Tell us a little about your background and how your interest in music began.
I am a classically trained French horn player. Born in a small town in eastern Belgium, I started playing that instrument in the local wind band at the age of nine. This orchestra performed at a remarkable level, so I got to know what it means to make good music in a semi-professional ensemble. I then got diploma’s in French horn, solfeggio and chamber music at various music academies in Belgium. From there, I started playing in a brass quartet with three fellow students and still now, 30 years later, we regularly perform with this ensemble – which is a great addition to my actual tonmeister profession. Being an active chamber musician next to my day job as a classical producer is both challenging and rewarding – and something that always reminds me how it feels to be on the “other side” of the microphone.

How come you ended up behind the console and what drew you towards engineering/mixing?
Towards the end of my school career when I had to decide what to do with my further life, I wanted to continue making music professionally but not as a musician or teacher (since there weren’t a lot of job opportunities for a French horn player in Belgium at that time). A good friend of mine then told me about the Sound Engineering degree in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was a five-year tonmeister education which didn’t and still doesn’t exist in Belgium. I managed to get a place in the program and eventually became one of Germany’s youngest tonmeisters. After finishing my studies, I wanted to return to my home country to work there and got a job at Galaxy Studios. Here I worked my way up during more than 17 years – from assistant engineer to chief scoring engineer and head of music department. In 2020 I started my own company, High-Score Recording and Mixing Services, which allows me to record music all over Europe and mix it in my own immersive mixing stage in eastern Belgium.

What is the most common challenge mixing a full orchestra? Do you have any general tips, tricks or workarounds to share?
That’s hard to describe in one or two sentences… It always depends on the purpose of the recording. If it is for a classical record, you want to reproduce the original sound as naturally as possible, which is quite difficult considering the size and depth of an orchestra – and the huge dynamic range between a very soft flute solo and a massive tutti-fortissimo. In stereo, all these parameters have to be squeezed into just two channels, so a realistic sound is quite hard to realize. 5.1 surround makes much easier, and in immersive sound with three-dimensional speaker placement or binaural headphone technology, the sound is so realistic that you might believe you are in the same room as the musicians! If you record and mix music for a film, there are different rules that apply, you don’t really want the orchestra to appear as such – as an ensemble of musicians performing on a stage in front of you. Precise localization of the instruments is not necessary, on the contrary, it’s unwanted. In fact, the orchestra should not be recognized as such, but the music has to be an integral part of the movie, steering the audience’s emotions the way the film director intended it. To achieve that emotional result, you might need to make choices in balance and panning that don’t reflect a natural situation. Sometimes you need to make a solo instrument sound unnaturally loud, for instance, to create a certain impact on the listener. Mixing film music is actually much more creative than mixing orchestral music for a record.

You’ve come to specialize in engineering and mixing of classical music and scores. Have you always been into this type of music?
Due to my background as an orchestra musician, I’ve always been into acoustic and orchestral music. Our wind band often played arrangements of symphonic music, including a lot of film music as well. This way I already got a lot of experience during my teen years, realizing how an orchestra or acoustic music in general should sound. I also got to understand the emotional impact of 60 people making music together, which is invaluable.

What is your relation to mallets instruments like the ones you recorded for these two EKXs for EZkeys 2?
We recorded marimba, vibraphone, xylophone  and glockenspiel – all of these instruments were present in the orchestra I joined when I was nine years old. So, in a way I grew up with their sound and with the way they were integrated in a 60-piece orchestra, albeit a wind band without strings. Already back then I was impressed by the dark and powerful sound of a marimba, the aggressive tonality of a xylophone and the sometimes sweet, sometimes “painfully” clear and crispy sound of a glockenspiel. And I always loved the warm and mellow sound of a vibraphone played with a motor and producing this lovely vibrato that is so unique amongst all the orchestral percussion instruments. You could say: I enjoy these mallet instruments very much and I highly appreciate the colors they add to all the different types of music they are being used in. They are useful and essential in so many different genres. It is fantastic that Toontrack has implemented them into their EZkeys 2 software.

Listening back to the finished product, what are your thoughts?
I think we did a great job! I hear exactly the sound that I tried to capture in the recording room and it perfectly translates all the details we were aiming to capture. By recording all the instruments in a “wet” room with quite some reverb as well as in a “dry” room that only has a very short decay time, we were able to show the instruments’ most intimate sonority at the same time as their impact as distant percussion instruments in a big symphonic orchestra – placed at dozens of metres away from the listener. The different presets are a great tool for all kinds of producers, composers and musicians. In one sentence: I am very happy with it!