(upbeat music) - Immersive audio podcast. In conversations with industry thought leaders, practitioners, artists, academics, and entrepreneurs, discussing all aspects of this rapidly evolving industry. From art, science, and business to practical insights and project case studies, we aim to inform, educate, explore, and unite the community. - Hello and welcome to the Immersive Audio Podcast, episode 122 with me, your host, Oliver Cadill, and Monica Bowles. Hi, Monica, how are you? - Hello, I'm doing all right, how are you Oliver? - I'm doing great, thank you. Our guest today, Justin Gray. Justin is an award-winning Toronto-based bassist, composer, producer, and recording engineer. Justin, welcome to the podcast. - It's great to have you on. - Thank you so much, Oliver and Monica, such a pleasure. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, and it's lovely to be here with you. So I'm here in Toronto and Canada. This is where I was born and raised, and where my studio is, and pleasure tuning in from a beautiful fall day in Toronto. - Thank you very much. We briefly met at AES Conference in Huddersfield, in the UK a few years ago, if you remember. - I do. - Well, let's give you an opportunity, and can you please enlighten us on your rather extensive background working in various disciplines across the music? So could you please tell us a little bit more? - Absolutely. So my day to day is as an engineer, as a mix engineer and mastery engineer, both in stereo and immersive formats. Definitely my kind of passion, and where I'm really, really focused, then have been for the last decade, is in the area of spatial and immersive audio. But that all kind of stems from, as you mentioned, being connected to music in many ways. That includes going back to the beginning of my relationship to music, as a performer, as a bassist. Started playing really young and went through school, as a jazz musician. I've toured the world, playing a lot of different music from around the world. Jazz and R&B, I've studied a lot of Indian music, a lot of Afro-Cuban music, Flamenco music, classical music. And my kind of journey as a bassist, but also as a composer, I was always equally fond of the studio side of things. So a lot of projects that I started playing bass in, I eventually kind of started to produce those records and be involved in the editing process. And that transitioned into eventually building a studio and starting to be a part of kind of producing and mixing records, which has been a part of my kind of life for the past two decades. Along that journey, I did find that the art of mastering was something that was really connected to. And I'd say for the past about 15 years, it's a place where I've spent the majority of my kind of professional energy, specifically in the stereo world to start and still to today. Probably just because my relationship was sound, I found that it just kind of ignited all the things that I like about working on audio, the finite little details of it. But to come to where we're at here, with the podcast and the topic of immersive and spatial audio, I, my relationship with it goes back to essentially the first time I started hearing it in cinema. And also just as an audio file, I was raised with parents who were kind of audio files. We never had a surround system. But as soon as I built the studio for myself, I actually had a 5.1 system. And just listened to a lot of DVDAs and SACDs and eventually Blu-Ray and listened to a lot of whatever music was produced. Obviously, a lot of classical music, because that's acoustically recorded music certainly has been a regular mainstay in that world. But through all of that, I think I've wanted to create music in the four. In an immersive capacity or in a spatial capacity for many, many years. And as soon as I connected with the technology, which even prior to Atmos, just in 5.1, it's kind of unlocked my ability as a composer and as a producer to express music how I want to. And that kind of fast-forward through it is I'm working daily as an immersive audio engineer, very regularly in Dolby Atmos. Remixing songs for folks. I call it spatial remixing. So I work with a lot of labels around the world and independent artists kind of reimagining their music. And then over the past four years, I worked on a project of my own that I created from the ground up for this to be an immersive experience. And it's called "Amerst." And it's released this year. And it's been an absolute pleasure to kind of finally bring a whole bunch of different things together to just get to express that music and kind of the music in the way that I imagine it. - Do you recall that feeling when the penny dropped and like you realized, wow, this is not a gimmick. This is something very different. This is something I want to be part of. Maybe it's not part of the kind of the typical biography or work experience. It's more like a personal, more emotional, more philosophical moment. When it comes to spatial audio specifically. - Absolutely. There's kind of two pivotal moments that I, that are a part of my memory in terms of when the world of spatial and surround music came into my life. The first is we actually have one of, I don't know if it's the first, but it's definitely one of the earliest IMAX theaters in the world in Toronto. It's called the Cynosphere. And so when I was a kid, we would go to the Cynosphere. And it's this big, it's this geodesic dome. And inside is this big IMAX theater. And I still can vividly remember sitting down to watch movies and they used to light up the speakers behind the screen and say there's a speaker here. There's a speaker here. And they would do the whole show for you. And we used to go see movies there all the time. And at that time, I'm too young at that point to be thinking of it from a career standpoint. But I do think there's something in there that is very formative for me. And then the next moment, the one that really locked me in, is I'm a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings. As a reader from when I was a kid, as someone who studied Howard Shore's scores, I think that some of the most important music of the 20th century. And they have this box set, which I first bought as DVDAs, and now they have them on Blu-ray, of all of the cues from the Lord of the Rings, all three movies. You can get these awesome box sets and they have these beautiful booklets and everything. And they're the original full cues of just the score and there's the surround recordings and the surround mixes from "Air and Abbey Road." And they're just so beautiful. And I remember the first time I got the five ones set up and I got those discs and I sat down and I listened. And again, it's music that I already had like a deep relationship with. And it was like an instantaneous, like can't turn back kind of moment where, even from that music, like realistically, it's very much presented as like a pricinium-based music. It's a pretty standard classical recording of just ambience in the back. But the feeling that it was able to reproduce of truly putting me there, like basically being Howard who was directing those sessions, something I could never forget. And it definitely changed how I realized I could kind of interface with music from a technological standpoint. - I think we can move on to a hot topic. And a hot topic today is about what it really takes to produce an album in special audio from the ground-up covering aspects such as recording, mixing, mastering, orchestration, music writing. And steps beyond music production such as marketing and distribution. On this very podcast, Monica and I talk a lot about the importance conceiving ideas with special audio in mind, specifically talking about music production. We try to collectively evolve and move on from this paradigm of trying to retrofit the stems that were created, recorded, produced for the stereo format. And looks like with this project immersed, you really embrace that challenge and that philosophy of trying to work through every single element with a very different outlook and having that special audio context in mind from ground up. So for the past year or so, you've been working very hard on this project, on this album called The Muscat. Can you tell us what has inspired you to embark on this project? And maybe just give us a bit of an overview about the project in general as well. - Absolutely. So the compositional process for this album actually began close to four years ago. And part of it links back to the last album I made, which was called New Horizons. And actually if anyone listened to that music, they would recognize some very similar concepts around global fusion music, Indian influence, jazz influence, chamber and R&B influence. So as a composer, there's a through line there, but the very first thing that I mixed in my Atmos Studio, which was in late 2016, I started it and then I kind of finished it in 2017, was that record. Now that record, I did not compose or conceive or produce with spatial in mind. When I got to that process, I broke the record down, I went right back to the multi-tracks and I tried to remix it especially. And what I learned about myself in that moment was really the catalyst for this project immersed.
The first thing I learned was that as soon as I started to distribute the elements spatially, and you know, it's important here because it's my own music at that point. So I have a, you know, direct relationship to the parts and I was the recording engineer. I realized all the things that I wished I had done, all the things that I wanted to do to actually realize that music in three dimensions. And it kind of was this thing that just as I worked through it, every challenge I faced created a solution in my mind for how I would do it again. It's kind of like it's kind of a cool process. Like go through, you know, this is working, this isn't working. Oh, I wish I had this. I wish I had this. But what's fascinating is that since it was my own music, my own compositions, my own recordings, my own production, it was like this kind of self-written textbook in a way if that makes sense. I actually finished that record and I'm very fond of it, but I never released it. And that's because when I finished, when I got to the end of the process, I felt as though I did the best I could and it wasn't what I wanted it to be. And again, I've played that at conferences. Like I'm very proud of the mixes. I think it's, you know, it sounds nice. It sounds better than stereo, quite frankly, and in immersive. But it, all of the things that I knew it wasn't was when I said, okay, it's time to start writing. And so the process really began with the idea of when you start to write and the positionality of the music as there at the source, the arrangement, the orchestration, the instrumentation, the dialogue, the conversation, the form, everything can be influenced to have space as one of the factors. It's not the only factor. I mean, melody is still melody and groove is still groove. Harmony is still harmony, you know, form, tension, release. These are all the factors of composition that are truly, I would say, format, agnostic. But just like, you know, timbre and melody and structure, all of these things, when you add space as a component, it truly can be present at all times. If we write something where we know that it's going to be in front of us, I can now balance that timbrely with something behind me. And it changes the very core structure of how that feeling is. So that's kind of where it starts. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. I think when you start working and, you know, immersive, you quickly realize some of the things that work and don't work and the ways you do things different. And so I guess I'm curious what are some lessons that, some of your favorite lessons that you learned that you want to share with our audience today? That question is really deep. And that I feel like every single part of this process was that learning. But certainly at the very beginning is that at the end of the day, if we can have the arrangement evolve using space, the hard, like the work is kind of done already in terms of of the things as remixers that we're constantly trying to figure out. We're constantly trying to figure out how do we pull this thing apart and make the arrangement still make sense when realistically the biggest challenge was the arrangement does make sense in two channels, you know, assuming it's a good arrangement. Like it was designed for two channels, the way it was recorded, the way it was produced, the way it was edited, the way it was mixed, all of the above was this concept of the feeling was, you know, around this two channel delivery where when we don't, you know, limit ourselves to that and we understand the potential, it truly can just make every single part of the process actually like easier and trying to achieve that feeling. So from a compositional standpoint, what I learned is, first of all, I think to compose in the format, you do have to have a pretty intimate relationship with your aesthetics in space and by that, not only from that project I was describing, but like I have had the pleasure of working on thousands of songs as a spatial remixer. And through that process of re-imagining other people's music, I have also learned a lot about what I think feels good where, where I like to orchestrate certain instruments, what some of the problems that I've had to solve and that I, that if you just had written the music or you'd recorded those extra layers or you'd recorded it a certain way, it would have solved all of those problems rather than having to use digital processing to try and create a space. It's like, so, so that kind of leads me to the second part of it, which is once the music was composed and thought about and arranged, the recording of this record is really where the technology starts to meet the music. And maybe I'll kind of pause there before we get into it because it could be kind of endless. But what I'll say is like every single layer was recorded with microphone techniques so that I could have the instrument sit in the spatial location of the environment naturally without relying on reverbs later to create the reflections required for us to believe that that instrument was there. Again, that's a big one to unpack. So maybe I'll pause there. If you haven't mixed much before, it's the process of creating something for stereo is about trying to actually create this space that doesn't exist in stereo and where when you have, when you have a band, when you have musicians in a space, space exists. Yes. And then to be able to recreate it in a stereo space, relying on masking techniques, you're relying on different ways of microphone techniques to be able to try to fit everything into this very close space. So I think when you, if you're just working with stems and kind of trying to then remix that in a spatial way, I mean, a lot of, again, I think there's a lot of really amazing mix engineers that work in stereo and have learned all those techniques to make stereo sound amazing. But the reason it sounds amazing in stereo is also, I think, the reason it doesn't sound amazing when you take it out to put it back into space. And so I think it's really interesting that you're realizing that and then you decided to kind of move on with recording an album, thinking about that in mind and also recognizing too that there's a microphone techniques that can kind of help change the way that it sounds in the way that you're going to then mix it back kind of into space. So I think if you want to get in to kind of, you know, we have this kind of thought about, you know, pre-production and then recording. And if you want to, yeah, now kind of dive into all of that and take us into that process, I think that'd be great. Yeah, so from a, you know, pre-production is huge on this project and that's because with so many people, so there's 38 artists in total. It's, it's, it's somewhere around 35 days of recording in total. It's a lot of recording. And a big part of that is to do with the fact that I tracked this more like a film score or a video M score and that a lot of layers are overdubbed. And I will get into the philosophy of why because it's, it's very crucial to the sound of the project as a result in order to create something, you know, with that many moving pieces, it's all about pre-production. I mean, because you can't, you know, I don't have an endless budget. Budget is a factor in any project, as a matter of how big or how small and the timeline is always real. And really the hardest resources, can I get the musicians in the room? Can they be prepared and can I capture them at that time because I can't really afford to do it twice? So that's all pre-pro. And quite frankly, that's from all the way from mono to immersive. It doesn't matter. You've got to go through that process. So I recorded this at the studio at Humber College, which is where I'm a professor. I've worked in this studio for years. I know it really, really well. And to me, that was one of the greatest assets because I know what the space is capable of. And I was able to do like a year in advance of the project. I brought in a co-engineer Alex Gamble and Ryan McNabb, who are both part of this recording process. And we started doing tests. We started doing immersive array tests. We started doing reflections tests of piano, drums, bass, and any other instrument that we could kind of get our hands on just to see, just to see like what, you know, if we pushed the boundaries, if we broke some things, if we did, you know, what were the limitations of the space? And that was huge because it allowed me to come in with a great deal of confidence every day of how I wanted to record an instrument. And what technique I was going to use to reproduce what I wanted. But again, when we talk about what we want, that's the key. That's the pre-pro and that's the composition part. Prior to any instrument coming in, I already knew that the parts were written or the improvisations were, you know, well, well organized. I also am hiring people that I know really well. I basically wrote the music for them. No one on this project is someone that I don't know what they do and we haven't worked together a lot. So I'm really trying to, you know, as a producer and a composer, I'm also trying to set people up for success. Like, it's not a band, but I kind of write for people. So by the time that someone came in, let's say, for instance, you know, day one is bed tracks, which is just my self-unbase, my brother Derek Gray on drums and the pianist, Noam Lemmish. I knew that between the three of us, we could create the beds for the songs that we needed to give the musical context for everything else to be built. And then following that, it's like the next, from the very next moment, which is, I brought in a two saxophones and a trumpet as a trio, because I wanted melodic content to start a build the record. From that moment, everything was recorded spatially. So for instance, like I. orchestrated those melodies to be that saxophones are in the wide surround speakers, trumpets in the center for most of the songs that they're on. And so by recording their close sources, but also the reflections in the space above and behind them, I'm already building exactly where they are in the mix into the recording itself. And so that process, like, you know, for the next days, violin, well, I know that I want it to be a soloist. So I capture a lot of height and rear information to be able to position it in the front with a natural sense. But then when I get to the brass ensemble, well, I orchestrate the brass essentially always, trombone in the right surround, trumpet in the rear surrounds, trombone in the left surround. So quartet, and I record them behind a microphone array so that the reflections are naturally displaced in front of the listener. And by doing so, as we build the record, I'm building the reflections in the space for them as we go, but also capturing their close sources. And what this allows me to do in the mix stage is basically just decide how much dry close source do I want and how much of the reflections do I want. And most of it is an equal combination most of the time. And so by doing this, we're also monitoring and 914 the whole time in the studio. So I built the studio out to 914 for the entire recording session. And we're able to really just build that space and adjust the microphones according to every single moment. And so, you know, and unfortunately, if anyone's so curious on my YouTube channel, I at the end of every day, I documented the mic techniques, kind of a quick five minute video. So there are videos about these specific techniques of how the brass was done and the drums and electric guitars and percussion and Himalayan bowls and string quartet and bass, Vina and soloists and, you know, all like all of the 38 artists, but what was what was necessary from a pre-prost endpoint was that basically session starts at 10 a.m. when that artist walks in, all of the technology needs to be sorted out because then we're on to making music. And the technology needed to fade away, and I need to work with that artist as a producer as a composer to get them to play because at the end of the day, this is music, right? Like, we know this. Who cares about where the microphones are if the music's not happening and inspiring? So when a session was over at 6 p.m., I basically let the engineers go home. Myself and the videographer, co-director stayed in the studio. My assistant, an evening assistant arrived. We would strike the whole studio, have a nice clean space, and I would set up till 2-3 in the morning for the next day, being like, okay, this is the artist recording. This is where they're orchestrated on these pieces. This is how we're going to set up the microphones. If they're orchestrated in two places, I'd set up more microphones so that when we get to that song, the mic's already set up. And that way, again, they walk in at 10 a.m. I kind of put down the recording engineer's side of myself, handed off to Alex or Ryan who were the co-engineers and become the producer again. And for the artist, they just want to play. They sit down, they play, and our job is to capture all the speciality of it. So that's kind of, I would say, an overview of what this process was in terms of just ensuring that every single layer was captured in a way that it naturally served the composition and ultimately the immersive mix. Well, we will definitely have to include some a link to your YouTube videos. I think that will be really interesting for our audience. And so I guess kind of moving from we have the pre-production, the recording. Now, how did you take all of that and then get into the mixing process? Totally. So one of the challenges to recording in this way was some of these tracks came out with 600, 700 up to a thousand individual tracks. Now, a lot of those are grouped together in instruments. If drums had 38 mics and I did a drum over a dub, it's like, well, suddenly, we're already way up there with 76 mics. So it's not that there are that many musical layers. So the first and foremost thing is just organizing the sessions so clearly and editing and getting into the editing process. So I spend a long time also with my assistant, his name is Andrew Chung. We have a shared system for all of our studio work together. And we just went through the process of editing down the music, take selection. I am very much a kind of producer who like, if I make decisions in the studio about what playlists I want or like, you know, kind of trying to produce as I go and edit as I go. But with this many layers, this many people, some of the music is quite challenging, technically speaking, there was editing to be done. So an editing in the immersive is fascinating because again, if you allow it to be a part of the process, it can have significant effects on how tight you want to rhythm to be or what the flexibility of tuning is in space. Suddenly, if you have two things that are baked on top of each other in stereo, you might feel the need to tune it more than or choose takes. I didn't actually use tuning on anyone at any point in this record. But more so, what I mean is like sometimes actually the little bit of tonal, like, or like pitch flexibility across the front to the rear is a totally different effect than if it's baked on top of each other. And it's kind of wild, like to be reminded that if you're editing in stereo, I think that some of our aesthetic choices are kind of different. And it makes sense if we think of like a choir, for instance, in a big hall, which is naturally a beautiful spatial presentation of music. Well, it's kind of the differentiation of pitch that makes a choir sound so fantastic. It's the same with this infinite orchestra. Obviously all within reason. But if everyone truly was playing the exact same harmonic content, it would be very thin and boring. And so as soon as it got into the space and like editing with the 3D space, you know, I'm editing in 916 the whole time, it also affected my decisions afterwards when it came to, you know, editing is the kind of last phase of orchestration. With this project, I will admit and with a lot of my productions, I kind of overtrack sometimes like, oh, let's get another layer. Let's let's put a lot of paint on the canvas. And then the editing process was also working with my co-producer Drew Jureka to, you know, thin things out and say, you know what? This got a little busy. It's kind of over orchestrated or it's overwritten. If you do it in stereo, you would remove so many layers to try to make space. But when it's in immersive and it was already placed where it was, the decisions around the very arrangement that was being built through the editing process changes. In fact, I'll go the opposite where there's a couple pieces, where it kind of got to the place where I edited it all. A piece pendulum is an example of this. And I was like, huh, this piece is not done. And I went back to the recording studio again about eight months later and did another recording session for two pieces of music that were that I felt once I presented them properly and immersive and got a total picture of the record, I realized that they were actually underdeveloped. And that I still needed a soloist in one section and I needed some string textures in another section. And in fact, the song pendulum didn't have drum set on it at first. And I was like, ah, this kind of, I want to orchestrate the tub, let you know, the North Indian instrument to be totally surrounding me. But I'm kind of missing the anchor of this. But I really do think that if I edited in stereo, I wouldn't have necessarily felt that. I think it would have felt full. And it probably would have been like, I would have been removing parts where by editing it in the immersive space, it actually kind of encouraged me to do more sometimes because I'm trying to keep this, this environment alive right over the course of the record. I'm trying to keep this, this development feeling present. And any time that I felt like, ah, you know what, right now it's not there. Suddenly, there's room for another layer in the back, even if it's super quiet, that will just kind of, I don't know, just keep us in this, this surreal environment. I have kind of a clarifying question. As far as when, so again, you're you saying having up to what 76 microphones on one instrument, one like 38 is the most and it was on drums. Okay. Okay. So 38 microphones on drums. And then would you kind of mix that into the, is it 9.9, 9.1.6? Okay. The 9.1.6. So where you kind of, you would mix that to the 9.1.6. And then that's where you would edit from. That's a great question. So another, I would actually say that this kind of goes all the way back to pre-pro. Atmos is, as we know, is one format in a sea of incredible spatial and immersive formats. There's no question that it has, it's, you know, it has some serious commercial potential right now. It's, Dolby has done a great job over many decades now to build their name, to build their ecosystem, to build their distribution platforms. And I do think that atmos as an object-based delivery format is proving itself to be very, very functional and a great tool, but it is important that we all always know that it is just one of many. I did consciously choose to use atmos as the way in which I wanted to deliver this record. I did that for quite frankly, I did it for commercial reasons. I've got the ability to share it now in streaming. I've got the ability to have a logical, binoral fold. I've got the ability to share it on blu-ray, which is the way in which the film that it's paired with is also capable of being delivered in high resolution. So, you know, all of those decisions going back to thinking about the end format all the way at the very beginning. Now, as a result of saying, okay, I'm going to do this in atmos. In Home Entertainment Atmos, 916 is the widest speaker pattern or the widest speaker
that we can have in cinematic. It's different and that's an interesting conversation to have. But so I literally orchestrated this record around the idea of nine speakers on the lower level six on the top and an LFE. I will say the LFE is not I wouldn't call it orchestration. I would call it pure mixing. I didn't write parts that are only in the LFE. I just augment parts using it. So it really is a 15 channel orchestration concept and not for better or for worse, but if I if you choose the format to go beyond 15 channels, you start to fight the format. And so I just kind of like I I was like 15 is enough. It's enough places and literally like my arrangements would be like, okay, I want 15 layers of kalimba. I want 15 vocal overdubs for this track. Like I use that quite realistically because of just understanding how the format delivers and all the above to get to your question objects in an ADM file or the thing to understand because I wanted this to essentially resemble what we could call like a discrete channel 916 mix. What I did was I used the objects as essentially what they become and what they can become is an ADM file can kind of become a stem out of your project. And I know this because as a mastering engineer when I import people's ADMs, I work on them and it's essentially a version of object based stem mastering because the objects are separated from the bed and any object comes in as a mono element with spatial metadata. So what I did was I organized the whole record like you would a film score delivery. So I have a 904 drum object bed a 904 strings object bed a 906 percussion bed a 906 bed for the soloists. What this looks like at the end of the day look at my ADM. It's huge in file size. I'm using all the objects, but that's not that doesn't mean I'm using all the locations 95% of it is objects sitting on top of each other. When we understand the spatial coding of Atmos, there's no disadvantage to having multiple objects sit on top of each other. They're all going to be treated the same. There's no there's no technical disadvantage to doing so. And so what it means, though, is that I set up these oxes. This is exactly your question. So I had a 904 or 906 or whatever was appropriate for the instrument ox for each thing. So drums as an example is mixed into a 906 ox track in Pro Tools and then that is going to the drum 906 object bed. I did that for yet drums, percussion strings, brass, harmony, soloist, melody, then separate objects for bass, separate objects for vocals, separate objects for tubla, and then a separate 906 effects object bed. And the reason I did that is when I got to do the cinema remix for this. So like I'm coming to London, for instance, and going to New York again this year and I've done a bunch of cinematic playbacks of the record as a film. Well, when we get to the cinema, 916 is no longer a limitation. It's actually a full fledged full high full resolution non-spatially coded object-based medium. And so it actually makes sense to break that apart and spread the things around the space more because there are speakers there and it actually can expand to fill that environment. So when I got to the dub stage, suddenly my master, my ADM master is a stem out and I can redistribute object locations. I can re-level things. I can re- I can exactly as though it was like a delivering 5/1 stems for a film score mix. So all of those decisions went back to before editing. I organized everything. I even figured out what the binoral settings would be across the whole record for every instrument so that the record could be delivered as one long file for blue ray. So all the tech back end was figured out at the start. Now this is because I've been through the headache of it. So many times of other people's projects that I was like, I want to make this smooth. And I was I was able to kind of anticipate all of those problems. And it yeah, it so goes right like before editing. All that had to get laid out. And it's kind of cool. Very interesting to hear your whole process around that and kind of setting up your sessions and how you're kind of working through all of that. Let's talk about mixing because I feel like it's one of the key elements in this whole process, the whole 3D mixing paradigm. Maybe if you could elaborate on what techniques you have deployed, what kind of pitfalls you've avoided or came across, what kind of things you could share with the community that you were interesting, unique to this project possibly or potentially equally universal to other projects. Yeah, so once the editing is finally completed, although when you're the composer and the editor in the mixer is editing really, ever truly completed. You know, you can keep adjusting. It's one of the advantages to committing your tracks so you can't keep adjusting. Then the mixing process begins. Now, I think like all records that are recorded intentionally, a lot of the mixing process had already taken place all the way from the recording stage. And the biggest part of a of immersive mixing is oftentimes first deciding where things go. In this case, what was unique is that the things every element was essentially already placed where it was supposed to be, which is possible because of the recording techniques and more importantly because of the compositional pre-production. So I really didn't move things because the microphone techniques were designed around where they were and every time I I did try a couple times, I was like, I wonder, what wonder what happens if I was wrong and the brass should be in the front. But then all of the phase and all of the timing cues of the microphone techniques start to fall apart. So it's like, okay, cool. It's fine. The strongest option is what we committed to and that's why we committed to it. So as a mixer, one of the first things to do is just to go through and I've always got spot mics or close mics and ambient sources. I did run out of groups and pro tools that sucked. It was really unfortunate to find that limit because what I want to do is, you know, be able to basically go through with a desk and say, okay, where here's my spot mic, here's my ambient mic and you know, just find the balance. Like, where is the right balance for every instrument? So the beginning and the mix was absolutely like no plugins, nothing, just finding an overall balance of close to ambient sources for the whole thing and then starting to automate. Now this is where if it was intended to be an acoustic project, that might be starting to get towards the end. But my intent with this is in no way to create something realistic. I absolutely wanted to create a surreal listening perspective for the listener. I'd like them to be sitting in the middle of an ensemble, kind of in the way that we have heard about from great classical productions. Morton Lindbergh is one of the immersive producers on this record and Morton's work is something that I admire a great deal. We can got to get into that. But but at the same time, I don't care if it's like following a rule or this or this or this, I love mixing pop music. I love mixing fusion music. I like mixing electronic music and all sorts of things. So this is where the mixing part became a whole new level for me and I spent a lot of time on it. I absolutely use, you know, if I want the drum set to feel like an R&B record, like I'm using all the techniques I would on the close sources to get to get the drums to feel the way I want. But then the awesome thing is that the ambient source most of the time I do nothing to the room we recorded in this beautiful. The microphones were beautiful. The techniques worked out. So it's like I can kind of have the best of both worlds for me is that I can manipulate the drums like the kick to sound, you know, like a like an R&B record, like a D'Angelo record or like a like a Robert Glass-Brow or a good, you know, but I'm not saying I got it to that level, but I did my best. But then also have this beautiful 11 channel Shepsa Ray that I can bring up the ambience between these two worlds. And to be able to have access to all of those channels at the mix phase is a dream. It's a lot to handle. It's a lot of work. It required a lot, but it made all of those problems that I faced in spatial remixing just go away. They were never present. If anything, the problem I'd have is that sometimes I'd have to remove the immersive stuff just to, you know, because it was getting a little too cluttered. And also, as much as that was there, there were times when I was like, yeah, the reverb of that studio is like one second, maybe sub one second. And it wasn't long enough. So I'm using a burst of reverbs wherever I want. I'm using delays if I want. Like there really was no rule at the end of the day. Once that process was done, I'm going to use any technique and any plug in any tool I can to augment the production and augment the feeling of the music. And in fact, there's one pretty wild thing, which was like the way that this record was composed is like the soloists are big deal, because it's jazz music at the end of the day, whatever jazz fusion global, whatever we want to call it. The soloists are always in the center channel. I did that because it's a cinematic project. The center channel's awesome. It's what I chose to do. Something that Morton Lindbergh, who is again one of the co-producers on this project, along with Drew Jurekko, who's the violinist on the project, and his lives here in Toronto with me, something that Morton brought up when I started to send him the mixes to listen to was he was like, ah, the center, some of the soloists in the center feel like they're detached from the rest of the ensemble. And one of the reasons for that is that some of the soloists are like the instruments, when we think about the spatial recording, take a saxophone. Well, if you take a saxophone versus a brass quartet, those two things are going to engage a space with different amounts of energy. And the brass quartet filled that studio space and the ambient mics are full of reflections and all sorts of content, where the solo saxophone doesn't put as much amplitude into the space so the spatial microphones don't capture at the
as much reflection energy. So as a result, when you start to put things on top of each other, the saxophone, the ambience of the room at its native catcher was not quite loud enough. So of course, I started using reverbs. And I just could not find a digital reverb that I really liked for that, that the soloists, like the key soloists of the record. Martin agreed, and we were kind of going back and forth and Drew agreed as well, we're trying to just figure out, okay, how do we, how do we do this? So what I did was I took all of the soloists and I went to a beautiful hall in Gerono, called the Agacon Museum. It's a gorgeous hall. I have a good relationship with them. I've actually played there many, many, many times as a bassist. I played an instrument I designed that I play on the record called "Base Vena" there for the Agacon himself once on the opening of the museum. So I called a favor. I got access to the hall and I re-amped or worldized all of the soloists into the hall. So I put it took a speaker, put it against the back wall, put a 906 array on the floor. So a 15 channel chefs array on the floor, hung omnies from the ceiling, which is like 85 feet off the ground. And we just captured reverb and like straight up organic reverb played it into the room with a fader. And that's the reverb of that source. So again, even at the mix stage, I'm just like, I'm looking for, I'm looking for a feeling. Like I'm looking for a sense of like, yes, every part is feeling full and it's, they're integrated together, but there's also this overall space that everything can kind of live in. And that was probably the most intense thing when I went back to Martin. I was like, okay, this is what I did. It's like, what? You did what? Okay, that's pretty extreme. I was like, well, that's the nature of the project. I mean, I'm not, I didn't have a timeline. Like I, that's one of the benefits, I guess, of being in charge of it is like, well, if this is what the music needs, like if as long as I can afford the time and find ways to financially afford the process, I'm just gonna try it. And it was absolutely the best. Like the reverb for the soloist is just faders up. Like it was, it had a nice long tail, like a two to and a half second tail with really great frequency response. And it just felt real. And I think that's what I was missing. But at the same time, if you go in and you listen to the roads or the synths on the project or the electric guitars or the all the spacey violin layers or bass layers, they're full of delays and reverbs and like there really was no rule other than find ways to kind of serve the music. And so I just really feel like was a reminder as well. And I know folks know this, but like composition and mixing, composition and editing, composition and production, they really are like totally linked if you allow them to be. Because at the end of the day, as the composer, I feel as though the only true representation of the composition as I intend it is the final master. Obviously, like if we defined composition by like top line and bottom line, then someone would disagree with me. To me, the composition is the merging of the music and the technology. And so it's fascinating, again, being the mixer and the composer because I got to, I just have that intimate relationship with the music and like trying to find like what was the actual feeling that I was after? And it is above melody sometimes. Like melodies are beautiful, but at the end of the day, the way in which that melody feels to a listener is absolutely affected by the mix. So yeah, I mean, that's a long answer. I could get into some more universal aspects if we wanted to talk about some more specific things. But what do you think about that? - I think that was great. You gave like a beautiful answer for all of that. And it's cool to hear about all of your process. I would ask, what are some of your favorite plugins for immersive kind of mixing since I think that's kind of something that's still, I think, being worked out. And there aren't too many available. So I'm curious what kind of, if you also did you use kind of stereo plugins or mono plugins and then mix those in and did you use immersive plugins? Can you talk a little bit more to that? - So the answer is indeed a combination because of course I've got mono mics on just about everything. So those sources are gonna use, I mean, for instance, some of the analog gear you see behind me, I use analog in the process on the close mics. And that resembles a stereo mix. I mean, if a great compressor sounds great on the kick drum, I'm gonna use it, but to get to the immersive answer, the reverbs, I'm a huge fan of the entire liquid sonics collection. I use them a lot, all of them. The lustrous plates one, the cinematic rooms. I like HD cart, which is kind of an Alexa con model. I like the ones that they did with reverb foundry as well. So basically, oh, I'm a huge percasti fan, so I love seventh heaven. And they all kind of have their own timbrel effect. And that's what we're really, when I'm choosing a reverb, it's not just about the space, it's about the timbre and how it affects the source. I still use my exponential audio reverbs, which were kind of the first immersive verbs that I had access to. And actually Morton Lindbergh is a huge fan of those. They have a nice clean timbre to them. I used slapper, big fan of that delay, which is cargo cult. But I also, I love sound particles, sound particles, made its way into this project big time. In the session itself, I used energy panor from time to time. I used density. Density is an amazing plugin for not if you're trying to create something real, but if you're trying to expand something in a way that feels kind of surreal. Also did use the external DAW of sound particles a lot. There's a song called Tapestry where this is the song that reached 1,000 tracks. All of the Foley, which is totally recorded, forks and knives and metallic objects. All of those gestures were recorded in sound particles. I set up a 906 array and then made all of those gestures with hundreds and hundreds of different Foley recordings that I had made along with the co-composer Sean Rompre, who's the drummer on the song. And then I made those 906 gestures and brought them in as 906 tracks to Pro Tools and then kind of moved them around. Ivan Tide has a couple big ones. I really think that MicroPitch is a fantastic plugin that allows us to, let's say we take a Stereo Rodes recording Fender Rodes. It's the kind of instrument where by just detuning the sides, the front and rear and the top and bottom by a couple of cents, we can create proper non-correlated information that makes that instrument grow into the space in a way that's really quite captivating. The PSP compressor, I'm a big fan of that compressor. I had it on those 906 subgroups often, not for a lot of compression, but just a little bit, just like you would in Stereo Mixing, a little bit of top down work can be nice to kind of glue things together. Yeah, those are the ones that come to mind initially. I mean, I listed a lot of immersive plugins there. If it's an immersive plugin, I'm kind of into it. I try to test them all and I know I haven't mentioned them all, but there's a couple others that are there. But at the same time, the most used plugin on the entire thing still has to be like FabFilter EQ. I've just, you know, basic, just basic tonal shape or your temporal shaping. And although it can go up to 9116, it's not really an immersive EQ. It still is just multi-mono. And I do think I'm waiting. I do think I'm waiting for a truly three-dimensional equalizer that is not also an effect. I think we're still waiting to see when someone can create a temporal shape or with truly three-dimensional thinking. So whoever is listening to this, please do it and then make it so that we can get it. (laughs) Yeah, so that's kind of the immersive side. Like all of those tools are employed at any point and all used like between subtly and like sometimes the sound particle stuff or the eventide stuff like is used pretty aggressively to try to just like take an instrument like Rhodes or guitar that was not inherently immersive and make it fill the space properly in a way that it kind of wasn't designed 'cause it's their designed as mono instruments. Yeah, I love sound particles too. I've used that a lot in my work as well. It's, they've got some cool plugins and they keep coming out with more. They do. Let's talk about mastering. And you're mastering engineer. That's kind of you're one of the main gigs, right? Before you kind of really go into spatial audio. Yep. It's a delicate subject. It's a quite technical one. Absolutely. A lot of the times hard to navigate, especially for people who kind of relatively new to the industry. I can certainly comment from my own perspective working in kind of in a similar context but more on like experiences in films rather than music. But yeah, we'd love to hear what did you do? What did you use? What were the issues? Any pitfalls, any limitations? Anything can share with us. That would be great. Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I am a mastering engineer. I'm a mastering engineer in stereo of many, many years and also an immersive. And in fact, right from the beginnings of building my studio, I'm not in my studio right now. Actually, there's a little Renault going on. But I designed it around being a mastering studio. These are my speakers, the Lapinski's. I like them as a mastering engineer. I built the whole studio using the same speakers because I wanted to be able to do that. And although in spatial audio and immersive audio, the role of mastering is certainly used less commonly at this stage than in stereo, the philosophy of it remains identical, which is it's the finalization stage for music. And it's an opportunity for perspective to be brought into the process. It's an opportunity for somebody, whether it's the mixer or a new mastering engineer, whoever is doing it, it's the opportunity for them to take a step back, look at the big picture, and also take a magnifying glass and look at the smallest picture.
all at the same time. And it's a totally different mindset than mixing. And I certainly as someone who's a mixer and a mastering engineer, like I have definitely done both. But I knew at this project that for all the reasons that great mix engineers asked me to master their projects, that I needed someone else to master this one. I'm the composer, I'm their courting engineer, the editor, I'm totally have lost that last 10% of his perspective. There's no way to imagine that you can truly separate yourself from something that you spend three years on. It would be naive to assume, could I have maybe done a good job? I'm not saying that I wouldn't have, but still the ability to truly objectively listen to it and say, this is what it needs or this is what it doesn't need. I wanted to leave to someone. And so Michael Romanowski is the mastering engineer of this project in both immersive and stereo. And we haven't even talked about stereo yet, but we should should at one point. But we'll talk about the immersive side because that's the main thing and that's what was mastered first. So Michael is someone that I really admire. I admire his, the records that he's mastered. I admire his aesthetics. I admire his understanding. I admire his philosophy and passion. And I also know he has an incredible, incredible studio that is up to the task. So he knew he was going to master this record two and a half years ago. He knew that I was going to deliver an ADM with a lot of objects, which is not necessarily as common in some of the deliveries he's received from other mix engineers. And so we had to some discussions around the technicalities and me needing it to be delivered back in the same way because of the cinema remix and because of the blue ray and because of this and this and this. But at the end of the day, what I wanted from him is not plugins, not speakers. I wanted his ears and his perspective. I wanted him to sit down having not been obsessed with it for three years and listen to it objectively and decide if there was anything tamberly, anything dynamically and anything even potentially spatially that came to mind. Now of course, my co-producer Drew Jurekka had already listened to it with me. Martin Lindbergh had already listened to it and kind of almost sied off on it. So what had to be done was minimal, but that's the job of mastering. Is that really if a mastering engineer only has to do a little bit, it means that as a mix engineer, I did a good job. That's a good thing. It's kind of like if you think about it and like, oh, well, you know, you make this investment and they didn't have to do much, was it necessary? Well, that's a hard question to answer, but I think at the top level of any music production on the planet, yes, it's that opportunity to have somebody ensure that it checks all the boxes and that there's not something left that could have helped the translation down the line. And I really, really was grateful to have it. It gave me a sense of peace knowing that I didn't have to be the beginning and the end of the project. So I deliver him the ADMs at 96K because everything was recorded at 96. They're giant just absolutely giant files because of all the objects and everything. And then he, you know, brought it into his system and he made the very, you know, the subtle temporal adjustments that he felt were necessary. He looked at confirming that the sequencing felt good. He made sure that, you know, the loudest moments of this song kind of matched the loudest of the other and all of the changes were very subtle. But as soon as I got it back, the good news is like, it sounded like what I sent him in terms of like, you know, it's all there. It's what I delivered. But then all those little, little details are it's like, yeah, all right. I'm so happy that, you know, you just, you defined exactly where that low midrange should sit or you defined exactly what level that LFE should be or exactly where the top range of the, you know, where where that top sparkle of the record kind of is. And I liked it. I agreed. And that's, you know, not a surprise because I think we both have similar aesthetics musically, but it's a beautiful thing to have that that that confidence at the end of the process. And then from there, we have these full 96 K ADMs. Then we split it up into separate tracks and we have to put it to 48 and do all the separate conversion and separate things for streaming, create deliverables for Blu-ray, create the deliverables for cinema. All of this, the whole time has to be frame accurate to the film, which is already, you know, happening on the side. So it's a lot of responsibility technically as well on the mastering side to make sure that no like not a single detail gets missed, including the binoral settings. Like there's so many little details there, but Michael was up to it and needed a great job. Talking about kind of how you feel after all of this process, things translated into all these different distribution formats. Do you feel like they captured the essence of what you were trying to do? Are there still limitations? You wish we could kind of overcome? How do you see the kind of final product coming out? And is it what you imagined at the beginning? Yeah, I mean, to go to the end, I'm really happy, artistically speaking, with what the technology is able to deliver today for folks. But that requires a whole bunch of different lanes and all of them required their own attention to detail. So the biggest being stereo, you know, this is I really, really hoped honestly, deep down when the immersive masters were done, I really hoped that I would have some sort of fold down algorithm that was going to behave itself and be inspiring. And it wasn't. It just my co-producer, Drew, Drew, Drew, was huge at this moment, because you know, he was that perspective to be like, no, this is not, it's not acceptable. It's not, it's not the music. It's not the power that exists in the original production is not here. So I completely remix the record in stereo from the start. I was able to keep my edits, I was able to keep my automation. Lots of the plugins are, you know, if you change the track width and pro tools from 906 to stereo, the settings will remain, but the reality is that all of a sudden, all the things you mentioned at the beginning, Monica of stereo and masking and levels and compression and all of the things that make a stereo record good, where I orchestrated things from back to front and top to bottom, stereo is all about left to right. And so all of the conversations compositionally were lost. So I literally stripped all of the immersive aspects of the pro tools session, all the panners, all the buses turned it entirely into a stereo project. And I remixed it. I'm really, really happy with the stereo mixes and masters as well. Now here's I think maybe the most, the part that I would advocate for is at no point in any of this process in immersive. I never thought about stereo, not during tracking, not during any part of the process that I allow myself to think about what would this be in another format. And the reason I thought about that is I've kind of come to this analogy where if you're going to make a sculpture that you want to put in the middle of a square and downtown, whatever city, it's a beautiful analogy because their sculptures are three dimensional. And if you're going to make a big, big sculpture of something, well, if you were thinking about well, how was this going to look in a photo, it would probably change what you would do about the sculpture. You might start to make one angle of the sculpture look better than everything else. But I think great sculptures, they make the thing. You want to see it come to the Piazza and see it. And if you see it in a photo and it inspires you great. And if you see it in a photo and you're like, yeah, it doesn't look that good to me. Like, that's kind of your problem. It's not the problem of the sculpture. And I found that to be helpful because at no point in the creation of this record from an immersive standpoint, did I once think about what it was outside of 911 six. Then at the very end, of course, I did, I thought about by Noural made sure there was no problems. But honestly, I was really happy once I got the by Noural settings, right? I was happy with it in spatial audio. It's different, but I was happy with the balance. And it still had the essence. That's what you said, Monica, like the essence of the music is still there for me, the balance, the temporal aspects. And so I never thought about it in stereo, not once. And I didn't want Michael to do it as a mastering engineer either. And vice versa, when mixing in stereo, not once. I could, I was like literally one button press away from it at all times. But I did not once ever compare it to the immersive mix because it doesn't matter. And if someone wants to listen to this where they're toggling between the two, I mean, I think that that's a silly way to listen to music. I would encourage them to like what what a ridiculous again, imagine being in the in the Piazza and looking at this beautiful sculpture and then looking at your phone at a photo of it and being like which it doesn't make any sense from an art standpoint as a as a listener. So I made the stereo come to the point where myself and really Drew Jericho was the one as a co-producer. He was hammering me on it to get it to the point where it's like, yeah, this feels like the music, this feels like it honors every melody. It honors the balance. It honors the punch. And quite frankly, they're they're probably different. Even to this day, I don't put them up again. I don't care. I really just don't care if one sounds like the other. I'm happy artistically as a mixer, as a composer, as a producer with both. I'd be just as happy for someone to listen to the stereo version as the immersive version. If I can choose one, the immersive version every time, of course. So that's how the stereo got done. And then Michael Romanovsky also mastered it. And he mastered it as its own thing. And I kind of said like, look, if you want to compare them, if that helps you, you do whatever you want to do, but I don't care. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to be like, oh, well, I think that the 12k is a little bit more present in the immersive. So we should do that to the stereo. Like, I just want them to both feel like they fit the format that they're designed for. So then once that's done, now at least there's stereo. And we've got immersive files, the DD plus jock, of course, which is the specially coated streaming file for Atmos when we talk about Apple music and title and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, it loses some resolution. It loses some detail. But because I did limit this to a 911 6 delivery, I find that it holds up and the fold downs to 5 1. I like, I think it's kind of cool. Actually, it's kind of fun to, like I've done some film festivals where it's played back in the theater in 5 1 because they don't have an Atmos system. I kind of enjoy it. Like as long as the balance of the music is there and the immersion is there, it's, it's just a different perspective on the
music. And there's no doubt in my mind that I know what my ideal is. My ideal is someone either sits in a 916 studio and listens to the ADM file or that they go to a gorgeous Dolby cinema and they listen to the the DCP which is an MXF. Those are high resolution. There's no loss, sea aspect to it. I can hear every little detail. They're direct representations of what I made. But on a translation standpoint, at this point, I checked it that if someone listens to it in stereo, someone listens to it in Dolby's Binaural, someone listens to it in Naples Spatial, someone listens to it on their sound bar, someone listens to it on their Apple Music System via DD+ Jock. Or now we start to get better if someone listens to it off IAA, which is a immersive audio album. Now we have Dolby 3 HD. And my ideal of all for the consumer is the Blu-ray. The Blu-ray has the Dolby 3 HD. There's also a CD in the package. There's the liner notes which show people and show credits and make sure people know who's involved and the film is there. And so there's full high resolution film to it to to go with it, which is an entire other part of this production that was given kind of equal care. So to me, the Blu-ray is like the one where if someone wants to get as close as they can to my intent, that's what it is. But I do also as an artist feel like it's a little liberating to be at a time when this music can reach more people without the barrier of access being an audio file system. So whether I'd feel that about every production, no, I think there are some productions where it's like, "Eh, I kind of only want to present this one way." But with this particular one, I made that decision early on. And it just required babysitting every single step and making sure that, you know, that things slotted in nicely. And thus far, there's nothing out there that I kind of wish I could take back. I'm happy if someone wants to dedicate the time to listen to the music. So you also created a music video to accompany this album. Would you like to talk a little bit more about that as well? So the very first person I called when I decided to make this record was actually the co-director, which is Michael Fisher. And I said, "I want to make this record. It's going to be for immersive audio, as it's kind of audio delivery format. But I'd like it to be a film. And I'd like it to be able to be experienced in movie theaters because I think movie theaters are awesome. And they're very practical immersive spaces for consumers to get to have an immersive experience. I've actually done a bunch of releases where we had no visuals. We turned the screen off in movie theaters. And it's been awesome. But I have made lots of music films and music video in the past. I'm certainly of a generation where, you know, the music video is a part of our relationship with music. And so Michael, we thought about what the look was. We thought about the whole concept. And essentially our concept was we were going to film every single day, every single performance with multiple cameras. We lit things beautifully. We staged things at the same time was setting up all the immersive mics every night. He was staging the next scene. And we kind of built it so that the music video is that you always have the best angle of everybody at all times, which is kind of impossible in if everyone was playing at the same time. And that we wanted to create the never-ending studio. So you're like, if you think about it and you watch the film, you're like, wait a second. How do where are all these people? Like how do you have 30 people all with cameras on them? Like, where are we? And we did that very consciously to try to create something believable. The big challenge that I gave to him, and I didn't really touch on this earlier, but the challenge I gave to him, he would have preferred if we were just all on a big stage together. Right? It's easier. As a cinematographer, just give me, give me like, Massie Hall and Toronto, put everyone on the stage. I get all these beautiful, you know, shots with everybody in them. It's epic. It's grand. We all know how awesome that looks. The reason that I did this overdub style was because I wanted the spatial control over every layer. And I wanted to use techniques that allowed me to have the soloists have the same spatial energy as the brass ensemble. And the reality is that if I tried to put all of these people around a microphone array, it would be impossible for me to have mixed it in the way that I mixed it later on. And that was important to me. It was important to me to have the most finite control to have 15 kalimba layers at the same time as a string quartet as the same side as a drum set. And the reality is that the bleed would have made it not possible. And the layout would have made it not possible for me to achieve what I would add set out to achieve sonically. So I gave him the challenge of having to piece that all together. I needed a brilliant job. And then finally, when we laid it all out and watched it as a film, we realized there were things missing. So we did actually add some dance performances to three songs, some nature shots. There's a we went to a butterfly conservatory for the last song and did some shots. We shot something, some stuff outside at a beautiful provincial park. And we also shot the album art, which is the pendulum art. And we actually filmed the creation of it and kind of use it interspersed throughout the film. So yeah, it was it was an entire process that was like there all all the way along. He had to edit his video to me this time. So it was like audio first, video second, which is kind of rare. And he did an absolutely brilliant job. And I think ultimately what I find that the film does is when people are sitting in the movie theater listening and watching, it just engages that last part of the immersive experience, which is that you're totally all your senses, like you're totally in it. And especially for people who I think what it does is it connects them to the performances in a way that you or me, you know, the three of us might not need. I think we can close our eyes and we know what the instruments are or were at least able to connect to the the music making process. But for a lot of folks, I think they really appreciate seeing the instruments and seeing people play them for real. And there's no mimeing. It's all real. And I think it really brings them into the into the experience more and it kind of actually invites them into the space and makes what otherwise could be a bit abstract, maybe a bit more tangible. So yeah, that's the video process. So you really have, you know, I think painted kind of a beautiful journey and kind of taken us along, you know, with that as far as your whole process through all of this. So to kind of wrap up this section, I think a lot of people when they, you know, look at doing immersive audio, look at doing, you know, productions, especially at the level that you have just described would say, doesn't that take a lot of time? Isn't that very expensive? And I guess my question for you, what are your thoughts around that? And do you feel at the end of the day that all of this time and all of, you know, the work you put into this was worth the outcome? It's a great question. On a personal level, absolutely. I kind of, I wasn't going to do this unless I could see it through artistically the way that I had intended. So like every part of it was kind of necessary for me to justify the years of work. Now, from a funding standpoint here in Canada, we do have granting organizations, so the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, Ontario is the province I'm in, and then the Toronto Arts Council, who helped to fund some of this, not all of it, but some of it in a very sizable and a way that I'm very grateful for. I also, as a professor and an as an engineer, I mean, I have misbehaved in terms of justifying what I put into it. If we were to talk about it on pure return on investment financially, no, I mean, I think that we have to address the fact that the music industry is in a place that it needs, it needs adjustment, right? Like if this was my sole source of income, I would have reached limitations that would have held me back from certain parts of it, and I'd be the first to admit that. So I certainly have justified it as an art for arts sake. I do think as well that, you know, as an engineer, as someone who can produce for other people, like, obviously, it also is a part of my career, and it's a part of, you know, attracting other folks who want to do this together. And one of the things there is, whenever you're going to do something in life that's going to push the boundaries, you're always going to have to put in more time than the next person has to. I'm just standing on the, you know, I've learned so much from my predecessors, and I'm sure people will learn from this process as well as my colleagues who also do awesome things. But whatever has been innovative here or whatever has offered some new perspective, my hope is that this is a part of what your exact mandate is, is to help educate and encourage people, especially at the start of the process that to conceive their music with this in mind. And the next person to do this, if they were to say, okay, that sounds like that sounds like it would serve my music, whether it's me or whether it's someone else, like, you know, this is not about trying to make an ad or something. It's like, whoever it is, I think that every time we push art forward, we push technology forward, we make it more possible for the next time. And so I really think that the next time this happens, it doesn't have to be like, it could be done in less time. Some of the decisions and some of the learning processes around it could be achieved more efficiently. Naturally, that's just how learning goes. Also, this music, like I decided to have 38 artists, like there's so many factors where if this was a band with four people, eight people that's a fixed band that plays together all the time, they're all rehearsed, like all those factors would also make the music go faster. Like you might not need to do this in 35 days, maybe all of a sudden, it's an eight day recording project. Or it's like, so I really do think that some of the details that pertain to my particular journey are very personal based on the decisions I made. But I actually think that at the source, the pre-production is number one. Recording it with immersive intent is number two, and that's the part that if you miss that stage, you're up against a lot of challenges. And then the immersive mixing part is, I think just getting the artists in the room for the mixing, getting everybody to create something not as a byproduct of something else, but as its thing. And having everybody being creative during that process, I really think that there's a world where this is absolutely feasible, and it doesn't need to be quite as daunting as what I've described. I'm also like, I literally, I love it.
I think I've probably demonstrated my passion for it. I have enjoyed this process. It's exercising every part of my musicianship in all the ways that I am so grateful to even get to do. So I've had no problem with putting in the extra time. That's something that a sacrifice I'm willing to make for my own heart. But I think that if someone puts together the right team and they've got the right vision and the music is suitable, this is absolutely a reality. I think it's a closer reality than many might realize. Well, thank you. Where do you see this heading in the future? My hope is as more and more musicians begin to have meaningful immersive listening experiences and spatial listening experiences, whether that's in an ammo studio or an immersive studio, whether it's a five-one situation at someone's home theater, whether it's a movie theater, whether it's something as epic as the sphere or an awesome art installation in a museum, or they go to see murder of crows or whatever they end up kind of experiencing, that it unlocks some creativity and it unlocks the creators to be like, "Yeah, I want to use space as a part of my music." I think that that really is part one here is to have it really, really get into the creation phase. I think that we are at a time now where we've got a lot of engineers who have been training themselves to understand spatial audio, to understand immersive audio, who have been learning, who have been developing their own relationship with it, mostly as mixers at this stage, who are there and ready to support on a personal level. I'm looking forward to hopefully someone who experienced the music or whatever, somehow our paths cross and I'm the right person to help them realize that thing that they're thinking about. At the end of the day, the music is what matters the most. To go one level up above that, I do think that if folks are not composing immersively, but they're like, they want to produce immersively, having a producer in the room who understands this level of, to understand how this can serve an immersive presentation or a spatial presentation during the creation phase in the studio at least, even if it wasn't compositional, at least in the studio. This is mic techniques. This is inspiring overdubs that might serve an immersive mix differently than stereo and advocating for the immersive production as early in the process as possible. The more that this happens, the more that the listeners are going to feel it. They don't even need to explain to them. They're just going to feel the power of that music. And that is in turn going to inspire the artists and that kind of cycle of artistic intent getting to the listeners. That's part one. Then I think part two is remembering that music is only one branch of this giant tree. There's so many, some of the most captivating immersive experiences are not to do with song, form, music, recorded, release, the nut most, put out on streaming. I'll give an example. There's a thing called newy blanche here in Toronto. It's an all night art festival. I just did an installation that played all night. We played back some of the record, but also another production of a Pakistani, like a Koali performance that I recorded immersively. It's this huge bubble, this see through bubble. It's pretty big. It can hold about 70 people and it's inflated with fans. And we set up an immersive speaker system in it projected on the side of the bubble from the outside because it was translucent. And people came in and listened to this immersive art all night. They were there till 7 a.m. Like thousands of people came through. And those are the, that's where the next time that someone does a great installation at a museum or outside or at some art festival or whatever it might be, bringing the immersive sound aspect to it. And it's already being done. I'm not saying this is new. That's actually an area where this is kind of consistent. But yeah, just remembering that our creativity doesn't need to only be limited to whether a song can be on streaming or not. Like I look forward to folks continuing to push the boundaries and bringing communal listening experiences together. Because immersive audio is really good at that. It's really good at having a lot of people in a space experiencing something. It's why it's making its way into live sound. It's why it's make, it's already been a mainstay in film is because when you put a lot of people in a space, it kind of makes sense to surround them and sound. So anyways, I think I'm just kind of like eyes open ready for the next challenge. I'll probably do something of my own and also just kind of like be ready to be a part of continuing to push the creativity forward. Just an absolute brilliant, what an amazing case study and I feel like you've covered every new concranny and beyond. The last question, last two questions rather. What is the best way to find out more about yourself and the work you do? I would like you to include all the events that you mentioned earlier, London, New York, all the listening sessions and all the kind of public engagements and festivals where immersed is being played, exhibited and available for public access. The best way to keep in touch, the simplest version is probably social media, Instagram, which would be at Justin Gray's sound is the handle. I try to keep pretty active in terms of posting content there. That will lead to the next kind of step up is YouTube. That's where the long form videos are not being limited to vertical delivery formats. So the YouTube is also Justin Gray's sound and there's a lot of content about this record there as well as some other things in the area of music production. There is a website which is Justin Gray's sound.com and on there there's actually a page dedicated to immersed. So from there we have links to streaming, links to the videos, the videos that are accompanied like the film are all YouTube videos separated by a song. Of course those are only stereo delivery at this stage. So yeah, between social media, YouTube and the website, Justin Gray's sound, there's ways to even contact me through those mediums or even just be an audience member and enjoy whatever nerdy immersive content comes flowing. Certainly going to continue for the next couple of months to keep things kind of delivered there because there's more stories to tell. As for events, the next thing coming up, I'm going to Europe next week. So I'll be at the Tonmeister Tugging which is a conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. That's November 13 to 15. I'm presenting "immersed" there a couple of times. Very honored to do so. There's some amazing, amazing folks going to be there. Then I'm going to Berlin, the record label, Ian Records, which is a immersive audio label created by Stefan Bach and Stefan Sardiac. We're going to do some listening events at their studio MSM. So that's the 16th and 17th in Berlin. If anyone wants details on any of this, I would say the social media is the best place to go. Following that, I'm going up to Sonic Days which is at Sonic College in Colding Denmark. That's on the 19th of November. I'm doing a cinematic playback of a immersed and then also doing some education with both Michael Romanovsky and Morten Lindberg, which is quite cool because they're both involved in the project. In November 21, this is a public screening of a immersed in London, England. It's in the afternoon. Again, social media, you will be able to find all the links for registering for tickets. They're almost out, but there's a few left. Then I'm going to come back to Canada for a little bit. Then the kind of closer for this year will be going to New York. I'm going to be doing some education with the rock nation school down there as well as Manhattan School of Music and NYU. Those are all private, but on December 4, there's a screening in Manhattan at the Dolby Cinema. Again, on social media, there's links that you'll be able to find to registering. If you happen to be in the New York area, that's in the evening of December 4th. Then following that, I mean any new things that I will certainly put from the social platforms in terms of how to engage with any future screenings. Wow. That's a busy schedule. Doing great job promoting the project there. Thank you. That's for sure. What do you have a piece of advice that really helped you in your career, your journey? I would say that the piece of advice that has been so helpful to me was that this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. As someone who wants to be involved with music as a performer and as a composer and as an engineer, developing all of these various things takes time and it doesn't happen overnight. That's kind of the beauty of it. For me, it's taken to this point of my life to be able to release a project that I feel is representative of a lot of aspects, but it's taken time and it's taken a significant amount of effort. I think being kind to ourselves in terms of knowing that this is a long-term journey and that being in a musical career is not about the short gains. It really is about building something sustainable for yourself because it's hard. It's hard work. It's daily work. It requires so much from us in so many different ways, but if you can kind of observe it over a period of time, I think it's easier to kind of see the growth and justify the efforts because it can be really up and down from day to day sometimes. As an artist or as an engineer, as self-employed people, right? I think just, yeah, the advice to know that this is something for your life in music has been very helpful to me. I love that. I feel like that's a constant reminder that you need. So thank you so much for that advice and thank you so much for being here with us today. Justin, thank you so much for talking to us today. Such a pleasure. Honestly, I really appreciate it. We look forward to meeting you in person again at some point soon, maybe in London. Maybe in London, fingers crossed. If you enjoy the podcast and would like to show your support, please consider becoming a Patreon. only our
You can find out more on our official Patreon page, www.patrion.com/immersiveaudiopodcast. You've been listening to the immersive audio podcast hosted by Oliver Cadel and Monica Bowles. This episode was produced by Oliver Cadel and Emma Reese, an included music by Rizm Scott. Got an idea for an episode or want to comment on something we've discussed recently? Drop us an email at
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