No. 01 · Energy

Make your mix feel faster — without touching the BPM

This is the one that broke my brain first. Luca's goal on a mix is to make it feel faster than the reference — without ever changing the tempo.

Same BPM. Same groove. But the mix moves more.

And it isn't just a vibe — it's a move you can dial in. He reshapes transients and release, and his tool for it is Articulate by Newfangled Audio: an envelope shaper that splits a sound into attack, decay, sustain and release so you can tighten each stage on its own.

On the percussion, he dries the release — shortens the tails just a touch. Less ring, less sustain, more snap. Nothing else in the track changes, but the whole thing suddenly reads quicker and tighter, because your ear hears shorter percussion as faster motion. Tempo is a number; energy is a feeling.

No. 02 · Low end

The “kick pocket” — the Skrillex trick

Everyone knows sidechaining. Almost nobody does it the way Luca does.

His tool here is FabFilter Pro-C 2, and he puts it on almost every element in the track — all keyed to the kick. But he isn't ducking the whole signal. He ducks only the tops — the high-mids and upper frequencies.

The result is a clean pocket the kick drops straight into. Nothing fights it. The kick never gets louder — everything else just gets out of its way. It's the same principle Skrillex is famous for: the kick always has its own lane, so it hits hard and clean without burying the track.

And here's the bonus: all that rhythmic ducking doesn't just tidy the low end — it adds movement. Every element breathes with the kick, which feeds straight back into No. 01 and makes the track feel faster without a single BPM change.

No. 03 · Dynamics

VCA automation is what makes the drop hit harder

This was Luca's “secret sauce” moment.

When the mix is basically done — the very final stage — he automates the energy of the whole track with VCA faders.

Right on the first kick of the hook, he pushes the level up 1 to 1.5 dB. That's the “oh!” — the tiny lift that makes your head snap up the instant the drop lands. And the quiet sections leading in — the build-up, the pre-chorus — he pulls down half a dB to a dB. The contrast does the work.

Here's why it's a VCA and not the master fader: a VCA changes how much signal you feed into your mix-bus and master-bus processing — so your compressors, clippers and limiters actually react differently. That dip before the drop gives the processing room to breathe; when the hook hits, everything slams back to life.

After mastering you won't see the volume jump. You'll feel it.

That's the difference between a chorus that's loud and a chorus that hits.

No. 04 · Workflow

Fewer plugins. Better mixes.

You'd expect a Grammy engineer to run an insane chain of boutique plugins. He doesn't.

Luca holds himself to about 15 plugins — total. The same ones, every session, for years. That constraint is the whole point: because he knows them cold, he never wastes a second wondering which one or why — and it's a huge part of how he works fast and how his sound stays his.

Chasing new plugins is procrastination with a credit card. Master a small kit until it's muscle memory, and your decisions get faster, your focus sharpens, and — counterintuitively — your mixes get better. Less choice, more clarity.

No. 05 · Your ears

Gain-match everything — and cut what isn't helping

The simplest habit on this list, and the one beginners always skip.

Every time Luca adds a plugin, he gain-matches it — same level in, same level out. Why? Because louder always sounds better — even when it's worse. Gain-matching kills that illusion so he can hear what the plugin is actually doing. And if it isn't clearly making the track better, it comes straight off the chain.

He pairs it with one more habit: riding the monitor volume all session long, up and down, to keep his ears fresh and check the balance at different levels. (His rule for level: loud enough that you can't easily hold a conversation, never loud enough to hurt.)

Neither is glamorous. Both are what separate a mix that sounds good in your room from one that sounds good everywhere.