Mark Willsher
Grammy®-winning engineer Mark Willsher moves seamlessly between roles as recording engineer, mixer, and producer — as well as supervising music editor. His expertise spans a wide range of genres, from film to classical, folk, and hip-hop, with a discography that includes the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, re-releases of the original ‘Star Wars’ soundtracks, ‘Riverdance: The Animated Adventure’, ‘Downton Abbey’, Michael Franti & Spearhead, the St. Lawrence & Kronos String Quartets, and the San Francisco Symphony.
Selected Credits
Recent projects include New Line Cinema’s ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ (composer Stephen Gallagher), Netflix’s animated feature ‘Ultraman Rising’ (composer Scot Stafford), and Deutsche Grammophon’s release of Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Adriana Mater’ (music director Esa-Pekka Salonen), which earned Mark a Grammy® Award for Best Opera Recording (engineer/mixer).
In addition to production work, Mark has always been actively involved in audio education as both guest lecturer and guest faculty. He has lectured at The Peabody Institute, MIT, The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, The Royal Academy of Music, and was guest audio faculty at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada for seventeen years. Since 2023, Mark has been guest faculty at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. He is also on the panel of immersive audio experts for the ECHO Project: a collaborative research project on 3D microphone array techniques for orchestral recording, which has broad industry sponsorship.
With a background in music performance and a deep understanding of all technical aspects of the recording process, Mark’s guiding philosophy is to create recordings that allow listeners to be fully immersed in the emotional experience – free from awareness of speakers, microphones, editing, or mixing.
His personal studio is a fully equipped immersive mixing space supporting Dolby Atmos and other immersive formats, with a hybrid analogue/digital signal path.