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Hi, I'm Andrew Scheps. I'm a mixer, producer, engineer. I've been very lucky to be in the
right place at the right time on a lot of records. I've managed to win Grammys for my
work on Adele's "21" and Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Stadium Arcadium," which I'm awfully proud
of. This studio's called Punkerpad West, and now my standard credit is "Mixed by Andrew
Scheps at Punkerpad West, Van Nuys, California."
As we go down the list of these records they're all very different. I'm always looking for
the kind of power and explosion that you would get from a punk track. So, Adele, I sent the
mixes to Adele when we finished. She's like here's an email address, send them to Adele.
Then, the album came out and four of the mixes were on there. You can never know that something
is going to be as successful as that.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, yeah. I mean I've been really lucky. I've worked on the last three
records with them.
Mixing Jay-Z "99 Problems," I wasn't aware at all of how huge that song was. I had no
idea. But, as it turns out, for my kids that's the one where their friends finally think
that their dad's cool.
I'm a big believer in the balance should work, especially if I'm mixing something that was
cut with live musicians. So, I'm always trying to get back to that point where it sounds
like the record but works like a rough mix.
Behind me is one of my magnificent Neve 8068 desks. These are obviously a huge part of
everything I do with the fine faders automation. Then, there is the behemoth rack of outboard
gear.
EQ wise, the Neve is obviously pretty genius. If I had to pick one EQ it would be a 1073.
The 1073 is probably the classic mic-free and EQ in recording history.
The plugin we've done I think captures the equalization really, really well. It sounds
just like a 1073 to me. We've had the added bonus of finding a little known band, a 10K
midrange band, that was used on the 1078. We also spent a lot of time making sure that
it broke the way a 1073 would break. If you push it hard you get distortion and does that
distortion sound right? We spent a lot of time making that distortion correct and useful.
Then, also, brought in one element of a lot of the stereo processing plug-ins now where
if you use a stereo version of the 1073 you can decide to EQ mid-side as opposed to left
right which works into a lot of people's work flows these days who do a lot of mid-side
processing and not to have to decide the EQ before you encode or after you decode. You
can actually put it in as part of the process.
I think that we've done a pretty good job of making this plug-in act the way I'm used
to when I reach for the hardware.
