Dom Morley on Mixing, Mentorship and the Tools That Changed His Drum Workflow
Dom Morley is a Grammy-winning engineer with more than 25 years of experience. He’s worked on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black and with artists like Adele, Sting, and Mark Ronson. He taught music production at Leeds Conservatoire and started The Mix Consultancy, where up-and-coming engineers can learn from his approach. In this interview, we talk about what makes mixing rewarding, the risks of having too many tracks, and the AI tools that have changed how he works.
The Battle of the Mix
For Dom, mixing is the most satisfying part of the process. "I kind of enjoy the battle of mixing," he says. "It does feel like you versus the track in some respects and the track wants to sound rubbish and you're trying to make it sound great, and you're finding ways around it and ways around the problems. I like the challenge of that and then when you resolve it, it sounds amazing."
He compares mixing to choreography rather than solving a puzzle. "It's a bit like a ballet because you move one thing and then that's relationships change with everything else, and then everything needs to move to keep the relationship that you wanted between these guitars, while the lead comes up or while that little stab in the rhythm needs to push that moment, but then that balance change means everything changes."
Dom sees the mixer’s job as guiding the listener’s attention. "I think the job of the mixer is to direct where people’s attention should be held in the mix at any one time." When the vocals drop out, you might highlight the bass or the flutes. You’re always moving different parts forward or back, leading the listener through the track.
The Mute Button Is Your Best Weapon
Because every DAW now allows unlimited tracks, productions often end up with too much going on. Dom notices this a lot in his Mix Consultancy work: "Everything is a bit clogged up, and everything's sitting on top of everything else."
He often solves this by taking things out instead of adding more processing. "I'm working on a mix right now where the production is massive. So there are bits where I'm like, the best thing I can do here is actually mute this, not try and crowbar it in because it's making it worse, no matter where I put it."
Dom picked up this approach early in his career. "There was a guy that I used to assist, and he always said that the most useful bit on the desk was the mute button." This engineer was known for creating spacious mixes, often by muting parts at the right moments rather than removing them completely. “He'd bring it in for a couple of bars... their part was still there, but then in sections where it was pulling away from the focus of the track, you know, it would just be gone.”
Dom often quotes Brian Eno, who said that great records come from small budgets and tight deadlines. These limits push you to make creative choices. "Back when I started, you know, it was a 24-track, and that was it. Done. So the fact that you can endlessly keep adding things, I don't think is the best way to get to an end result."
Learning Over the Shoulder
Dom’s Mix Consultancy is unique because he gives detailed notes on how he would improve a submitted mix. For a small fee, he spends time in his studio listening and figuring out what could be better.
"It was actually inspired by how I learned," he explains, "which was by looking over the shoulders of engineers who were more experienced than me and seeing what things they did to make mixes sound better. When I was listening, they would do these little changes, and it would get a lot better, so I would work out what it was they'd done."
His advice is often simple, like taking 3dB out of the rhythm guitars at 500Hz. These are small changes. "I get people say that they pay for the service for the first time, they get the notes and go, 'Is that it? Is that all he's come up with?' And then they do it, and they go, " Oh yeah, that's stunning. That's so much better."
Most people who use his service already have a mix that’s nearly finished. "Often it is, people have got it close, but they don't know how to get it over the line, and it doesn't take much to bring you into focus, but you need to know what the small things are that are eluding you, that you're not aware of."
Black Magic Drums
For his current mix, Dom has been using Acon Digital’s drum tools. He uses DeBleed:Drums on the kick and snare, and then Remix:Drums on the overheads.
"I was trying to explain the plugin to somebody recently," he says of DeBleed. "It's not a gate. It sort of works like a gate, but it's so much more because... when you do the DeBleed thing, it's just the snare and everything else around it is gone." He pauses. "It's kind of mind-blowing, really. It's black magic, isn't it?"
Remix:Drums helped him fix a problem with hi-hats that were too loud in the overheads. "You can just turn down the hats in the overheads and down they go, and mute the kick drum. It's mad, and the overheads still sound fine, but they don't have a kick drum in them. It's bizarre, but it just saves you so much effort and stress and time trying to get those drums contained and useful and energetic."
What He Would Have Done Before
Before he had these tools, Dom’s workflow took much more effort. "I'd probably end up trying to use samples so that I could bring those up relative to the things that I wanted to bring down that I couldn't."
Traditional gating brought its own set of problems. "The gate would change the balance too much between when the snare was gated and the hi-hat was gone and then when the snare opened the gate and then the hi-hat was really loud again, or cymbal splashes that get really loud when the gate's open the snare and then close down again."
The old way involved searching for a clean snare hit in the session, sampling it, and using it for replacement. “So you're talking at least an hour. And now just put Acon Digital on, and then within 30 seconds it's done.”
He’s also used Extract:Dialogue 2 to clean up a poorly recorded interview. "That was again just as mind-blowing as the drum ones. It's like you can just put this thing on, and what felt like it was going to be a full day's worth of work trying to extract this dialogue, and instead using this is a breeze."
Dom tried several dialogue extraction tools before choosing Extract:Dialogue 2. "I did do a little test as well between that and a few others. I think I've tried about three or four different ones, and the Acon was definitely the best one. It was miles better than the others."
Where Hours Become Seconds
The main benefit of these tools for Dom is increased time efficiency. It’s not just about working faster, but about staying creative instead of getting stuck on technical issues.
He describes a live recording at the Bercy Arena in Paris, with an orchestra, choir, and full band, where everything bled into the drum mics. "The ability to focus those kick mics down to just what you actually want from it, enables it to be so much punchier and more exciting than when you've got everything going on as well in the kit and you can't turn it down."
Technology has changed what’s possible. Tasks that used to need sample replacement, careful gating, and editing now happen instantly. The creative choices are the same, but it takes much less time to get there.
Staying in the zone when mixing is critical for Dom and our plugins help him do that.
Thanks so much to Dom for sharing his wisdom with us, you can find out more about his endeavours below.
https://www.themixconsultancy.com/