The Producer- an Enhypen fanfic

Chapter 9: Mixing while Mixing

After working for some time we lapsed into a break. We had figured out some of the lyrics and worked a bit on some of the melodies for the song. It had been a decent amount of work and effort, so a break was deserved. Eventually, Sunghoon and Jake also joined us.

"God, you do this everyday? All day? This is exhausting." Jay leaned back in his chair, resting his head back to look at the ceiling.

The other boys looked at the equipment in my room, messing around with various knobs and switches, while some scrolled through their phones. I leaned back lazily in my chair across from Jay, mirroring his posture.

"It's really not that bad when you get used to it, I actually quite enjoy it. It makes me think."

"That's good at least, you seemed to have a knack for this anyway." Jay gestured to the musical equipment around my room.

"Well, that and I paid like $50k for a degree. It took some time to learn."

Heeseung nudged my shoulder from where he sat beside me. He had pulled his chair up along with Ni-ki so they could explore the various devices at my console.

"Elia, what does this do?" He pointed at a set of faders and dials. I felt my excitement peak at his curiosity.

"Oh, so these edit the track set to it. So, let's say I had a vocal track on this, I could adjust the EQ and pan with these knobs, so I could increase the treble levels and place them somewhere specific in an audio field. And these faders show where volume levels are, so if I wanted to automate the fader to lower one person's vocals when another voice enters I would slide this down."

I moved my hands around the console, showing the two what various things did. They watched with wide eyes, nodding along to everything I said.

"Generally, I am not the one controlling the mix while recording, that's the job of an audio engineer. They are involved in mixing and mastering a song, so cleaning it up. That's what my brother Blaine does, he works in LA."

"I didn't know you had a brother, do you have any other siblings?" Ni-ki asked, poking at a fader to his right side.

"I don't, but my brother and I are quite close. We got along fairly well growing up, I think it helped that we have similar interests." I said, showing Heeseung the panning effect on a bassline we recorded.

"That's cool, I have a couple of sisters. We usually get along because we mostly spend time dancing together, and if you're dancing you can't argue." Ni-ki flicked some hair out of his face and pulled out his phone.

"What do you mean you can't argue if you're dancing?" Jungwon questioned him from across the room. "You do it almost everyday."

"No I don't!"

"You were literally arguing with Sunoo during rehearsal yesterday, don't even lie" Jake butted in, looking up briefly from the phone he, Sunghoon, and Sunoo were staring at.

"He was sticking his butt out!"

"I was not, you liar!" Sunoo gasped, glowering at Ni-ki's smug expression.

"You were a little bit..." Sunghoon trailed off, getting distracted by what was on his phone screen.

Sunoo scoffed, rolling his eyes at the unaware Sunghoon.

"Elia, what are you doing Monday?" Jay asked from behind me.

"Oh," I paused, Heeseung shot me a look from the corner of his eye, it made me lose my thoughts for a moment. "I'm going to be doing an interview. Why, what's Monday?"

"Ah, that's cool, what is the interview for? I was just asking because it's one of our off days and we didn't have any plans."

"Well, maybe I can hang out another day, we do live in the same building, so it isn't hard. The interview is going to be with Genius, you know the company that interviews all of the musicians?"