How mixer Amy Sergeant built her career as a music maker

Mixer, producer and writer Amy Sergeant reflects on the skills that have shaped her career so far, and the Mix With The Masters seminar that deepened her confidence in both her instincts and abilities.

Mix With The Masters connects the music industry’s most respected professionals with the next generation of talent, offering award-winning educational seminars, webinars and video tutorials on a range of topics including songwriting, production, beat-making, mixing, mastering and more. We’ve partnered with the platform to shine a light on its ReBalance Scholarship Program – an initiative that aims to cultivate a more inclusive industry by providing bursaries for women and non-binary applicants, providing much-needed access to the skills and connections needed to succeed in the music industry.

As a mixer, producer, writer and engineer, Mix With The Masters alumnus Amy Sergeant‘s job is to bring music to life. Having worked with headline acts like Bastille, Wet Leg & Florence & The Machine, her day-to-day involves collaborating on and jumping between a dizzying spread of projects, utilising a broad range of technical skills that have taken years to hone. Looking back, though, the simple act of bringing songs into existence is something she’s always had an innate drive to do.

“I began playing guitar when I was ten. This led to writing songs as a teenager, which led to gigging those songs and then recording them. I remember getting home from school and being totally immersed in either listening to, playing, writing or recording music,” Amy explains. Before long, she was experimenting with production, using a digital 8-track to layer guitar and vocals alongside its built-in drum machine.

Approaching songwriting as more than just a creative outlet, Amy’s instinct was always to commit her music to some kind of physical record. “Some people learn to play an instrument but see creating music as a different thing. For me, it felt very fluid. Making stuff up was just part of learning the guitar,” she says. “Beyond the writing, it was important to me to understand recording because I wanted my songs to exist in the same way as songs I heard on CDs and the radio.”

In 2023, Amy became one of 30 women and non-binary artists to date to be awarded a bursary through Mix With The Masters’ ReBalance Scholarship Program, which allowed her to attend a life-changing seminar held by American record producer, Tchad Blake at Studios La Fabrique in France. The Scholarship works with artists and a global network of organisations, including We Are Moving The Needle, She is the Music, The SOCAN Foundation, Women in Music Canada, Apogee and She-Q Audio to cultivate a more inclusive industry for women and non-binary applicants.

Here, Amy breaks down how she turned her early love for production into a career, what essential skills she learned along the way, and how initiatives like the ReBalance Scholarship are making a vital difference to an industry in urgent need of change.

After teaching yourself to make music growing up, at what point did you begin to consider it as a job? What steps did you take to get there?

Initially, I wasn’t focused on working towards a particular job role. As a 17/18-year-old, I was able to earn some money from gigs, sell homemade EPs, and release music online, which gave me confidence that I could build a portfolio career and my own self-employed micro-business making music. I did a mixture of things alongside university study and beyond – playing in bands, recording/mixing/producing those projects and other people’s projects, function gigs, live sound, festivals, songwriting, and assisting a music broadcast engineer. This process helped me work out what I enjoyed most and what I was good at. A few years after graduating university, I moved to London to find work in commercial studios and really focus on music production as a career path. My role still varies project to project – a combination of recording, mixing, writing and playing guitar – but I am now predominantly studio-based. 

Much of your early career was spent working closely with rising artists, especially in Bristol, and shaping their sound. How much of your work is about collaboration versus a more independent, insular process?

Last year, I worked on Josie Beth’s EP Alone In A Crowded Room. I really enjoyed the collaborative side of this during the creation and capture stage, such as workshopping the songwriting and arrangements with Josie, vocal tracking days with her siblings Harry and Elise, and working with James Maltby and Floyer Sydenham (St Barbe) to record additional drums, guitar and bass. I find that I also need time alone with projects to bring the best out of myself creatively. I’ll often experiment with production ideas and shape the mix alone before sharing it with the artist. It’s a ping-pong between collaboration and working independently.

 

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In 2023, USC Annenberg’s Inclusion in the Recording Studio report found that women and non-binary people make up just 6.5% of producers and mixing engineers in music. Is this imbalance something that’s shaped your own personal experience working in the industry?

My route into production was through pursuing what I enjoyed doing, and in all honesty, I wasn’t aware of the wider gender disparity in those roles. It was at university that I noticed less women on my course were taking an interest in production, and so I chose to research this for my dissertation. Up to that point, I’d had the support of my collaborators to take on those technical roles, and my lecturers at Bath Spa University (Commercial Music) were very encouraging. No one had said I couldn’t or shouldn’t be pursuing music production, and in some ways, as I didn’t know the stats, it didn’t feel like a daunting thing to be doing. My findings amongst my peer group were that there was a lack of confidence to take on those roles, rather than a lack of interest, and that a good way to counter this would be to have visible role models.

It’s so positive that there is way more awareness about it [now], because it encourages organisations to develop initiatives to improve the issue. My first assistant engineer role at Miloco Studios and my role as Spotify’s in-house engineer were both part of initiatives to support women in the industry. I’ve seen more gender balance in commercial studios the past few years in the entry-level roles of runners and assistant engineers, so over time, I think and hope we’ll continue to see that number rise. We Are Moving The Needle globally are doing brilliant things to support producers and engineers at varying stages of their careers, and it was through them I got to attend Tchad Blake‘s Mix With The Masters seminar, which had a really positive impact on my mindset and career. I’m also part of the 2% Rising community, who host socials and workshops to meet like-minded people. Having those safe spaces to connect and share ideas has been really positive. 

Can you tell us more about your Mix With The Masters seminar experience? What did you gain from it?

I attended Tchad Blake’s seminar at Studio La Fabrique, France. The seminar was a week long and consisted of Tchad remixing projects other attendees had brought in and critical listening of attendees’ work. It was quite holistic, focusing on the feeling of the music rather than specific plugins or settings. That being said, there’s some gear that he regularly uses, like the sans amp, that are integral to his workflow, which was cool to see. The studio sessions were phone-free, which I loved, and we all had a notepad to jot down our thoughts across the week. My biggest takeaway was to back my taste and instincts more. After the seminar, I approached mixes more creatively, aiming to make them sound exciting to me in service of the song rather than trying to do things ‘right’, and as a result, I was finishing mixes much quicker. 

How important are these kinds of scholarships, and the work initiatives like Mix With The Masters are doing, to nurturing new talent in music?

Spending a significant amount of time watching an experienced mixer or producer work is incredibly insightful. All my prior experience of that had been in a work situation where the session was only one or two days long, and there was a job to do. You do learn something new in every session, but having no working responsibilities for a week gave me the chance to totally immerse myself in the process with a different mindset. It was also a big confidence boost that Tchad listened to some projects I’d mixed and was positive about what I was doing. I was happy with those mixes and so were the clients, but it meant a lot that Tchad thought they were cool too.

What skills are essential to what you do? Where did you learn them?

The biggest skill, I think, is critical listening and being able to make good technical and creative decisions to enhance the emotional impact of a piece of music. There are so many resources to learn those fundamental skills – whether that be online, university or classes – but mastering the effective application of tools such as compression, EQ and reverb is something that comes through time and experience. I personally learnt a lot through finishing projects, doing the best job I could do at that given time and moving on. There are mixes from five years ago that I think maybe I could make better choices for now, but I needed to do those projects and move on to improve and grow. My critical listening skills continue to gradually improve, and I’m always trying to get ‘better’ at what I do – ‘better’ being achieving the sonic vision I’ve got in my head for a track.

What might people not know about your job and what it entails?

Organisation is such an important part of what I do. Being on time to sessions, scheduling your diary, setting and sticking to deadlines, thorough note-taking, to-do lists, communicating effectively in-person and virtually, file management… Everyone has their own workflow and ways of staying organised, but it is essential.

Looking forward, what are your future plans to develop what you do?

Music production is an endless knowledge journey. Every project has its own unique requirements, and technology is constantly evolving, as well as all the classic gear that already exists. For me, this is exciting, but I can understand why it can feel daunting for some people. But no one knows everything, and you don’t need to know everything to make great music. Having an open mind to constantly learn and improve is important. I work independently a lot, and find talking to peers and mentors refreshing. I feel lucky to have people with tons of experience to go to with questions or for advice.