The Life And Times of Mixerman

From mix engineer to mysterious author to educator— THE JOURNEY OF ERIC SARAFIN

ERIC SARAFIN is a mix engineer whose work can be heard on records by everyone from the Pharcyde to Ben Harper, having come from classical trumpet and jazz piano though stints at Boston’s Dimension Sound Studios and Capitol Records and Hollywood Sound in LA to a successful freelance career.

He’s also famous in the audio world as the author of several books under his pen name of MIXERMAN, starting with the infamous Daily Adventures of Mixerman... a blow-by-blow account of a rock album session bursting with all kinds of music-industry insanity, from backstabbing musicians and hysterical A&R people to Teflon-slick industry moguls and the world’s most clueless doorman, with now-immortal characters like Willy Show, Fingaz the Wegro, and Penny Pincher. He kept the industry guessing for years, with writing so deft that many people believed the fictional sessions were actually real, despite reading about a session drummer playing with headphones duct-taped to his skull or a DAW set up in a bathroom with the tech sitting on the toilet.

Since then, Mixerman has produced a variety of excellent books on the various aspects of record production: The Zen of Recording, The Zen of Mixing, and  The Zen of Producing. By sheer luck, our Paul Vnuk Jr. recently found himself in Eric’s current hometown of Asheville, NC, where he was able to sit down for a fascinating interview about (as you might guess) all kinds of stuff.—MM