Andrea Cichecki is an artist inspired by sound and specialised in the field of electronic music. Based in Germany but with Dutch roots, Andrea has been honing her skills intensely during the last few years in order to flourish her creativity and to perfect her craftsmanship.

We invited Andrea to hold a workshop about mixing and mastering at DAVE Festival in Dresden. But due to the Corona Pandemic the workshop had to be canceled. So we talked online with her about her work as a producer, mixing and mastering engineer, her creative process and living in the countryside.

It´s not uncommon creative people leave small cities for a metropolitan city. Why did you move from Berlin to the countryside near Dresden some years ago?

Berlin was really attractive to me and I loved the craziness of the city, the people, the vibe and the club scene. I've seen it, lived it and absorbed it all. As a DJ being in Berlin is great but for me it was hard to evolve as a producer, which was actually my biggest wish. After saving up money, I went to study at the Abbey Roads Institute and discovered a whole new world of music and sound.

One day in 2017, I visited Castle Studios near Dresden, to attend a workshop with iconic producer Sylvia Massy who worked with e.g. Prince, Tool and Johnny Cash. There, I also met her engineer Peter Junge, the artist community and the studio owner Arno Jordan. About a year later, Peter and I met again, fell in love and so he moved from London to Berlin and we started living together.

Not long after, we got an opportunity to live in the artist community and work at the studio. So we decided to give it a go, packed our things and have been enjoying the countryside since.

You are working as a mixing and mastering engineer at the Castle Studios. Can you tell us a bit about your work there?

I work as a freelance music producer, mixing & mastering engineer with my own clients. I'm specialised in electronic music and, being an artist myself, work on my own productions but also compose for other artists (such as singer-songwriters), for example, when they need additional electronic sounds, layers or soundscapes in their songs. For that I bring my clients into the studio as well.

Beside that, I work part-time as an assistant engineer doing band recordings where I help setting up sessions, run smaller ones and do all the little things around the recordings too.

This can be swapping mics, getting different instruments and also bringing coffee to the artists. Recording days can be intense and long but I don't mind it at all, because there is so much variety in music, the musicians and the work I do, it never gets boring.

Is there any difference between mixing and mastering an indie band or mixing electronic music?

The main difference is that a band has several members, is recorded live and rarely computer precise. So you have way more things you need to do, like drum editing and vocal treatment, cleaning and comping the project files, before you can even start mixing. It also depends whether you have recorded it yourself or somebody else did that for you.

If you record yourself you can already tweak and do a lot whilst tracking the artist. If not, this can easily lead to a lot of preparation work in order to get the sounds and instruments mix and mastering ready, be it cleaning the session, organising it or re-recording sounds to get a better starting point.

With electronic music everything is usually tight, often programmed. Most of the time you are working with well selected instruments and often composed by a single producer who works it all tow...