Award-winning engineer Jake Jackson deconstructs his mix of a brooding musical cue by Sheridan Tongue for the BBC’s long-running crime drama.
With the rise of the modern home studio, composers are expected to do more and more in the box, and often from their own small, privately owned, studios. No matter what technical tools a composer uses, it’s still beneficial to have a second pair of ears on a project. This is where the mix engineer comes in. In response to dwindling production budgets, Jake Jackson set up his ‘Mix At Yours’ service. Instead of sending your music off to a mix engineer in another studio and receiving a mixed file, Jake swoops into your home studio to mix your music. Not only do you save money, but this also let’s you make post-mix adjustments should there be an inevitable 11th-hour change to the video.
It’s a formula that seems to be working for Jake, with an amazing list of credits ranging from feature films like Cinderella, Under The Skin and Foxcatcher, through to TV shows like Doctor Who and critically acclaimed games such as Alien: Isolation.
In this feature, we deconstruct a musical cue from the BBC's Silent Witness, part by part. Along the way, we find out about Jake’s approach, learning about combining reverbs, blending real with sampled instruments and also that ‘solo’ isn’t such a dirty word after all.