Stan Greenewith FX Collection
LA-based Stan Greene knows what he wants when engineering a mix. But for him, part of the challenge - and privilege - of being an engineer is being trusted to elevate someone else’s art to the next level.
Stan kindly invited us to sit in on a mixing session with singer-songwriter Spencer Sutherland and producer Keaton Stromberg to see how FX Collection helps him deliver platinum-worthy results.
Time well spent
Working with some of the biggest talents in the business undoubtedly has its fair share of challenges. For Stan Greene, it’s just another day in the office. His passion for his craft, his experience and education in the field, and his deep knowledge and familiarity with the tools he uses means that he knows how to make a good mix into a great one.
Since kick-starting his career at the prestigious Larrabee Recording Studios in Hollywood, Stan has worked with the likes of Big Sean, Rihanna, Saweetie, Jaden Smith, and many more, picking up multiple platinum certifications along the way. Alongside mixing and mastering, he’s the co-founder of Arketek, a music management and A&R company. When it comes to nurturing talent and creativity, he’s not afraid to put the hours in.
Trust your vision
As a mix engineer, the notion that you’re tasked with taking someone else’s creative output and altering/enhancing it can be daunting. For Greene, it’s also a source of pride and inspiration that gives him the drive to do better, to push harder.
The fact that there are these super-talented people - writers, producers, artists - who are entrusting you with their baby… they’ve spent weeks, months, years with these songs and they’re like ‘hey, I basically choose you to help me take this to the finish line.’ They trust your ideas and your vision. I’m very very lucky that I’m able to do that every single day.
He notes that one of the turning points in his career was being handed a track produced by a childhood hero. That producer was Pharrell, and the track was a project featuring Big Sean - and that’s when it became real.
Mixing for someone that you looked up to creatively and admire… I literally had a session with his stems and his files, and I’m like mixing his song and trying to make it sound better. It was a crazy surreal moment from being a fan to helping him craft his sound.
We live and work in a time of absolute flexibility and quick results, thanks to enormous progressions in audio technology. The ever-increasing demands of artists, audiences, and the industry as a whole mean that many producers expect their tools to deliver the goods quickly and efficiently. Stan points out that that has to be balanced with musicality - and for him, that’s where Arturia comes in.
One of the things about my workflow is I need things that just work. When I put it on an insert it has to be doing something, I don’t need to try to figure out the manual, and ‘this button doesn’t have a label’, ‘how does this work’... I don't have time for that. I gotta put it on my track and it has to help me musically in some form. Arturia does that.
On FX Collection 3
With Spencer Sutherland & Keaton Stromberg
We spent time in the studio with Greene, alongside producer Keaton Stromberg and singer-songwriter Spencer Sutherland, to see how they brought their track to life using FX Collection.
These analog pieces of hardware are already helping you mix the song when you run a signal through it. It’s doing some kind of EQ, it’s doing some kind of compression. When you put in these Arturia plugins, it's doing the exact same thing.
STAN GREENE
The cool thing about FX Collection 3 is the fact that it’s not eating into all that CPU. You can have our 80+ layers of tracks going and load those plugins in. Sometimes I bake them down but a lot of the time we’ll just leave them on and going.
KEATON STROMBERG
Favorites
The team took the time to run us through a few of their favorite effects and how they use them in their DAW workflow.
STAN GREENE
Chorus DIMENSION-D
Pull up the Advanced tab and basically automate the mix knob, so as he’s riding into the falsetto, I’m turning the mix knob up so it’s getting wider and wider… bro, that part gives me shivers every single time!
Pre V76 & Comp DIODE-609
The plugins I use the most are the Pre V76 and the Comp DIODE-609. The Comp DIODE-609 is something I put on my master bus all the time, and when you put it on it does something to the sound. It just does something.
Pre 1973
As you can see, I have it on Type 2… when you click on Type 2 you can hear it’s kind of boosting around 20-30Hz, so if you want more of a punchy character to your sound, you wanna do Type 2.
KEATON STROMBERG
Comp TUBE-STA
I’ll usually reach for the Comp TUBE-STA. It's got the two knobs retro style, and usually it’s shaving off about 3dB if that, then bringing a little of the gain back in just to control and push that vocal a little bit more.
Comp FET-76
I’ll probably reach for another compressor, usually something a little bit more attack-heavy. Maybe an 1176, where again I’m probably only taking off 3-4dB on those peak transients. A lot of it is all of these processes stacking up, getting that compression to work properly.
Dist TUBE-CULTURE
The magic happens I think when you reach for a saturation at the end. The last thing in my chain is the Dist TUBE-CULTURE which is doing some saturation. It adds a little bit of that warmth, that analog feel, a nice fatness to the vocal.
A better mix, faster
The combination of FX Collection’s instantly-gratifying sounds and features with its inherent musicality fits Stan Greene’s award-winning workflow like a glove. Seeing Stan, Keaton, and Spencer in their element, breathing new life into their project, offered us a unique and humbling insight into what these effects are truly capable of in the hands of creatives.
When you hear engineers say ‘for some reason when I mix through analog, my mix comes together faster’ - that’s exactly what these Arturia plugins are doing. They’re helping you get to a better mix, faster.
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