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Mixing session with Koen Heldens (Sunday, 19 December , 2021)
This evening the students of Sound Education Nederland were provided with an online mixing session by Koen Heldens. He was born in Venray (Nethernalds) but moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19. Currently, he works in Miame.
Koen Heldens is an international multi-award winning and multi-diamond selling mixing and stem-mastering engineer. Heldens caught the music bug at an early age and began attending music school at the tender age of six. During his teenage years Heldens soaked up a variety of experiences in music production and studio engineering, and radio and live sound before finding his true passion for mixing music.
In Los Angeles he worked with legendary producers Timbaland, Scott Storch and Dr. Dre. He also worked with legendary artists including Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Rick Ross. Most notably he is known for his work with XXXTentacion – including his Guinness World Record, RIAA Diamond (10x Platinum) selling, No. 1 single “SAD!”.
In his begin period, Koen used the HS5/HS8 to make his mixes. Currently, he switches between headphones and monitors (with SoundID) for mixing. He doesn’t think that Pro Tools is a necessity but it is still a standard in most studios. However, he likes ‘Loud and Proud’. Interestingly enough, for part of his stems he uses always the same plugin with the same settings. Although this speeds up the mixing, this is generally adviced against since every stem (and song) is unique. But it provides another example that every mix engineer has his/her own aproach. Like many other mixing engineers he doesn’t use (a lot of) analog gear anymore since this is impossible if you have to many mixes every year. The problem is the recall of the settings of the analog outboard gear. He tries to avoid having a ‘sound’ but more thinks about what a particular production needs.
You can find Koen also on YouTube with several interesting videos. For example:
Thanks, Koen.
