![]() “I mixed ‘Drown’ on my KRK VXT8 monitors, which I have had for six years, and which are really good. Lancaster conducted his mix of ‘Drown’ at his Zing studio, with the same equipment as he currently owns, with one vital exception. Everyone liked my mix the best, so I got the job.” We were all given stems of a song called ‘Drown’. All I could do was to give it my best shot. I did not know at the time who the other mixers were, though I later found out that there were some big names amongst them. It was pretty much the same situation as described by Ken Andrews in the Secrets Of The Mix Engineers series of how he got the job of mixing a Paramore album. “Six months later the band contacted me for a blind mix shootout for their new album. I actually mixed the track on my Bose QC15 headphones, which are noise-cancelling, so a lot is about what you’re used to! I really tried hard to make it sound great. They recorded one song with programmed drums, and through a mutual friend I got the job of mixing it. “The first time I worked with the band was in 2014,” recalled Lancaster, “when they were contributing a song to Zane Lowe’s project to re-score the music for the movie Drive. Next on the horizon was Bring Me The Horizon. It got tons of radio play and helped propel the album to number 16 in the UK album charts. But ‘Here We Go’ came into being after Avron had finished mixing the album, and so Lancaster’s mix was used. Lancaster had produced the band’s self-titled fourth album (and co-written many of the songs, including ‘Here We Go’), which was mixed by Neal Avron. For the time being, though, he’s fully focused on serving other artists, with his break into mixing being the result of his mix of the Lower Than Atlantis hit song ‘Here We Go’. New HorizonsĪccording to Lancaster, his ultimate aim is to “build a web of clients that will eventually be strong enough to be a selling point for me as an artist”. These are Bring Me The Horizon’s highest-ever UK and US chart positions, and part of the credit obviously goes to Lancaster, who has clearly ‘made it’ as a mix engineer. ![]() Released in September, it was narrowly beaten to the UK top spot by the Stereophonics’ Keep The Village Alive, debuted at number two in the US, and reached the top spot in Australia. Lancaster attracted mainstream attention with his work on pop hit singles such as 5SOS’s ‘She Looks So Perfect’, Lower Than Atlantis’s ‘Here We Go’ and Don Broco’s ‘You Wanna Know’, and landed his first high-profile mixing job in the summer, when he was asked to mix the whole of Bring Me The Horizon’s fifth studio album, That’s The Spirit. Along the way Lancaster has co-written, engineered, mixed and/or produced recordings by acts like 5 Seconds Of Summer, Lower Than Atlantis, Don Broco, Mallory Knox, Nina Nesbitt and Little Mix. ![]() Lancaster first came to prominence in the UK music scene in 2007 as guitarist and singer of the post-hardcore band Proceed, and has spent the years since developing his production, engineering and mixing skills - with, he says, the Inside Track series as one of his most important guides (see box). Step forward 29-year old Dan Lancaster, originally from Hertfordshire, now based in London. ![]() As expected, this was an instant hit with the semi-professional home-studio owners who make up a large part of SOS’s readership what was more surprising was learning that some well-known mix engineers too have used these details to rebuild mixes done by their colleagues and try to pick up new tricks.Īnd now, appropriately in the magazine’s 30th anniversary issue, Inside Track has its first graduate. The idea was that Inside Track would offer detailed insights into the techniques and working methods employed by the world’s top mixers of high-charting recordings. When this series was introduced in 2007, one of our main goals was to address exactly this issue. It’s no longer an option for most newcomers to learn on the job, following the traditional career path from tea boy or runner to assistant engineer, so aspiring engineers are forced to look for other ways to obtain this precious know-how. The decline of the studio industry over the last 15 years or so has placed in jeopardy a rich culture of music recording and mixing expertise, built up over decades. Where does a young mix engineer learn the techniques to deliver hit rock mixes? In Dan Lancaster’s case, right here!
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