Mick Roby

Mick Roby is a mix engineer currently based in LA and an assistant mix engineer to Jason LaRocca at Fab Factory Studios in North Hollywood. His credits include Lord of the Rings’ ‘Ring of Power’, God of War Ragnarok, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Massive Talent, and many more. Mick drops some serious gems of knowledge as we get a peek behind the curtain of mixing for film and game music.

Hey Mick, thank you for taking the time! How did you decide to pursue music? Was it early in life for you?

"Yeah, it was early for me. I grew up in Northwest Ohio, and I was super in love with music. I loved songwriting and started playing guitar when I was 9. There were other things I was interested in, like science, etc., but learning about those things never got me as excited as I was when I was learning about music. Even something as simple as learning a scale brought me tons of joy and fulfillment. That's how I knew."

Ok, so you're in Ohio, and what brings you out to LA?

"I went to college at Berklee School of Music in Boston, and I was talking to some mentors, describing what I wanted to do, which was production and engineering, and they just said, 'Yeah, you need to go to LA.' I had friends out here in LA, and the girl I was dating was here, so it was really natural. A month after I moved here, a friend was at a studio and called me and said, 'Man, you should swing by. I think they’d love to have you.' So I went to that studio, which is Fab Factory Studio in North Hollywood, and that's where I still work out of today."

Was it a natural evolution from intern to assistant mix engineer for Jason?

Well, I put in the work. I cleaned whatever toilets needed cleaning and scrubbed whatever floors needed scrubbing, and people took notice. Jason was here, liked my attitude, and asked if I wanted to do some things for him. I think the first thing I ever did for him was to get him tacos, but eventually, he started asking me to do little things here and there, like basic prep work. Over time, he noticed that I was pretty good at that, and years started going by, and all of a sudden, I was mixing with him. Just being there, hungry to work, and down for whatever got me that gig. Because there were definitely some dudes here who were like, “I don’t want to do that! Screw that shit!” And they’re not here anymore.

So if you’re a young person who wants to be an engineer, do you recommend taking that intern route?

Absolutely. Get into a studio and be a runner and do all the stupid shit they want you to do and just kill it. 'Cause I’ve learned so much more by being around these people and actually getting to see how they do it. For example, when I first got out here, I was hanging out with Dave Pensado, and I noticed that he wasn’t doing much to these tracks. He was not EQ’ing certain things; he was very gently touching these things, and he was very intentionally making processing decisions. But he was asking, "does this actually help the performance? Yeah, it might sound better solo’d, but that's not what matters." I never would have learned that at school and haven’t seen anyone talk about that on YouTube. Spending three minutes with this guy was invaluable."

With Dave's approach that you mentioned, do you feel Jason takes things on in a similar way?

Absolutely. Jason doesn't like to mess with the sound too much. It's more about enhancing and bringing it to life and bringing out the character. First of all, most composers like the sound they've chosen. Secondly, the production team, producers, and directors of the TV or film - that's what they know. So, you don't want to go around changing everything, or else a lot of people are going to be pissed. So really, what we do to enhance things and make them special is balance. The magic is in the dynamics.

What are the differences you find when mixing for an artist in pop versus mixing something intended for film or gaming?

One of the big things is how much more delicate you have to be, and how much more headroom you need to keep with mixes for film and games. When working on a pop record, everything is really big and pushed and loud and awesome. You have to do that with a score, but you have to be so much more fine with it. When you adjust a recorded orchestra with 20 mics or so, 0.1 dB makes a massive difference, so you have to be very careful where you put stuff. You also have to be really careful where you put things in relation to the audio and dialogue. Adding sound effects can make the orchestra sound tiny. Adding dialogue can make a part that was a really good lead now sound intrusive. And the one thing that still gets to me is that the EQ balance kind of changes when you hear dialogue with it. Low mids with a pop record, if you don't have those dialed in, it can sound really boomy and messy, but with orchestral music, the low mids are really the heart of the sound. And so, if you cut a lot of that out or treat it really aggressively, you will lose the sound of the instruments when you put it to dialogue.

When you are mixing a cue for film, do you have access to the sound effects and dialogue?

We usually do for a reference, but we won't be the ones delivering those files. We will pass our mix to the music editor who does further engineering, editing, and administrative stuff, and then they pass it to the dub stage, and they can just grab us on their faders and move us where we need to be in relation to the SFX and dialogue.

One of the things I noticed about the mix on Gods of War Ragnarak was how well you and Jason managed the low end on that record. Can you talk a little bit about your approach?

Absolutely. Well, it starts with good samples, and Bear McCreary has excellent samples, so that helped a ton. A lot of that score is sampled drums that we would layer on the orchestral recordings on top, but a lot of the meat comes from the samples. Part of it is very deliberate EQing, but a big part is transient designing. So, we go crazy with transient designers on drums, which gives them that pop but then can pull them back, allowing the orchestral to kind of bloom underneath. If the drums can get out of the way really quickly, that can help a ton.

So you’re saying to boost the attack and then quickly duck the sustain to get the drums out of the way?

"Yes, exactly. And with the transient designer, we are focusing on the low frequencies. So we want 20-60-120 Hz to pop quick and then pull back. Also, we very often manually edit that in so it feels big, and you feel the energy, but it gets out of the way quickly."

Do you have a transient designer you like?

"Yes, we almost exclusively use the Sonnox Oxford Envolution. No other transient designer comes even close. It does such a good job of taking the whole sound and popping it. It's got two independent controls for attack and sustain. We've also used it on a whole orchestra to pull the room out if there are quick strings and there is just too much room. It's very musical and has independent EQ controls for attack and sustain so you can really specify what you want to effect with those parameters. It just sounds so good and meaty."

"One more thing I want to add on the low end is that we do not high pass or cut out the low frequencies out of sounds unless it is completely necessary. With orchestral mixes, everything sounds so much bigger and better when you just leave those frequencies in."

Gods of War Ragnarak might be the best sounding orchestral music recording I’ve ever heard. It has a closeness and warmth that is really impactful. What do you think contributed to that?"

"I'm trying to remember because we actually started this in late 2020, and I believe it was recorded at AIR in Lyndhurst, which is obviously an incredible room. It sounds like a million bucks. It was also recorded in parts, and with this much music, you kind of have to. We had a lot of layers to work with, which really helps to make everything sound huge and important. We also put lots of love and attention to detail in it. It took a long time to mix these. We really wanted to bring that analog warmth with our processing, so a lot of the saturation we used was hardware-based plug-ins. It was also recorded by the best of engineers who really gave us a beautiful set of recordings, and we definitely couldn't have made it sound nearly as good without them. We just really wanted it to sound expensive, and Jason threw his signature thing on it. Crank that low end, baby, crank that high end, make it sound massive."

When you get the files from someone like Bear McCreary, what format do you get it in?

"99% of people we are getting things in the Pro Tools session, sometimes raw audio files, but most of the time Pro Tools sessions. With Bear, we got the pre-lay first before anything is recorded. That has the sync stuff and sample stuff a lot of which gets kept and a lot that gets replaced by recorded. But at that point, we can have a discussion about processing and reverbs. Are we going new school or old school? Dry or wet? Is this supposed to sound like a certain composer? Like sometimes we get a session and they say, 'this is like a Danny Elfman Vibe,' and we treat that a certain way."

When preparing deliverables for a game, is that different from delivering for a film?

Most of the time, it's pretty similar. One thing we usually have to deal with is loops a little bit more, where we have to make sure that when we print it, it has to have a reverb tail or not have a reverb tail, etc. But overall, it's very similar because we send our files off to the game's integration team, and they do their wizardry getting it into the game and optimized.

Are ear breaks important to you, and how do you approach taking time to keep your ears fresh?

Totally. I take lots of ear breaks. I get kind of antsy anyways, I don't like to sit still, so I will take an ear break after every cue, for sure, even if it's just to grab a coffee or take a walk. I also try not to bring work home with me, that's something I find really important.

Incredible, man, thank you so much for your time Mick. The last question is where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?

You know, I don't know, and I sort of don't care! I love performing, I love composing and producing and mixing, and they're all just super exciting for me, and my whole musical path, I've just gone with the flow. I wouldn't be doing this right now if I had been really stern with what I was doing before. So, if I end up mixing film and game stuff, I won't be mad. If I'm producing pop, I won't be mad. If I'm composing, I won't be mad!"