Alex Aldi (Holy Ghost!, Passion Pit, Troye Sivian)

Producer and mixer Alex Aldi started as a staff engineer at Gigantic Studios where he worked on Holy Ghost!’s self-titled album, Passion Pit’s Manners, and The Walkmen’s You and Me. In 2010, Aldi set up The Glass Factory studio in Brooklyn and went on to produce and mix Passion Pit’s albums Kindred and Gossamer, Troye Sivan’s For Him, and Bad Wolves’ Zombie nominated for Rock Song of the Year at the 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards.

Tell us about your current studio setup.

I work in Pro Tools, monitoring with a Dangerous D-Box, Genelec 8050’s and NS-10’s powered by a McIntosh 7270 amp.

I use quite a mixture of plugins these days: UAD, Waves, Izotope, all the big names are definitely being used regularly. But I’m possibly having more fun with the boutique developers like Baby Audio.

I’m more drawn more to creative sound-design type plugins when mixing as opposed to just hardware models.

How do you typically approach a mix: what's your process for setting it up?

I’m not really making any editing decisions during mixing. The process involves just becoming familiar with the track (which usually happens when I import it into my template), finding similar references to AB, getting the kick, snare, bass, and vocals roughly hitting the way I want them, then bringing everything else in.

Refining, AB’ing, ear breaks, repeat.

Once I get it close, I start monitoring through my boombox, and lastly before sending it out to clients, I stream to my phone just to make sure it’s translating there as well.