Yang Tan (Kanye West, Mike Dean, Kid Cudi, Young Guru)
Yang Tan is a mixer and vocal engineer at Paramount Recording Studios and the owner of Absolute Magnitude Entertainment Records. She has taken her skill for orchestral arrangements and morphed it into a successful career as a mixer, working with artists like Kanye West, Kid Cudi, Jackson Wang, Stephanie Poetri, J. Cole, Pentatonix, and K-pop artist Jackson Wang. Tan was featured in Variety as a hitmaker engineer.
Tell us about your current studio setup?
I’m mostly in-the-box with a summing amp (SPL Mix Dream 2384). I work in both Pro Tools and Ableton Live, and I also produce in Studio One. My monitors are Yamaha NS-10 Studio and Neumann 310s. My go-to plugins are UADs (1176, Fairchild 670, Elysia Alpha Compressor, Maag EQ4 ), Waves (Doubler4, NS1), Fabfilter (Pro-Q3, Saturn 2), Slate Digital Air EQ, and Oxford Inflator.
How do you stay fresh and excited about making music every day?
I love solving puzzles. Working on music to me is a new piece of the puzzle every day; it’s never the same thing. I enjoy the moment when I finally figure it out and it sounds exactly how I pictured it in my head. Some days, I just can’t get my head around it, and it makes me want to spend even more time on it.
How do you typically approach a mix: what's your process for setting it up? How often are you making big editing decisions in your mixing?
I have my own mix templates and they’re being updated pretty frequently. Before I start mixing a song, I’ll organize the stems in my mix template, compare it to the rough mix, make sure the stems are sent right, then find out the key, tempo, and structure to the song.
I usually play the song all the way through so that I can learn the energy of the song. It's not too often that I'm making big editing decisions. It’ll be done if needed. If I think the song can be arranged differently, I’ll make a second version for a mix with a different arrangement so that I can present both the original and the revised one to my clients.
What's typically on your mix buss these days?
Oxford Inflator, Elysia Alpha Compressor, Elyssia MUEQ and Waves L2.