Interface
Born out of their popular series of YouTube-based producer masterclasses, Mixing Night Audio’s quirky and innovative first releases have turned quite a few heads with both their gamified design and pro-level results. We catch up with the company’s respected founders to discuss LOLCOMP, the underpinning idea, and how their technology serves to arm their audience
Mixing Night Audio
Ken Lewis (Co-founder/producer)
Dom Rivinius (Co-founder/producer)
cm: When did you form Mixing Night Audio, and what was the driving force behind establishing the company?
Ken Lewis: “We were locked down and we knew Covid was going to be really, really serious, and we had no idea if the world was going to hit pause indefinitely. We had all this gear and a bunch of time, so we just started to broadcast and started bringing people together. The more we built a community the more we realised that we had something we didn’t know we needed.
We don’t even attempt to monetise the show, so we can use copyrighted material and I can put on the show stuff that I want to put on; I don’t have to cater to anybody else. We partner up with other companies to do giveaways but we don’t have sponsors.”
Dom Rivinius: “We ran Q&A sessions, had QuickTip videos. We still do Mixing Night every first Wednesday of the month. That’s the foundation of this community. All of our 13,000-strong audience have come organically – we did no advertising. We were thinking, what can we do to increase the engagement in that community even more, and what can we do to give them tools to get better results. We’ve talked to those people on a daily basis. The problems that everyone was facing were pretty similar, and that was the foundation of what tools we built and how we built them, to help as many of those people in those stages.”
Ken: “We’re hoping that long-term the income from the plugins allows us to keep doing the shows. We put a whole staff, about three hardcore days, into a free show that makes us no money. But it became the thing we loved and we had serious conversations about whether we should stop this. I realised I couldn’t. Now we’re committed to the show, committed to the plugins.
“I was just at the AES show in New York; I couldn’t walk 20 feet without someone saying ‘Dude, I love Mixing Night, keep doing what you’re doing’. The outpouring of love from the audio community for what we’re doing at Mixing Night is special. I see really high level people tuning in and telling their friends. We have multi-platinum heavyweights tuning in regularly, live on the broadcast. I feel like we’re making a difference. Everyone can interact on the chat and make networking connections.
“We also realised that people were collaborating on our beat challenges across oceans, making music for
