The Mixing Style of Chris Lord-Alge

The Mixing Style of Chris Lord-Alge

The Mixing Style of Chris Lord-Alge

Chris Lord-Alge is an American mixing engineer who gained notoriety in the ’80s mixing artists such as James Brown, Prince and Madonna. He is currently one of the most sought-after mixing engineers in the industry, mainly working on pop and rock music artists.

Chris Lord-Alge in the studio

His success is in part due to his signature mixing sound, which is often hyper-real sounding and very polished. He makes judicious use of dynamic range compression in his mixes, as evidenced by the multitude of outboard compressors in his studio pictured above. His use of compression allows him to limit the dynamic range of each individual element in the mix whether it be the kick drum or the bass guitar, this provides a very ‘tight’ and controlled sound, where every instrument can be heard and slots in place within the arrangement. He often favours the Universal Audio 1176 and LA3A compressors when mixing, so much so that he had his hardware versions cloned and turned into a popular digital plugin for Waves including his preset settings for different instruments, allowing other users to emulate his style of compression in their mixes.

The CLA 76 plugin by Waves

Another important part of Chris’s mixing is his use of the SSL 4000 Mixing Console, particularly the EQ of the channel strip.

He is known for having a lot of high-end frequencies in his mixes, particularly pushing the frequency 8k to add a ‘sheen’ to elements such as the vocals, guitars and cymbals. He typically does his compression after the EQ, which allows the compression to clamp down on these boosted frequencies, this combination of EQ and compression creates a very ‘radio friendly’ sound, as his mixes translate well to radio where the majority of people listening are not listening on the full range high-quality speakers, therefore the tight and bright sounding mixes cut through the speakers.

Like his compressors, this channel strip was also cloned and turned into a popularly used plugin.

A crucial if controversial component of Chris’s mixing sound is the tightly edited musical performances, with pitch-corrected vocals, tightly edited drums, the use of drum samples. Chris is said to not want to work on a mix until the music has been tightly edited and cleaned up however Chris is not always responsible for this, sometimes it’s the producer or the assistant engineer who is responsible for this heavily edited style.

Regardless of the musical merits of having such a ‘perfect’ sounding musical performance, it does help contribute to his signature tight and polished mixing style that is one of most popular on the radio today.

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