Inside Track | Secrets Of The Mix Engineers

People + Opinion : Artists / Engineers / Producers / Programmers

All it took to make a star of Carly Rae Jepsen was one memorable song — and, in Dave Ogilvie, a mix engineer who understood how to make it stand out.

By Paul Tingen

Dave 'Rave' Ogilvie at The Warehouse in Vancouver, where 'Call Me Maybe' was mixed.

Dave ‘Rave’ Ogilvie at The Warehouse in Vancouver, where ‘Call Me Maybe’ was mixed. Photo: Adam PW Smith

Producer Josh Ramsay called mixer David ‘Rave’ Ogilvie in March 2011, excited about a new song he’d written and recorded with the relatively unknown Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen. Ogilvie recalls, “I enjoy everything Josh works on and like mixing his stuff, so I was eager to hear what he’d done. I went over to his studio, The Umbrella Factory, and when he played me the song I thought it had one of the biggest hooks I’d heard in years. I couldn’t wait to mix it, and did so a couple of months later. I knew that the Canadian radio would love the song, and when it took off in Canada I felt vindicated in my initial opinion. But I had no inkling at all of its worldwide potential.”

Very few people had. ‘Call Me Maybe’ was released in Canada in September 2011, and was in the top 10 by the end of the year. Then Justin Bieber heard it on Canadian radio and tweeted that it was “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard” — whereupon ‘Call Me Maybe’ went on to become the big Summer hit of 2012. It reached number one in 20-something countries, including Canada, the UK and the US, went multi-platinum in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US (where it sold a whopping four million copies), and turned Jepsen from a former Canadian Idol second runner-up into a global star.

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