Interview (Page 3).
Tim Brunsden: “There seems to be a lot of choices about all the detail. How do you make a decision on that, because there is so much to choose from?”
Hildebrand: “There is… the details you can dig into in an environment like Chairworks are immense and you can easily get distracted. So it is important to keep focussed on what was the sound originally, what did it intent to do and what can I make better out of it.
- Sometimes you stumble across happy accidents, where you completely change something but it sounds really cool. You obviously keep that… it happens actually quite a lot of the times that the accidents stay.
I’d like to quote Nile Rogers there, who said that when he produced, he only arranged the happy accidents between all the musicians in the room’.
When you go explore, the accidents that happen become interesting. And it is great that Badzura allows me to do that.”
TB: “It seems like a playful environment, but it has a deadline. So is there must be a trust in getting it done?”
Hildebrand: “Time is always a factor. Yet still mixing needs time. To create something exceptional, which is always my aim, simply takes time. It has to grow and there must be the trust of the producer that I go into the right direction. But why would the producer choose to work with me, if that was not the case in the first place?
I have a specific way of approaching the mix process. I don’t approach it by instrument, but by asking myself ‘what is the most important thing in the song,‘ and I work around that first. Everything else will have to be brought into the mix around that, at the right sonic point.
That can take a few hours, but once I have the setup going in the studio, all the mixes of an album usually come together faster and even better. Which often makes me want to mix the first track again I started with!”
TB: “So, what is your mixing background after all?”
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Hildebrand: “I’ve got musical history and am a musician. One of my music teachers back in Germany had a larger studio, with a lot of gear and I started working there, doing a lot of MIDI programming with strings and drum sounds, but also recording songs with bands.
Mind you that was a time when your average computer barely knew what a sample was! It was all very hands on still, which I am glad to have been part of.
So I learned about mixing those programmed sounds, that came out of a large array of samplers and sound modules, in a way that they sound as realistic and fat (!) as possible.
That kicked off my interest in the mixing process and the production of music and I decided to move to England to study sound engineering. And then I stayed…”
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