Nico Essig
"Success has different metrics for different people. It's not necessarily the number of plays or the money. If you can add value to even one person - however that is - that's huge. That's real."
Apr 26, 20264 min read
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October 30, 2026 Releases
Issue №5 · Official Radio
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Issue №5 · October 30, 2026Issue №5Showcasing Stars Before the World Catches On● LIVE
Nico Essig is a Los Angeles–based mixing and mastering engineer with well over 300 credits spanning pop, R&B, dance, and beyond. He grew up in Strasbourg, France, moved to the United States with high-school-level English and a very clear idea of what he wanted: to work in big studios, learn from the inside, and get good. He did all three. Berlin REDLUX - a producer, educator, and community builder from New York City - runs a growing online music school and met Nico exactly the way she tells every one of her students is possible: on TikTok, through consistency, through showing up.
● On the Industry"Success has different metrics for different people. It's not necessarily the number of plays or the money. If you can add value to even one person - however that is - that's huge. That's real."
● The Feature
COVER STORY
The Honest Engineer
Nico Essig on perfectionism, momentum, artist identity, and the brutal discipline of finishing the work.
There's a moment in almost every serious conversation about music where the technical and the human become impossible to separate - where talking about a compressor's attack setting somehow slides into talking about self-doubt, creative paralysis, and what it actually means to bet on yourself. That is the kind of conversation Nico Essig and Berlin have. Sitting in on one of their sessions feels less like a masterclass and more like eavesdropping on two people who have genuinely figured some things out and decided, without fanfare, to give it all away.
Nico Essig is a Los Angeles-based mixing and mastering engineer with well over 300 credits spanning pop, R&B, dance, and beyond. He grew up in Strasbourg, France, moved to the United States with high-school-level English and a very clear idea of what he wanted: to work in big studios, learn from the inside, and get good. He did all three. Berlin REDLUX - a producer, educator, and community builder from New York City - runs a growing online music school and met Nico exactly the way she tells every one of her students is possible: on TikTok, through consistency, through showing up.
"You and I literally met on TikTok," Berlin REDLUX told Nico during one of their now-regular live sessions. "Now we're running a school. Can you imagine?" It still seems to delight her. It should. It's a pretty good story.
LEARNING THE CONSOLE
Before Nico was a sought-after engineer, he was a runner - the lowest rung of the studio ladder, the person who gets people food, cleans up, and spends enormous amounts of invisible time proving they can be trusted. He'll tell you that period was essential, and he'll tell you it in a way that makes you believe him rather than resent the system.
"When I started as a runner at studios here in LA," he recalls, "the place I was staying didn't have laundry. So I'd take the SSL console manual to the laundromat and just read it for two hours." He laughs a little at the image. "You don't understand everything. Some of it is really technical and you know you're probably never going to use certain things. But you go through the process."
The process, for Nico, has always been the point. He studied music production at Berklee College of Music - one of his first courses there involved ear training through obsessive listening: picking songs apart instrument by instrument, analyzing structure, writing everything down. That discipline shows up everywhere in how he talks about the craft now.
"Read the manual. You'd be surprised what you learn. And I'd bet that maybe five percent of people actually do it."
He moved from runner to assistant to working on sessions with major artists across genres - pop stars, R&B acts, singer-songwriters, dance music producers. He mentions a two-week writing camp he engineered for a prominent pop artist, running sessions across multiple studios where producers and songwriters cycled in and out daily, generating somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 songs or song ideas over the course. The A&R team would listen to overnight mixes each morning, narrow the field, and pass selections up to the artist. Most songs never made it.
"My point is," Nico says, "you can't be so precious with your one first song or first release. You just have to go through the motion. Whatever you learn in that process is making you so much better for the next one."
ON LETTING GO
The question of when to stop working on something - when a mix is done, when a production is finished - is one that haunts independent artists differently than it haunted previous generations. Nico has a direct answer for it, rooted in how professional studios used to solve it involuntarily.
"Back in the day, it was easier," he says. "The record was done when the budget ran out. You had X amount of time in studio. That was it." For independent artists working in home setups with no external deadline, that boundary has to be self-imposed. "You have to set a limit. Think about how much time you want to invest. What does that time cost you? And when you hit that line - that's it."
He tells a story about working with a multi-platinum rock band on mixing sessions. One of their songs had a tambourine that, in retrospect, was louder than the band would have liked. Years later, they still mentioned it. "Guess what? It never mattered. The audience connected with the song. A tambourine two dB too loud was never going to stop that."
Berlin REDLUX listens to this and translates it immediately for her students: "You can't be so precious about just one song. That's the point of the day." She's right, and during the interview - feels it.
"An audience isn't going to notice if your snare is two dB too loud. If they connect with the song, they connect with the song."
TWO SIDES OF THE SAME PROBLEM
About eighty percent of the independent artists Nico works with, he estimates, are avoiding social media and self-promotion almost entirely. They'll post their song link on a Friday with a caption that says "go save it," and then wonder why nothing happens. The other side of the equation surprises people when he brings it up: social media influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers who come to him for mixing or production help and are just as paralyzed as everyone else - scared to release music, unsure if it's good enough, hiding behind the tools.
"It's the same process," he says. "They've figured out one side of the equation, but not the other. You can't have one without the other."
Berlin REDLUX agrees with something she returns to often: the idea that social media is not optional, and that the artists who treat it that way are simply choosing to fall behind. "You're spending so much time learning mixing, mastering, all that," she says, "but by the time it gets to marketing they're empty. Start learning now. You'll get better in a year. Think about the people who aren't starting. They are behind."
She says this with urgency, not judgment. There's a difference, and she lands it.
THE UNFAIR ADVANTAGE
One of the more quietly useful ideas in Nico's thinking is what he calls the "unfair advantage" - the things every person already has, usually not related to music, that can form the bedrock of an actual audience relationship.
He grew up in France. When he arrived in LA as a runner, his English was functional but basic. When the studio needed someone to work with French-speaking clients - including, eventually, the French electronic duo he was assigned to precisely because of a shared language - he was the answer. "Not because I was better than any other engineer. Just because I spoke French."
He also happened to be good at ping pong. This sounds like a joke, but it's not. During a three-month stretch working with a major pop/R&B artist, the sessions began each day with table tennis, and Nico held his own. "It's things as simple as that. Things you know how to do. Things you've gotten better at. That's what gives you an edge."
He gives another example: a client of his, a gymnast in her competitive years at a national level, began creating content that combined her athletic background with her music. The result was striking, original, and deeply shareable - something audiences hadn't seen before. "That's an unfair advantage. Use what you already have and are good at. People aren't going to listen just because you put music out. They want to listen because of your whole package - your story, your experience, what you bring to the table."
"Write down everything you've already accomplished. Tell your story. You'd be surprised how many people are in the same situation and didn't know someone else was talking about it."
Berlin REDLUX's unfair advantage is movement. She's from New York City, from a place, as she puts it, where dreaming out loud - especially for women in music - was not encouraged. She moved, she built, she taught herself the things she needed to know. "Don't worry too much," she says. "Just do it. Put it in your pocket. Any experience is valuable." She means it literally: every bit of lived experience is material, and material is what artists are made of.
ON TEMPLATES, TONE, AND COMMITTING EARLY
Nico is a vocal advocate for templates - not as a creative crutch, but as a structural intelligence. Every mix he does, every production, he sees as part of the same ongoing project. "If you start with a completely blank canvas every time, you're reinventing the wheel. If you spent three hours getting an organ sound you love, save it. The last thing you want is to spend an hour searching through plugins for something you've already solved."
The principle extends beyond presets. He advocates for committing to sounds and decisions early in the production process - not as a shortcut, but as a discipline. Frequency clashing and mix problems, he argues, often aren't really mixing problems at all. They're production problems. They're arrangement problems. They show up at the mixing stage because nobody went back and listened critically during the building stage.
"If you can't work on your mix as you go, at least take ten minutes at the end of each session to do a quick reference mix. Start the next session from there. You'll start finding issues early, when you can actually fix them."
Berlin REDLUX adds her own version of this for melody: she deliberately uses the most boring, unadorned keyboard sound she owns when she's writing. "If the melody is good on the ugliest sound I have, I have a song. Melody is everything. I don't want to be distracted by fancy textures."
PROMOTION IS NOT CHEATING
Here is where Nico says something that independent artists need to hear and generally don't want to: putting money behind your music is not cheating. It's how music has always been promoted. Labels do it at scale. Independent artists who refuse to do it at any scale are simply choosing not to use a tool that exists.
"If your only strategy is posting your link on Thursday and saying 'my song is out Friday, go pre-save it,' I can guarantee you nothing is going to happen." He pauses. "You've put all this work into producing, mixing, mastering, releasing - and then you don't promote. It doesn't make sense."
He's not recommending reckless spending. He's recommending starting small, testing what works, and scaling from there. A client of his who produces in a pop-adjacent style has grown her following to over 30,000 in six months by combining strong content with modest, consistent paid promotion. "She's really good. But good isn't enough if the platforms don't know you exist."
If a promotion effort doesn't land, he argues that's information too. "Maybe the music isn't connecting yet. That's not failure - that's a test result. Move on, learn, try again."
"Every company has a marketing budget. You're a company now. Act like one."
BLOGS, BACKLINKS, AND THE LONG GAME
Near the end of one of their sessions, Berlin REDLUX explains her idea of a magazine - something to celebrate the students at her school, give them a platform, where they can document what they're building. She asks Nico what he thinks about blogs and press coverage for independent artists. He lights up.
"Blogs are huge. And not necessarily because you're going to have thousands of people reading your blog. It's about search engines. It's about backlinks. It's about Google understanding that you exist and that people are interested in what you're saying." He started posting consistently to his own site a couple of years ago. Organic traffic now sits around 800 monthly visitors - people searching specific keywords who land on his content and, sometimes, hire him. "You probably already have the content. Transcribe your sessions. Post them. Let the algorithm find you."
A client of his once reached out having found him through an AI search engine. He hadn't done anything differently that week. He'd just been consistent. "Don't be scared of any of it," he says. "Try everything with the lowest effort possible. If something works, double down. If it doesn't, move on. The point is to try."
ON AI, AUTHENTICITY, AND THE PEOPLE WHO SKIP THE STEPS
Neither Nico nor Berlin REDLUX is a purist when it comes to AI in music. They've both had to update their thinking in real time - and they say so, which makes the nuance land differently than it would from someone with a fixed position.
Nico used to get uncomfortable when clients submitted AI-generated tracks for review without disclosing it upfront. "That still rubs me the wrong way. Be upfront about your process." But he's seen what honest engagement with the tool can look like - artists who can write lyrics but don't play instruments, using AI to hear their words realized as music, and then genuinely learning from feedback on the song's structure and production choices. "For people like that, a review is actually valuable. They're learning song structure. They're making better music."
The problem, both of them agree, is the shortcut mentality: generating fifteen albums in a week, putting promotion money behind them, and expecting the system to do the rest. "They skip creating a fanbase, creating a relationship with their audience, creating a journey. And then they wonder why the music isn't connecting. It's not the tool. It's that they skipped the steps."
Berlin REDLUX changed her position on a digital artist after watching the care that went into the community building, the consistency, the response to comments, the genuine engagement. "Somebody with the capacity for branding, marketing, and world building may actually have a shot," she says. "And a real artist who plays an instrument may not, because they're not nailing those things." The tool doesn't save you. The work does.
"The issue was never the tool. It's that people think the tool is the shortcut around the steps. It isn't."
WHY THEY DO IT
At some point in the session - it's hard to say exactly when, because the conversation moves like water - Nico mentions a YouTube comment he got once. Someone said they'd learned something. That it connected. He still mentions it as a metric of success that he actually trusts.
"Success has different metrics for different people. It's not necessarily the number of plays or the money. If you can add value to even one person - however that is - that's huge. That's real."
Berlin REDLUX built her school in five weeks. She launched without everything ready, without the perfect plan, in the full tradition of the advice she gives her students. "Don't worry too much. Just do it. Your journey will tell you what to do next." She still believes the next major artist is going to come out of her community. She says it with the kind of confidence that is hard to argue with - not because it's certain, but because she's the kind of person who makes things happen by deciding they will.
Nico, for his part, keeps posting on TikTok, keeps reviewing mixes, keeps reading the manuals, keeps committing early to sounds he trusts. He arrived in Los Angeles from France with high-school English and a clear goal. He read SSL console manuals at the laundromat. He learned the console so well he eventually ran sessions on it for some of the biggest names in pop and dance music. He's been a runner, an assistant, a session engineer, and now a mentor. The thread running through all of it is not talent, exactly. It's something more actionable than that.
"You have to put in the work," he says. "I know you hear that a lot. But yeah. You just have to put in the work."
★ ★ ★
Nico Essig is a mixing and mastering engineer based in Los Angeles with credits across pop, R&B, dance, and beyond.
Berlin REDLUX is a music producer and educator whose online school launched in early 2026.
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