Inside The Mix: "Lift Me Up" by Skillet, with Joel Wanasek

September 01, 2026

Written by Aiden Wren-Pierce | IG: @aiden_w.p

Number Eight

Joel Wanasek's mix of Skillet's "Lift Me Up" hit #1 on iTunes Rock and #9 on iTunes All Genre charts day one. That's his eighth number one overall, and the seventh in the last three years. "It is always exciting to get one," he says, "because you might only get on a couple of tracks a year that really have the potential to chart like that.” "Lift Me Up” was produced by David Cowell, who Joel describes as “one of the hardest working and most focused producers in rock.”

Credit: https://www.impactus.org/articles/music-review-skillet-dominion/

Going The Extra Mile

The song was mixed, mastered, approved, and done. Then Cowell called Wanasek. He'd been driving around listening to the master, and he was wondering, “Could we beat this mix? “

So they went back in to reamp. The tone in Seth Morrison’s hands and insanely tight playing was the foundation, so it made swapping tones fun and exciting. Seth is also a massive fan of Mesa dual rectifiers and knows what kind of tones he loves. Assistant engineer Joe Wolitz reamped several different guitar tones for the song and ended up using a new Mesa dual rectifier reissue. "Those new dual rectifiers have a sound to them," Joe says. "It's a really great amp, a little different than the older rectifiers in the bottom end tightness and top end smoothness.”

They sent Cowell a couple of new tone options. Picked one. Joel polished off the updated mix and sent it back to mastering legend Joe LaPorta for a second pass and the chef’s kiss. They sent it to the band as an alternate mix option, and Skillet loved it. "We wanted to leave no stone unturned," Cowell says. "Glad we really pushed ourselves to the limits on this."

Drums

Kick drum started with sample auditions, and Wanasek landed on one that isn't commercially available, just something he keeps around, run through Metric Halo Channel Strip and DF Smack. "A little bit of that goes a long way," he says of DF-Smack, which shows up more than once in this session. “Finding the correct kick to bring the energy of the song to life is one of the most important decisions in drum mixing.”

The snare is a blend: Drum Vault - Snare Arsenal's Vibe Room Snare 2 layered with a sample from Joey Sturgis's Drumshotz Fire Edition pack, through Waves TransX, some EQ, an L1 for transient smoothing, and DF Excite 2 for top end. “Sometimes you need just a pinch of a limiter to glue a really hyped modern-sounding snare sample so it sits nicely into the pocket,” says Wanasek. There's also a room layer pulled from Drumshotz Dan Braunstein. Toms were provided by Cowell and mostly untouched beyond an ADR compressor and some board EQ. When the source is already good, you don't need to do much to it.

Bass

“John Cooper plays with power and has great dynamics, so I didn’t need to go crazy with bass processing,” said Wanasek. MH Channel Strip EQ into Pro-MB to tighten up the low mids and low end, a bit of limiting, then out to SSL E-Channel hardware compression, a 5:1 ratio, medium-fast release. Wanasek wasn't chasing a specific spot relative to the kick here; it landed where it landed. “I like to mix bass loud and proud, so trying to get that as forward as possible in a mix, that is one place the SSL really shines, especially when it comes to allowing space for the kick,” he said. “I do also have a few clever transient spacing tricks that help. But, I’ll save for a future Nail The Mix,” he added.

Guitars

Rhythm tone: dual rectifier into a Mesa cab, captured with a 57 and a Hendy Amps SDC mic. From there, Wanasek kept the processing deliberately close to how he'd treat an amp sim, even though these were real amps: EQ, some limiting, a pinch of soothe, an instance of Waves Rbass around 80Hz. "I was trying to recreate some of that modern sim edge with the guitars, but keep the impact of a real tube amp," he says, "even though they were real guitars with an amp, just to do something a little different and more unique tonally can catch a listener's ear." The arrangement stayed lean: rhythms, a filter guitar, some octaves, a few clean and glitch layers. Cowell doesn't overproduce, and it shows here.

Post-Production

Korey Cooper and David Cowell handled all the synths, beats, and loops, around 30-something post-production tracks. Wanasek's approach was mostly to let the SSL Origin Console do the heavy lifting rather than pile on plug-ins. What stood out to him more than any specific processing choice was that Cowell and Cooper build their own synth and loop sounds. "They don't like to use premade sounds," Wanasek says. "They are very into making their own synth sounds so everything always sounds fresh." Where Wanasek did reach for something, it was usually a saturator like Saturn, and only on a loop or synth that needed a bit more density to cut through. “When the team making the sounds creates excellent sounding production, there isn’t much to do in the mix other than clean a few small things up, shape tones to fit the larger picture, and try not to get in the way of already great producing,” he added.

Vocals

Cooper's vocal tracks came in recorded on a custom tube mic. EQ, a de-esser, Decapitator for a little saturation, Pro-MB to tighten up some low end, Metric Halo Channel Strip for EQ, an L1 pulling gentle peaks, feeding into a Chandler RS-660 on the hardware side. "I think that's an incredible compressor," he says, "John sounded particularly great through the 660, and it really brought out the unique character of his voice." “You can really slam that compressor and it doesn’t sound like you just did 10 db of gain reduction. It is such a great musical tool with a fantastic tone,” he commented.

He also feathered in hardware effects boxes for depth: an Echo Pro, an Eventide Eclipse, a Lexicon PCM92 on a narrow hall preset, a touch of analog slap delay on a SPX 990. Wanasek's take is that “hardware effects carry a depth plugins don't quite get to,” and he uses them deliberately for the sound.

There's a lot of hands-on work under the hood, too: clip-gain automation on nearly every phrase so it hits the hardware compressor perfectly, manual sibilance cleanup, and fader automation where needed. Cooper needed very little processing beyond that. Wanasek notes that he will “do whatever is necessary so the vocal sounds amazing on speaker phone over Instagram on new music friday” and that is one of his most important benchmarks in mixing.

How The Board Fits In

Wanasek mixes on an SSL Origin console, and it's worth explaining briefly how that actually works day to day, since it's not something most people mixing entirely in the box get to experience. He keeps his channel assignments more or less fixed, kick always lands on the same channel, snare on another, and so on, not because those channels sound different from any other channel on a brand-new board, but because it makes recalls fast. "I don't want to think too much when I'm mixing, I want to react and feel" he says. "Being able to emotionally connect with the song and find the balance pocket is so important in mixing." He's not being flippant about it, either. The point is to react to the song, not run a science experiment on it.

Recalls, he says, take him about a minute. He doesn't photograph the board, just writes settings in a notepad, since most of what he's adjusting is EQ and he rounds to the nearest dB marks on an SSL anyway. If something needs more surgical EQ than the board's fixed points allow, that's when he'll drop into the computer for it. It's a hybrid workflow, essentially: broad strokes on hardware, precision in the box when the hardware can't get there. The emphasis is on speed and turnaround time while getting all of the sonic benefits of the console.

Mix Bus & Master

The mix bus is pretty simple: Ozone for a limiter on this song, and an Alan Smart C2 on the hardware side for instrumental bus compression. “I normally use the AL-1 limiter on my master, but for whatever reason I felt like Ozone was the move on this particular song,” he said. On the end of the SSL, a Chandler Zener limiter that's barely doing anything. "I'm barely compressing, maybe just the highest transients, tapping the needle," Wanasek says. "But it sounds incredible just running audio through it." On this one, he ran a 4:1 ratio with auto-release and a 1ms attack. That gets captured into a Burl B2 bomber converter.

Where That Leaves Things

Any good mix starts with a great song and a really well thought-out production. Mixing isn’t always about performing surgery; sometimes it's just helping highlight the right things in a track that make the listener connect with the song. Wanasek says he prefers to focus on that when mixing.