So I’m about half way through the engineering program I’m enrolled in, all that’s left are essentially technical courses that I’m already more than familiar with, but the actual mixing and production courses are done. My final exam was a three parter, the big part being mix a song in 3 hours, which is an insanely short amount of time to do that. Managed to do it and walk away with an A+ average so I’m extremely happy with that. So where does that leave me? Well with lots of time to practice what I’ve learned and to start building a portfolio of what I’m capable of, which leads to this post.

A while back I joined a site called ProduceLikeAPro.com run my a gentlemen by the name of Warren Huart, he’s worked with artists like Aerosmith, Ace Frehely, The Fray, Korn, James Blunt, the list goes on and on, but he also loves sharing what he’s learned, and most importantly for me, shares ProTools sessions so that guys like me can build out our own portfolios. I’ll probably do a post on these type of sites at some point, and how and why I ended up at Warren’s, but if you’re like me and want to continue learning about audio engineering and production I would recommend his site, it is well worth the cost.

So this is one of those sessions, a song called Locked up by a young lady named London Lawhon, going into this I did not look her or the original mix of the song up ahead of time, I wanted to go into it blind (so to speak) so that the end result was completely uninfluenced. After the mix was complete and I was happy with it I went back and listened to the original for the first time with my wife. Even though it’s the same song from the same source, the two versions are very different sounding and we both much preferred my mix of it. That’s not a slight against the original, music is an extremely subjective medium, and my tastes and approach to it is that less is more and that is apparent in my mix with London’s voice, the piano and guitars being the focus of the mix. So here’s my remix and I’ll link the original video just after it:

YouTube Video and Original mix by Warren Huart can be found here.