RSR565 - Jason Lehning - Mixing Vocals, Low-End Decisions, Writers’ Rooms & Keeping It Fun

What's in this episode

What happens when you finally stop chasing every plugin and build a mix workflow that actually works? My guest today is Grammy-winning mixer, producer, and musician Jason Lehning, returning to the show after RSR074. If the name sounds familiar, it should - we’ve also had his brother Jordan (RSR104) and his dad Kyle (RSR094), the legendary producer behind Randy Travis. Jason grew up in studios and learned early on that songwriting, engineering, and mixing all feed the same creative impulse. In this episode, we dig into what it really means to build a mix template that supports musical decisions rather than cluttering your session with endless “maybe” options. We talk about Jason’s approach to vocal mixing - using parallels, dynamics, and tonal shifts to keep the performance feeling alive without over-processing it. He explains why he often duplicates vocals instead of relying on automation, how he thinks about track folders the way engineers used to think about console returns, and why an SM7 still wins sessions where expensive mics fall apart in a dense arrangement. He breaks down his low-end philosophy too: removing anything that fights the bass, organizing the bottom octave early

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