Joey Raia has been working with us at Definitive Jux for a while now (though he’s not actually sure for how long), and has mixed a lot of our releases including: El-P's I'll Sleep When Your Dead, Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass, Cage's Hell's Winter, Rob Sonic's Sabotage Gigante, Mr. Lif's Mo' Mega as well as numerous singles for El-P and the family.

Hi, my name is Joey Raia, and I'm going to having a weekly or bi-weekly (depending on how hellish a studio-week I'm having) blog. This is also my first blog ever. I started off as a designer of audio equipment and moved into the record-making side of things a few years after. Spending so much time in studios testing the stuff I was designing had me realizing "I'd much rather be here (in the control room) then anywhere else." I still love to do electrical audio design and work on various projects on the side.

You would think that designing audio gear (electrical engineering) and mixing records (audio engineering) were worlds apart, but in fact they are closer then ever. Back in the day most mixing engineers built (or heavily modified) a lot of the equipment they used to make records, some still do, and most of the good ones (engineers) today have a really good knowledge of what's going on electrically under the hood of the gear they're using, and how it's affecting the audio. This is actually really important and we'll probably have a full blog about it.

I'm still deciding how each week is going to be structured, or if there is going to be any structure at all. I will have a question and answer section in which you can leave questions in the blog comments area and I hope to highlight, answer, and expand on some the following week. In the blog I will attempt to vent some of my thoughts, jokes, tragedies, triumphs, disasters, catastrophic rewarding nightmares, and technical fun/frustrations during what goes into one of the final stages of making a record -

Mixing: An art form to which I've devoted my entire professional life, most of my personal life and social life, and pretty much all of my free time.

I'm often horrified these days at the state of some of the recording sessions I receive to mix - how things were recorded, how things were edited, how things are organized...the list goes on. If I could help prevent some of that it would make me feel better, even if it ultimately benefits other mixers and record making people. One my main goals in writing this is to help, and hopefully give a nudge in the right direction, to those looking to get into mixing as a profession or hobby. Ultimately, I would also hope to provide some insight to the madness and joy involved in making a record.

I'll leave you with some pictures of my personal mix studio - Gotham Studios; which is located downtown New York City. This is where I do mostly all of my mixing and spend the majority of my time.

Best,

Joey

P.S. My website is under development., it should be done by end of the summer / fall. For now you can check my myspace.