

This is by far my favourite mixer. I think this model is from the early 1990s and was originally paired with some cassette recorder. Because I grew up in the industry with computers and having to work so much in the box, I only ever get outside of it when I’m wanting to colour something in a way that I can’t achieve in the computer. There’s a consistently growing number of plug-ins out there that try to do this, but when I’m really trying to fuck things up in a way that is convincingly lo-fi, or add colour that isn’t exactly pretty, I find it so inspiring to just run it through some weird piece of gear in my ever-growing collection.

My biggest inspirations are engineers such as Dave Fridmann (MGMT, The Flaming Lips) who have walls and walls of weird stuff and I just absolutely love that. I find so much inspiration from it. So, the M-208 is a killer mixer for that kind of thing. I have two of them, each with eight channels, and I use both for doing any kind of analogue summing. The way I do this is to either mix the 16 channels coming out of my Foster B-16 reel-to-reel, or to just colour things right out of the box. The way I have my rig set up, allows me to easily patch in and out of the board or tape, straight from the computer. And doing this gives me the ultimate ‘bedroomy’ colour chain, which I love so much.

One piece of gear that absolutely had to make this list is my LCD-5s. I love being on the road and do a ton of travel for work, as I have clients all over the world, from New York to the Bahamas to Japan. And because of this, I’ve put a ton of energy over the years into finding a way to be able to get professional sounding mixes on headphones. It was always a struggle until I got a pair of Audeze headphones. The LCD-5s are its current flagship model and you really have to hear them to realise what they have to offer. It’s really mind-blowing how deep the sub frequencies seem to reach. This is something I’ve found difficult to work around on headphones. The low end is always either too exaggerated or non-existent. Yet these headphones seem to get it just right without any fatiguing to my ears at all. They also have a really articulated high-end. They give this feeling of a very grand soundstage which makes listening so much fun. I use them with my RME ADI-2 Pro headphone amp and travel with those as both fit in a backpack. While being out on the road, I’ve been able to deliver many major labels mixes this way!

The tool I always use to compare what I’m working on with reference mixes is the Metric A/B. It’s in every single one of my sessions, at the end of my master chain. It’s extremely helpful to make sure, loudness-wise and dynamically, all my mixes are feeling competitive. A lot of guys will throw reference mixes into audio tracks in their session, which is great, but I find using plug-ins like this just that much more efficient. I will often bring in previous versions of a mix I’ve done to compare and make sure any comments are addressed and that the mix is improving. It also has many useful meters too, along with a loudness match button, which scans whatever you’re referencing and plays it back at the same volume as your mix. This is really useful as it will make sure that I’m not fooled in thinking that something is better just because it is louder.