I’m Björgvin Benediktsson. I’m the author of the #1 Amazon best-seller, Step By Step Mixing: How to Create Great Mixes Using Only 5 Plug-ins, the creator of the Audio Issues EQ plug-in, and the founder of Audio Issues. I’m also a venture advisor for the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona.
I’m an audio engineer turned writer, and I’m on a mission to help musicians overcome their imposter syndrome, create great-sounding music, and release their work.
I’ve worked as a live sound engineer, a broadcast recording engineer, a professional touring musician, a freelance mixing and mastering engineer, and an audio educator in both Iceland and the United States.
Since 2009, I’ve been helping people like you turn your rough recordings into finished records you can be proud to release. If you want to create radio-ready and release-worthy music that jumps from the speakers, you’re in the right place. My dream is for you to email me out of the blue one day and tell me you won an award for your music because I helped you make it sound successful.
Thousands of home studio producers like yourself have learned from my training, and my work has been featured in publications such as MusicTech magazine, Audiotuts+, The Pro Audio Files, and Recording Revolution, to name a few.
Quick vocal effect tip for you today that I used on a mix last week. The artists referenced the song “The Mother” by Brandi Carlile and the vocals have a spacious delay sound that sits firmly in the background so I tried to emulate that. A simple reverb wouldn’t really work because it felt like...
Gary Ross wrote and directed the movie Ocean’s 8. It’s the Ocean’s movie with eight strong female leads, and definitely worth the watch. In 1994 he wrote the screenplay to Lassie, arguably one of our culture’s most cherished canine heroines. You don’t know where people will end up. You’re only meeting them at a point...
If you live in a city that’s been invaded by motorized scooters, you know the amount of controversy these things bring with them. One side hates them because they don’t like change and want things to stay the same. They think the scooters clutter up the streets and cause accidents and mayhem. Obviously, much of...
Live sound. The dream. The thrill. The drama. The agony. The rush. It’s all there. And when a great mix comes together at the last minute and the crowd goes wild… It’s hard to want to be anywhere else. Amazing. It’s where I got started with audio and I always look back fondly at the...
I gave an Audio Issues Insider some quick feedback over the weekend that made his mix a lot better. One of the main tips I gave him for adding more punch to his drums was to add some simple parallel compression to the drum bus. Here’s what he had to say after he tested it...
Inefficiency just means: “this system is broken and we need a better one.” It means that you have things in the way, or too many steps, to get to the final result. Everything that stands between you and the work is friction. If you identify and eliminate those barriers, you increase your productivity and finish...
I made brownies. The recipe said to cook for 22 – 25 minutes. A minute can make a big difference, but I started with 22 minutes to get a reference point. They were delicious, naturally. The next week I made brownies again. We discovered that making thin brownies makes them better, so we craved them...
I taught a Music Accelerator to about 25 students this week as a part of the TENWEST Impact Festival. I am very grateful for the opportunity to share my experience and story to help musicians make a bigger impact with their music career. One of the big take-aways the attendees told me was my “Good...
One of my favorite plug-ins lately has been the Scheps Omni channel strip from Waves. As you know if you’ve followed me for a while, I think you can make great mixes if you only know how to use five plug-ins: EQ Compression Reverb Delay Saturation The Scheps Omni Channel has three of them, which...
Got this comment from an Insiders member this weekend: I’ve had several “ah-ha” moments since becoming a member of Audio Issues Insiders. This week’s Feedback Friday may have provided the biggest one yet. I always struggle to get my guitars and vocals to fit together. The idea of placing an EQ cut between 900 and...