As long as I am on vacation I am super thrilled to have another Fiver Friday Takeover scheduled for all my dear weekly readers.

This week by my friend, former Iron Imager champion and imaging legend from Oz, Sidey, is taking over and I am sure you will be thrilled by his findings, tips and tricks! This is us at WWRS in LA years ago! What a fun time!

1. Plugin

I’m fairly unadventurous when it comes to plug-ins. I tend to stick with the most basic EQ and compression then a simple modulation plug-in and some reverb but lately I have been messing around with Izotope Ozone on the master and also I’m loving this plug-in called clear by super time for cleaning up noise.

https://www.supertone.ai/en/clear

2. Inspiration

These days I find a lot of my inspiration comes from working on lots of different projects. Take a break from mixing audio and write a blog. Make a funny video about your dog or cat. Create a meme – use AI if you want. I’m doing a lot of video editing in CapCut. Working on lots of different projects means you’re constantly looking at different content to try to pick things apart and figure out how people are doing things I do that day-to-day with my audio but when you combine everything altogether you’ve got this massive inventory of creative ideas that are constantly flooding your head.

3. Music

I can’t help but flashback to life in the 90s working at Triple M passing things under the table at the iguana bar in Kings Cross.

4. Web/Social/Whatever

Can’t get enough of this guy at the moment –

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by OXLEE (@imoxlee)

And this guy’s mumbling videos crack me up every time –

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Andrew “Rook” Ricardo (@ayorook)

5. Imaging

On slow days I love downloading other people’s imaging from wherever I can find it and just looking at waveforms and listening carefully picking apart every thing they’re doing and then trying to recreate that in my own sessions to add to my template later. It’s often a source of great frustration as every time I open someone else’s work I hear it and go. OMG I need to do that and I completely reinvent my sound every 5 to 6 days.

I’ve been working on my website at the moment so if you want to logon and have a look you can pick apart some of my work – sideshowma.com