Tiago Casadei (Beijo Testo, Anthology, Swanzy)

Tiago Casadei is a Vitória-based recording, mixing, and mastering engineer. He graduated in music with a specialization in Brazilian popular music and jazz, and began his career as a recording musician and arranger in 2002 . Since then, Casadei has been involved in Gold-disc award-winning projects. He has dedicated himself to mixing and mastering in stereo and Atmos, and works across a variety of styles from pop and Latin to Indian music.

Tell us about your current studio setup.

We currently have two rooms and two different setups. The first one is for stereo mixing, based on an AWS 900 SSL console with a Pro Tools HDX. The monitors are the Genelecs 1032 and the old NS10 on a power Bryston 2B. Also, we have some other equipment in the rack, most of which are compressors.

The second room, for Atmos, is also running Pro Tools with 192 interfaces. The monitors are mostly custom-made for the room, manufactured by Ysao audio. It additionally has another pair of Genelec 1032s, also customized by Ysao.

In this room we have a rack with some compressors such as the Purple 76 and BAE 10DCF.

In regards to plugins, nowadays we have so many good releases every day that it's hard to have a favorite plugin for more than a month without it being replaced. But I can say that the Pro Tools stock EQ can be used in most of my sessions.

Having worked on so many songs over the past few years, how do you stay fresh and excited about mixing music these days?

In a way we work in an area that goes hand-in-hand with technology, so keeping up-to-date seems to be a must for anyone who wants to stay in the game. The exciting part of it all is that this same modern world has given us the possibility to be working on new projects and with totally different people and ways of making music every day. This is really cool!

How do you approach the mixing of a song?

There are a few steps I like to do before I even start mixing. I first like to make sure I understand artistically how the producer and artist want the song to sound.

So I like to talk with the producer to try to understand more deeply what he has in mind for that song in a less technical and more artistic way.

After that, I tend to start mixing with all the faders up. This first audition helps me understand how far away I am and what I need to do to reach the goal that the producer and the artist expect and told me in the initial conversation