Mihai Grecea
Founder, Music Producer
Recording & mixing engineer, film director, musician
Selective discography:
The Groovy Bastards, Driftwood, Rapax, Totem, Post Mortem, Masked Toys, Playlist, This Cover Band, Evo Band, Bulgaru' etc.
With over 20 years of experience in music production, filmmaking, and the advertising industry — of which the past 7 years have been intensely dedicated to the field of music production.
His beginnings in the industry date back to the years 1990–1994 when he was a guitarist in the rock bands Totem and Post Mortem, with which he won several awards at the festivals of that era.
During the same period, he was part of the Rock Aid Association, which organized the festivals of the same name in Bacău. The association facilitated the creation of a small, rather primitive recording studio at the Puppet Theater in Bacău in 1993, where Mihai Grecea began making his first full analog music productions.
After a fairly long period dedicated to the advertising industry, which was emerging in Romania between 1999 and 2007 — a period in which he worked as a copywriter, creative director, and audio-video producer — Mihai turned to film and video production, founding the production company Easyfilm. During this time, he produced and directed a large number of commercials, corporate films, and music videos.
He also created or contributed to the making of three artistic documentary films: The Sounds of Bucharest, Birdman (an HBO Europe production), and Colectiv, which had a significant national and international festival circuit. Colectiv, for which he also did the sound recording, won 38 awards and received 56 nominations at the most prestigious film festivals and awards worldwide, also being nominated in two categories at the Oscars in 2021.
Since 2012, he returned to music, collaborating with the Traian 150 studio alongside Costin Dumitrache. After the Colectiv tragedy in 2015, he took over the legacy of Traian 150, which had ceased activity, and founded El Studió — first in Bacău, his hometown, in 2022 as a pilot project, and since 2025 in Bucharest.
His approach to music production is based on dedication and passion. That is, on endless patience and energy, a genuine concern to understand the artistic intent, and a serious and ongoing effort to find the technical and artistic solutions best suited to each project.
This is also reflected in the seriousness and scope of the investment, and in the way El Studió is designed, built, and equipped. All of this is the result of a long process of learning and refining — as well as considerable financial investments and human effort.
In the tradition of engineers from the great studios of Europe, you can have hour-long discussions with him about the nuances offered by different microphones, amplifiers, preamplifiers, equalizers, compressors, converters, guitars, basses, drums, etc., without feeling even slightly like he's repeating himself :) Then, when it’s time to record, he’ll bring out the most suitable equipment for the artist’s needs.
His working philosophy is that each musical piece has its own sonic world and its own story to tell. And for this, it is important that even from the production stage, maximum appropriate technical resources and suitable know-how are involved.
He believes that the attention given to the production stage is the key to a top-tier musical product. It matters how you structure the production, how you pace the effort, how you make decisions, what equipment you use, how the recording room is prepared, what musical instruments are used, how they’re set up, how musicians are prepared mentally, emotionally, and technically to begin recording. Every detail treated with care adds value. Gaps and lack of attention in the recording stage can dramatically diminish a musical production.
Later, during the editing and mixing stage—starting from very well-recorded sources, using the studio’s premium equipment and extensive collection of software, and making creative decisions based on precise monitoring in the acoustically treated mixing room at El Studió — a premium, coherent, impactful, original sound is achieved that still remains, at its core, the sound of the artistic intent. The studio helps artists sound “big,” “expensive,” memorable, professional.