Simon Hanhart (Asia, Marillion, David Bowie)
Simon Hanhart is a music producer, mixer, and engineer based in London. Starting as an assistant engineer at Marquee Studios, Hanhart worked with leading producers such as Mutt Lange and Gus Dudgeon. Since then, he has worked with a diverse array of acts including Asia, Marillion, David Bowie, and Yngwie Malmsteen. Hanhart also co-produced, engineered, and mixed Perfect Day, one of the best-selling UK singles of all time.
Tell us about your current studio setup.
I use Pro Tools Ultimate HDX in my home studio. I’m running it on a pimped-up Mac Pro. I do very little recording there, mostly mixing and post-production, and some mastering. Icdon’t use a desk. My interfaces are Focusrite RedNet HD32R and A8R. I have a few bits of choice analog equipment: Summit, Neve, Focusrite, Smart, a vintage Roland Dimension D.
Plug-ins wise I have all the usual suspects including Waves, Soundtoys, Eventide, Cranesong, Slate, AltiVerb, iZotope, and some Plugin Alliance stuff.
As for go-to plugins: the Massenburg MDW EQ and Waves F6 for Dynamic EQ I like. I find I use the Waves API 2500 compressor quite a bit. I like the Valhalla reverbs and delays and Soundtoys always seems to deliver something worthwhile. But I use a wide range of plug-ins depending on what’s needed.
For monitoring, I use KRK V8, NS10m with a Quad 520f amp, and Avantone MixCubes. I also have a vintage Sony blaster which I love and I do a lot of low-level balancing on that.
Having worked on so many songs over the past few years, how do you stay fresh and excited about mixing music these days?
Every project offers something new and different and is a learning opportunity. As a project or mix comes together it’s impossible not to get excited.
How do you approach the mixing of a song?
For me, preparation and organisation for a mix is paramount. With more recordings being made by the inexperienced at home, I always spend as much time as needed organizing the Pro Tools session before starting to mix. When I’m balancing, I don’t want to have to stop for major problems fixing, tuning or comping of vocals or technical clean ups.
Having started my career in studios with large format consoles and analog multitrack, I tend to lay out sessions using that protocol. My mix sessions are organised into clear areas: drums together, vocals together, FX returns together, and so on.
Everything is clearly labeled and colour coded. I have a template for FX returns which I normally start with and then adjust during each mix. I do use some audio auxiliary returns for drums and real strings if they’ve been recorded, a master auxiliary for stereo bus processing, and I’ll set up bespoke auxiliary returns if needed.
But I don’t start out with everything individually grouped.
I know and trust my monitoring so I rarely take a mix away to check somewhere else, the car for instance. If needed I will occasionally use a reference track while I’m mixing.