The control room at Monster Island has been tuned by Bob Hodas. Bob is known as one of, if not the best room tuners in the world. He has optimized the control room for the most accurate listening environment possible.

Unless otherwise requested, mixing is done in the analog domain, with outboard gear, rather than plugin simulations of the real thing. We maintain an extensive collection of plugins for opening sessions created in smaller studios that don't have outboard gear.

The console is fully automated and recallable. It has had many modifications and now uses the Chandler Mini Mixer for summing during mixdown. We have excellent documentation methods for recalling outboard gear, but highly recommend printing extra mixes like vocals up/down to avoid having to do a recall.

Mike Caffrey is well versed in Michael Brauer's Multi-Buss compression methods. He's written the definitive Tape Op article on the technique and has demonstrated it with Michael Brauer at the Tape Op conference.

Mike Caffrey has also developed a technique called Two Stage Compression, which allows independent control of the compression of a signals low and high level dynamics. The result is a much more transparent compression that allows a wide or narrow dynamic range without artifacts. Proper use of compression is often cited as the determining factor between a professional and an amateur mix.

The first stage of the mix process is session preparation. This takes essentially no time for tracks recorded at Monster Island and will vary based on the thoroughness of the documentation of sessions recorded elsewhere.

The next step is building the foundation of the mix and can take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours depending on the complexity of the mix. This stage in usually done fairly independently. When the foundation is done, it's time for the client to get involved and this is where most of the automation and fine tuning takes place.

Whenever possible, we'll leave a mix up on the board overnight to allow you to listen and send in changes that can be made very simply the next day. Small details like bass of or bass down, or adjust a vocal phrase or two. We believe very strongly that you need to feel 100% confident in your mixes because if you aren't, people can tell when you're promoting your recording that you don't beleive that it's the best it can be.

These are some of the reasons that Mike Caffrey is frequently hired to remix tracks initially mixed by other engineers in other studios.