Jon Estes: Working to make the song succeed

Jon Estes is a Nashville producer, mixing engineer, and multi-instrumentalist who works roughly 200 sessions a year, often as bassist, engineer, and producer on the same record. He's played on Kesha's Grammy-nominated Rainbow and Robyn Hitchcock's self-titled album, and produced and mixed full-length records for Jessie Baylin, Dara Tucker, and Langhorne Slim, most recently engineering and mixing rising country breakout Waylon Wyatt's 2026 debut Dustpiles. He also scores for TV (NBC, HBO, Disney) and video games (Fortnite). Estes runs a hybrid analog/digital studio in Nashville built around a 1" tape machine and a deep collection of vintage instruments.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

• The road to becoming a session musician
• The plugin Jon calls his best mixing hack, and it's not an EQ or a compressor
• What it actually means when you cringe listening back to your own mix
• Why sending a mix out too soon has "no reward," even on a deadline
• Why Jon calls some of the most famous mixes in music history "insanely bad," and doesn't mean it as an insult
• Why he sometimes works to make a mix sound worse, on purpose
• How to force objectivity when you’re wearing multiple hats on a project
• The reason a different guitar or a different pick can beat any plugin move

To learn more about Jon Estes, visit: https://jonestes.com/

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