Maria Elisa Ayerbe: "There’s not a single mix that I don’t use Leapwing Audio on"

As a mixing engineer, Maria Elisa Ayerbe has been involved in a number of Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated albums, working with the likes of Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, J. Lo, Natti Natasha, Il Divo, and many more. Here she tells Headliner about her independent music label, what she’s been up to recently, and why she uses Leapwing Audio plugins on every one of her mix projects.

As well as having her own studio in Hialeah, Miami-Dade County, Ayerbe has since 2015 worked out of Art House Studios, founded by multi-awarded producer Julio Reyes Copello.

“Being a mixing engineer keeps me away from people naturally, and I’ve been receiving lots of projects, so it’s actually been a really busy year,” she reflects. “There’s a lot of music being made at the moment, and I think we’re currently seeing some sort of a creative awakening.”

Ayerbe sources most of her work through soundbetter.com, and has been asked to work on projects as far away as Egypt or Japan. In fact, she currently finds herself working on music by a Japanese punk band.

Our conversation quickly moves onto Ayerbe’s workflow, and in particular the plugins she finds herself using daily as a mixing engineer:

“There’s not a single mix that I don’t use Leapwing Audio on to be honest,” she reveals. “The four of them are always there at different stages. When I started using DynOne [the first plugin that the company released] I immediately fell in love with it.

“You can do multiband processing in parallel, and compression at a very smart level with a lot of control per band. I can use the expander function to get that super crunchy roomy garage type of snare drum tone on my mix buss. Then there’s StageOne, which is just an amazing stereo widener that has a lot of different options that no other plugins have, and CenterOne, that allows you to have this mid-side EQ using just three faders and a slider, which is super easy.”

Ayerbe has also been using the six different instrument-centric presets included with Leapwing’s new Al Schmitt Signature plugin in a range of capacities:

“It just does this really bizarre sorcery thing where you can put it on anything, and it sounds amazing!” she says.

In 2016, Ayerbe created an independent music label called South Mountain Music, which has gone from strength to strength and has kept her busy in recent years.

“The ethos is just about nurturing those artists that come to me for production or engineering,” she explains. “If I see that there’s potential for them to move on to the next stage, I’m going to help them cross that bridge, and formalise everything in terms of publishing their catalogue and getting them ready with the right marketing materials — and everything else that a music release involves — which can sometimes be so hard for musicians.

“I mainly consider it as a way to keep promoting bands, especially rock music and rock en español, which is a genre that’s barely holding on but a genre that I very much grew up with. So I just want to keep promoting that kind of music.”