Top 5 Template Tools: Jacquire King 

Multiple Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer, Jacquire King (Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, Shania Twain, Modest Mouse) takes us on a tour of his mix template.

17 December 2025

“It’s very important,” affirms award-winning American producer and engineer Jacquire King on using a DAW template. “The template is not written in stone and I will, of course, modify it to do what is appropriate for the song, the production, and the end goal and vision.” According to King, the template brings a solid foundation to his sessions. “It’s a quick start instead of building everything from scratch,” he says. “So, it allows you to bring your common thinking and application to a mixing job. It accelerates your starting point, alleviating a lot of over thinking and heavy lifting, and you get to interact with the music a lot sooner.” Here are his Top 5 Template Tools:

SAFARI PEDALS FOX ECHO CHORUS

I primarily use it as a vocal thickening effect, as it’s a bit like a slap delay. I’m a big fan of the old tape-based Roland Chorus Echo, which I have a couple of, and have used for years. But the Fox Echo brings a new flavour to it. It’s got a particular sonic landscape and has a way of creating dimension especially as it has a width parameter to it. So, while it is very much inspired by the Roland Chorus Echo, it’s not exactly that either. Safari makes a lot of really cool ‘inspired by’ software pedals, and they even have a great mastering desk plug-in. I just really like the sonics of the Fox Echo, and it has a little bit of a unique character, which I particularly love when used on vocals as it also has a spring reverb built in.

UNIVERSAL AUDIO HITSVILLE REVERB CHAMBER

What’s cool about these types of emulations, such as the Hitsville Reverb Chamber, is that it’s so baked into the DNA of our record listening experience. It’s the sonics of songs and productions of the past. There’s a lot of depth of field to the reverb, especially with the microphone and speaker choices along with the repositioning of the microphones in the space. There are so many qualities that are just beautifully done with this one. I really love being able to position the mics in the spaces and play with the decay time. There are many things you can do to make the colour and shape of it really shine. I typically use it a lot on drums. It’s also cool for horns, background vocals, and things where you want some sort of a unique and controlled ambience. I endeavour to always capture a bit of room tone on things where it’s appropriate, and it’s a really beautiful reverb to put on top of a room sound, to kind of just shift the colour of a room tone a little bit. It’s an incredible tool and it is a classic sound.

SOUNDTOYS MICROSHIFT

I always use it on lead vocals because it’s a great thickener and widens the pitch centre. For example, one side’s a little flat, and another side’s a little sharp – it widens the pitch centre. We’ve become used to vocals being more on pitch, and kind of forgotten the personality of many iconic singers, where they’re not singing exactly on pitch the whole time and that gives character to a performance. Sometimes, they would be a little sharp or a bit flat compared to what the standard is now. This plug-in can provide a little bit of help for the pitch centre with some width, so that you can leave a little bit of personality in there because, as it widens the pitch centre, as well as, adds extra harmonic colour around the sound.

Also, you can vary how much it’s taking away from the true pitch. It also allows you to add a little bit of delay to it to add some additional thickness around the sound. Sometimes you get into situations where somebody tonally is kind of at the top of their range or their breath may have been a little short or the note is just tonally a little shallower, so I will use it as a little bit of a backfill, where I will push the effect return up and exaggerate the balance so the voice tone doesn’t sound so small.

WAVES SCHEPS OMNI CHANNEL 2

This is like a Swiss Army knife for me! I primarily use it as a bus treatment. It’s deadly on a lot of things because it has saturation on the front end, which is kind of similar to a Decapitator. It has the thump feature of the Decapitator that you can add in there too. It’s got a really fantastic filter set; the gate is super powerful; and the De-esser module has two bands, so it’s really powerful. I don’t really use it much on drums and bass as a bus because I have some other more specific things I will use on those, but on general instrument buses like horns or strings or background vocals and especially lead vocals, it is one of the plug-ins I rely on because it offers so much flexibility.

On the De-sser module, I will use one band in the primary frequencies of sibilance, which are typically somewhere between the 3-6kHz frequency area. I use it as a wide bell curve to get those hotspots down. But then I will use the second band in the shelf mode at a much higher frequency, like 10k or above because sibilance happens in that primary 4k-ish place, but then sometimes also you get very wispy, high frequency, breathy tones. Instead of using the De-esser in the typical way, where you have it affecting everything above a selected frequency, I will use it as a split process, so that the primary band is just affecting the very top, while the other band hits the hotspots in the mid-range frequencies.

PSP VINTAGE WARMER 2

This is an incredible plug-in. It has been around for a very long time and is a very good loudness tool. It is not really as appropriate as it used to be for me as a mix bus tool, but a decade or more ago, it was a great mastering tool too. You could get really aggressive with it and really smash something into place without tearing it apart because of the way the knee and the release functions work. It’s been on my guitar bus for electric guitars for 15 years – you can transform guitar sounds with it. It has a feature where you if you click on the name plate, it flips the plug-in around, and you get access to some extra features like saturation bands, which are also really nice to play with, especially when it comes to guitars.