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.

“…if you ask about my relationship with this instrument – it is a big love story!”

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.

The grand piano is an iconic and sometimes daunting instrument to capture. What is your relationship to recording this colossal-sounding thing and what have you learned over the years?
This particular instrument has accompanied my career as a tonmeister since the very beginning. A Steinway Model D is generally a fantastic piano, but this very one is one of a kind, handpicked out of a range of the same model at the factory in Hamburg back in 1992. I have recorded this piano for hundreds of projects, be it solo piano records, chamber music, pop, jazz, world music, film scores, piano concertos or large orchestral recordings. Over more than two decades I have learned to “master the beast” for any kind of production, and we always managed to get the right sound out of this – as you said – “colossal-sounding thing.” in fact, you can manipulate a lot of factors to make this particular instrument fit a specific project – the instrument itself, the room and its acoustics, the microphones, the positioning of the instrument – all these parameters are working together when recording a grand piano. And yes, if need be, I can even make this massive instrument sound intimate and small, yet touching and emotional. The next day, it might sound massive and big again for a Rachmaninov piano concerto. That’s the big advantage of a great instrument in a great room. So if you ask about my relationship with this instrument – it is a big love story!

Listening back to the finished product, what are your thoughts?
Of course you’re expecting me to tell you that I think we all did a great job, but I really mean it. As I said before, the challenge of recording a piano is mainly to make the sound fit all the different genres of music, and the different purposes of any possible project it will be used in. And by capturing the sound of this amazing instrument with first class microphones of all kinds (tube mics, condenser mics, ribbons) at different positions and distances from the instrument, I think we can provide solutions for any EZkeys 2 user, whether they’d want an orchestral piano sound for a film music track or an intimate close-miked sound for a singer-songwriter album. This very unique instrument is now at the disposal of every composer and producer and they’re able to add a touch of exclusivity and emotion coming from a fantastic thing, captured in the best of circumstances.