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.
EQ’ing your mix bus is a delicate process. Too little and you won’t hear a difference. Too much and you might ruin your mix. But with a sprinkle of just the right amount of Goldilocks EQ, you’ll tighten the low end and remove the mud while adding presence and brightness that makes your mix stand...
If you want to know how to eq synths and keyboards, you’re in the right place. In this video, I’ll walk you through some of the EQ presets I like to use when I’m EQ’ing synths and keys so that those tracks cut through without cluttering up the rest of your mix. Here’s the breakdown...
If you’re struggling to get your bass to cut through on small speakers, or just need a heavy low-end for your mixes, make sure you know about these EQ areas. In this video, we’ll look at the best starting points to think about when you’re EQ’ing bass. If you’d like to test out the Audio...
If you want your drums to cut through and the splashes of your cymbals to sing without adding harshness and piercing overtones, this week’s video is for you. Make sure you follow these overhead EQ starting points the next time you’re EQ’ing drums. EQ is only one of the five plug-ins I show you how...
If you’ve wanted your toms to hit harder, feel thicker, and punch through the mix, this week’s video is for you. You don’t want those tom fills to get lost in the shuffle (no pun intended?), so make sure you use these EQ tips to get them to cut through. Remember, if you’re tired of...
Next up in our EQ Starting Point series, we have the kick drum. We’ll expand on the common practices of the drum bus and try to enhance the flavor, punch, and power of the kick. We’ll cover taming the low end, cutting out boxiness, and the starting points for thump. In the next video, we’ll...
I couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. It seemed like time slowed down as she said it. “Why?” my two-year-old asked. I’d heard stories, but now that the moment was happening, I dreaded every minute of what might come. And I knew there was no coming back from it. Now I had to...
If you’d like to get rid of boxiness and boom so that you can create a punchy and powerful drum sound, watch this video. In the first part of my EQ Starting Point series I’ll walk you through some of the presets in the Audio Issues EQ so that you can make better home studio...
I went a long time without a mix template because it wasn’t a thing back in the day of live analog sound. Mixing whatever the live bands threw at me at the dark and musty music venue wasn’t unusual. Each show would be different. Each show would have random bands, each with separate instrumentation so...
Remember that movie “Multiplicity” with Micheal Keaton? It’s a movie from 1996 about an overwhelmed guy named Doug who clones himself to get more stuff done. Obviously, this is a very attractive proposition for anybody who’s got too much on their plate. Predictably, Doug’s quirky cloning experiment backfires with disastrous consequences, and although cloning might...