Now
Jaycen Joshua mixes out of Canton House Studios, his own multi-room facility in the hills above the San Fernando Valley, built after thirteen years at Larrabee. The main room runs a custom desk and Augspurger Duo12 mains for stereo work; a second room is dedicated to Dolby Atmos, run with engineer Mike Seaberg. His mix credits include Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Rosalía’s El Mal Querer, SZA’s SOS, Justin Bieber’s Purpose, Mary J. Blige’s Growing Pains and Good Morning Gorgeous, Usher’s Coming Home, and Summer Walker’s Finally Over It. His mixes have leaned on aggressive drums and heavy parallel processing since the SSL-console era; the work is largely in the box now, built around his own plugins.
Recognition
He has won three Grammy Awards, been nominated for thirteen more, and won two Latin Grammy Awards.
How he got here
Jaycen started working in A&R and marketing at fifteen, under his godfather Jheryl Busby at MCA and Motown, then at DreamWorks and MTV/Viacom. He enrolled at the Los Angeles Recording Workshop in 2003, interned at Larrabee, and by 2006 was Dave Pensado’s assistant — running cables and getting coffee before he was cutting records. That year he also worked on the Penua Project, one of his first outside mix credits.
Philosophy
“Make listening to a record like a movie experience,” he told Sound on Sound in 2010, describing how he builds a mix to move the way a scene does. Asked what a client is paying for, he put it plainly: “You are being paid for your taste.”
Teaching and tools
Jaycen is a master at Mix With The Masters, where engineers study his sessions, and took part in a summit at Abbey Road’s Studio Two in July 2023 and a masterclass with Dave Pensado at the 2022 AES convention. He also builds mixing plugins with Cradle — The God Particle, released in 2023, and the drum-bus processor Orion, released in 2024 — putting the tools he uses at Canton House into other people’s sessions.