Andrew Scheps Mixing with Dolby Atmos

[Music] [Music] [Music] hello welcome first um first week back on andrew talks to awesome people i think we just froze that's the good way to come back we've been on for about three months and uh this week andrew is talking to himself but with mark mark's here is mark coming in there he is hey mark hey good to see you this one is going to be awesome well especially because because we're talking about awesome things yeah that's what it is and you're an awesome person so um so just for people who uh weren't around last week to know kind of what we're doing basically andrew talks awesome people is not going to be an interview with somebody every single week because the prep for that was taking over in my life so what we decided to do after the break is i'll be doing hopefully two interviews a month and then the other weeks will either be mixed tank takeovers like we did last week for mixed review for puremix members but anyone can watch the youtube stream or things like tonight which is basically i'm going to blab about some stuff and then you guys ask questions either about the thing i'm blabbing about which this week is atmos music um or just other questions and i will answer them um and then also putting together some panels for people to talk about stuff and then also just some q a sessions with people so no interview but we'll bring back some people we've already talked to to do extra q a because everybody's always like there should be part nine like well i don't really have anything else left to ask them myself but you guys might so anyway that's the big plan yeah so the big plan is that and the first week of it is now and we're talking about atmos today yeah this is going to be amazing i have a ton of questions myself so i'm excited to see you go through it because you have certainly gone down the rabbit hole and you're quite quite equipped i am living in the rabbit hole and it's a pretty good rabbit hole and it's really interesting and it there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes to stuff that really interests me which is how do people hear because all the binaural stuff is about how people process location of sound and how can you trick people into hearing stuff and i mean a lot of mixers have been into that forever you're always trying to make stuff sound like it's coming from outside the speakers and behind you and like chad plate was really into it bruce wooden loved the q sound stuff we used to run just little percussion things through and spend hours like making sure it was as good as we could get it and getting stuff outside the speakers so now to have a system that is meant to do nothing but get stuff to move while you're wearing headphones is pretty cool yeah but that's just one aspect of the whole atmos thing so i'm going to start talking but mark you're going to interrupt me if i'm not making sense or i'm assuming people know things who don't may not nothing so any explanation stuff just stop me yeah um yeah so dolby atmos is a technology that's been around for years now and it's been used primarily for theatrical release and then it was adopted by netflix and then more and more streaming sites and now it's pretty standard for visual things to have their audio in at most really every single thing you stream is going to be either in 5.1 or atmos so which is actually a good thing to talk about so 5.1 is a very specific speaker format it is literally five speakers and one subwoofer and it is left center right and then left and right behind you and then a subwoofer and that's it and you are mixed your mix has six tracks to it one for each of those speakers those have rules when they're played back on systems that have fewer speakers to kind of fold the stuff that's in the back into the front but at a lower level and things like that but it's it's very much a discrete monitor format that describes the speakers and you mix directly for those speakers atmos is what's called an object-based um i probably should have had a word to put in there format an object-based format so wherever you are mixing you have a certain number of speakers and you are discreetly mixing through those speakers but what you're doing is you're placing sound in a 3d space and then depending on the playback configuration atmos will figure out how much of it should be coming out of what speakers so it's done during playback not during the printing of the mix um and i'll show you pictures of this later on but it's it's cool in that it abstracts the um the speaker setup that you've got that you use for mixing from the playback system um and i know that there are some tools out there that have had this forever i mean nuendo i think has had object-based panners for 20 years or something crazy but it hasn't been a mainstream technology that other people have been able to stream it's just been a tool you could use while you were working on something but at some point you had to commit it to an actual monitoring format with atmos you don't so the way it works is i guess let's start showing my screen yeah all right we'll start showing my screen so this is a pro tools session uh this is a low roar track off of the latest album um and i'm currently in the process of doing atmos mixes of that entire record and uh this is the first track on the album but that's irrelevant so basically this should look very familiar to anyone who works in pro tools and the only real addition to work in atmos is you've got a new column that you can show and it's it's always there you can show it in any version of uh pro tools hd you got to have the pro version otherwise you can't do surround stuff so the vanilla version of pro tools won't do it um and then you have a column that's called objects and what objects are are audio paths into the atmos renderer so basically you've got pro tools and you still have the pro tools mixer but you can take things outside of the pro tools mixer send them off to the dolby renderer which i'll show you that screen right now and then they will show up and these are indicators for audio input into any of the objects and then each of those objects can just be panned around so if i hit play here what you'll see in here is you'll see audio lighting up a lot of the objects down at the bottom here and then you'll see there are meters for every speaker output and what you see here this is my physical monitoring format so the renderer is showing me the audio that's coming in and these channels here are special channels which i'll talk about in a second and then this shows how it's going out to the speakers so at the moment what the renderer is doing is it's taking whatever i give it with whatever pan information i give it and then making it come out of a 914 system so my speaker setup is a left center right across the front uh then subs in the front then i've got a pair of speakers that are touching the left and right it's called the uh the wide so it's basically to spread the front wall it's not necessarily sides it's just a way for you to get wider than the left center right that's that pair of speakers there then you've got left and right sides which are about halfway back in the room and i'm not going to move the monitor around to move the camera but just trust me that's where they are then you've got your left and right rear speakers which are the ones you can see hanging one of them is behind the cat flap and one of them is next to the modular the the cat tree so those are my nine speakers that go around right three on the front wall and then two two and two then i've got four hanging from rafters above me and that is these here so left top front right top front left top rear right top rear so that's like a quad set of speakers above me and then the lfes so this is nine around the bottom one for the sub and four for the top so it's a 914 setup and that's the way the numbering system works the first number is always the number of speakers around you at the normal listening plane then the next number is how many subwoofer channels you have now i actually have multiple subwoofers because it's part of the dolby spec for this type of room and i wanted to be compliant with that so i've actually got four sub woofers which is crazy for this size room but it sounds amazing um but they get a mono feed so it doesn't matter how many subwoofer speakers you have it's how many channels of low frequency energy which is lfe um you actually have personally i mean you could have a 22.2 room if it's a gigantic room having a stereo subwoofer makes sense but for my room and where most of the stuff i do is going to be listened to it's not theatrical so a mono subwoofer is absolutely fine then the third number is up top uh the quad for me but you can have i think up to six really in a standard dolby atmos setup but you can have 70 speakers if you want and you would just set up the render um and i don't know actually if you could have 70. i don't remember what the maximum is it might be 1116 or something like that there is a maximum number of speaker outputs but anyway so that's the deal so the special channels though you got a question i do uh just a quick one so um for anybody who's watching and thinking uh i'm out of here this is like crazy amounts of money in speakers right don't be out of here you can do this and i and for months until all the bits and pieces for my atmos setup showed up i was doing this exclusively in headphones and i'm going to get to the whole binaural side of things and you could work in 5 1 with this and then just tweak height settings for things that are happening in the binaural and then you'll hear the way it'll fold down into five one if that's what you've got and for playback at home for consumers there are a million different sound bars that have at most decoders and extra little tweeters that throw stuff at the wall the amazon echo speaker is a single speaker that does atmos by throwing stuff around the room and obviously it's not as cool as having 900 speakers in your room but it does work and it's absolutely more than just direct sound coming out of the speakers so right the whole the whole idea that it is an object-based monitoring environment means that you do not have to have a gigantic speaker set up to actually do atmos mixes and there's an argument to be made that at the moment for music the binaural playback is actually going to be heard more often than the speaker playback so you need to spend a lot of time in headphones as you work in atmos anyway so yeah right very good point please stick around don't go anywhere yeah yeah so we'll get to that and i just want to say guys if you have questions go ahead and drop them in the comments i'll be collecting those and we'll get to it later so if you want to learn yeah there's no structure yeah we can take a break and to do some of the questions if you see some stuff that's really relevant to what we're talking about you know we can interrupt this at any time i don't have like a powerpoint this is just in my head yeah and so i can go off into the weeds okay so i want to really quickly talk about the fact that you've got this purple row of inputs here what this is this is what's called the bed and this is a predefined set of objects that is 10 channels wide which is 712. so it's seven speakers around the outside so it's my speaker setup minus these wides so you go left center right two on the sides in the middle two behind you that's the seven a single sub and then a stereo pair up top and this is that seven one two input and this is what's called the bed and what this allows you to do is you can assign things um i actually have a mix bus going because because i have more speakers than the 712 i'm not really using the bed except for the subwoofer but you can assign stuff directly to the bed and then you get a 712 pan pot and it just shows up in these speakers that's great and a lot of people use the bed a lot i don't use the bed much i kind of made my own mix bus that is 914 even though pro tools doesn't really support a 914 track width but i want to wait and get into that in a minute but basically the first um what is it 14 of these are inputs that are coming from i'll call i'll show you a little bit of this it's just a nightmare there's so much going on in this so i have a 7-0 mix bus master that feeds a router that's feeding what i'm called calling an object bed and then i'm routing every individual track of that bed my own bed that i made so left center right front wide um which are the ones i told you aren't in the regular bed there are the sides they're the rears and here's my quad high speakers and each one of these is going to an object so object 11 up to 23. so 11 through 23 for me is something i get to without taking individual instruments to objects i i don't want to spend too much time getting into the really fine details of it but basically i've made my own bed which lets me take the bulk of the mix and just pan things and i know that they will show up in the speakers i'm asking them to show up in but because pro tools doesn't support a 914 track format i'm having to cheat some things so i've got a 7.0 mix bus where i can pan stuff around in 7-0 then i've got just a stereo send to those wide speakers so what i'll do for instance is take the overheads of the drum kit put them hard left and right and then i'll have a send on that track to the wide and that will spread the overheads a little wider than just the left center right so that's how i get to that is just with a stereo thing there then i've got a quad mix bus that is just for the height so if i want to send something up top i can just add a little bit of it so like i would take the overheads and add a little bit to the top front as well so now i've got all my symbols taking up space that is covering the entire front wall of the mix but my kick and snare are going just to the center channel things like that so you've got a huge amount of control but you've got to decide how you want to take advantage of having multiple speakers and how you want to send to those speakers and there are a lot of different ways to do it and a lot of people set things up differently so i didn't want to turn this into a tour of my atmos template because it's still something i'm developing and it changes all the time as i'm doing more and more atmos mixing so i don't really want to talk about it other than in the context of what you're seeing on the screen um so anything above 21 i've taken individual bits of audio on tracks and sent them to individual objects and then those objects can pan around now why would i do that instead of necessarily just adding them to my bed that i made the reason is because if you're panning inside of pro tools and the audio is just being sent to different places the atmos renderer doesn't know that you meant for something to be in a specific speaker it just knows that there's audio coming out of that speaker only at that moment but if you had a different monitoring configuration that wouldn't necessarily be the case it might be coming out of two different speakers to try and give you a phantom position at a spot between two of the speakers that you actually have when you send something to an object the renderer does the panning for you so it is much better at placing things exactly where you want if you you pan it inside of pro tools now you still use the pro tools panner to automate it it's um it's actually quite cool you can just turn this on and off and what you'll see is that the dots in the panner so this is the panner for the evil jelly track if i turn off the object you'll see these dots go green and that means it's now panning to this internal pro tools bus when i make the object active all of the same pan information is retained but it's moving the object inside of the renderer so let me see if i can get both on the screen um if i do that's about as small as that wants to go but if i do let's see do that no i'll do that and then i'll make pro tools that side there we go um and then if i come over here where the evil chelly are and i pan them around what you'll see is there's a dot for every speaker and if i oh it's all difficult there you see you can see it now you see that blue dot moving what that means is that's actively being panned so i'm panning the object inside of the renderer as opposed to if i turn this object off then that dot will go away completely and now my audio is being panned inside of my mixbus but it's just changing how much is coming out of these different dots that represent the objects that i made to be my mix bus so this is panning information that's set up inside of pro tools when i make the object active which uh this track there it is now i'm actually moving this with metadata inside of the atmos renderer now why is this important the technicalities of it are it's important because it changes how discreetly you're going to different speakers like i talked to like i talked about a second ago but the um practical side of how this works when you're exporting mixes is when you bounce a mix that is going to be an atmos mix that is going to be sent off to be at most out into the world you make what's called an adm file um and advanced dolby some i don't actually remember what it stands for doesn't matter someone will tell us in the chat i'm sure but the point of it is it is a multi-channel wave file so what it has is it has the audio from every single object so these files can be gigantic you've got up to 128 objects that you could have all running live all moving and so it will bounce every single one of these objects into a channel of the multi-channel wave file and then it will have all of the metadata to describe where that object was all the way through the oh there you go audio definition model broadcast wave format all right well you see why i didn't remember that it doesn't even have dolby in the name um so it and the metadata for every single one of these objects is also stored inside of that wav file so it's like a multi-track of your mix but you can't then split it apart and replay it i mean you could because it is just a wav file but as soon as you start messing with it the metadata gets screwed up and then it's no longer a dolby atmos file but you bounce either into the renderer itself or pro tools is actually quite cool in that you can bounce the adm directly inside of pro tools and bounce offline which you cannot do when you're bouncing to the render if you're bouncing to the renderer you literally put the renderer in record hit play in pro tools pro tools is actually sending time code to the renderer and it will bounce the adm until you hit stop but if you've got everything running in pro tools and there are a couple of things that are weird meta data wise which i'm not even going to go into but basically 99 of the time you can just bounce the adm offline in pro tools and that will generate the exact same adm file that you would get if you bounced into the renderer okay i think i've covered that part of things yes i want to do a recap if that's cool because that's a whole yes please do i'm going to move my screen so i'm looking at the camera this is amazing you just um you made this make sense very quickly so okay uh so we've got two things happening in addition to pro tools we have this other piece of software called the dolby renderer yes this is a somebody asked in the chat if if there was a hardware piece of gear that they had to make and this is software you can get it it is purely software and it can run on the same computer as pro tools i have mine running on a separate mac mini for reasons i will explain in a little bit but i have successfully run pretty big atmos mixes with the render on the same computer and i'm using an imac pro so it's not some crazy mac pro from you know 2019 uh and it does work but there are there are a couple very small limitations with that but you have to go crazy to get around the limitations even if it's on a separate computer so yeah right just okay cool so we have um this piece of software that's running alongside pro tools that is doing the rendering and when that last piece that you just explained made made something like click in my head you're actually recording your mix into the renderer software yes your playback engine when you have the render on the same computer the playback engine is dolby audio bridge there are other ways to do it there's an older way you can do it with sends and returns but that's a mess so there's actually a core audio device called dolby audio bridge that is 129 channels wide 128 channels for all your audio and then 129th channel is for the time code so that's all of your outputs go straight to the renderer then the renderer has an audio device that is for the monitoring so it's up to you to get out of the renderer into some sort of monitor controller so you can turn the volume up and down and listen to your mix but you could actually go straight to speakers and there's an attenuation knob uh you're not seeing my screen at the moment it doesn't matter there's a knob it's all right there's a knob at the top of the at the top of the render that that can control monitor level if you want it to so you could really really cheaply just hook up some speakers using the outputs on the audio interface you're no longer using for your outputs because you're going into the dolby audio bridge and come out into your speakers and use this as your monitor pot and if you have um the pro tools control app on an ipad you can control the monitor level from there it's a full-blown monitor controller within that app or if you have a pro tools dock you can map the monitor control knob to control that so yeah you can do a full-blown monitoring setup for this like super easily and cheaply right okay great very helpful and then i just want to do one more rundown on the metadata portion of it so can you explain how that the metadata is it's literally it well okay it's oh yeah video feedback the metadata is just pan automation if you pan an object and it's automated so it moves during the course of the song then that is stored in the metadata if you don't move it then just the position is stored in the metadata okay there's one other thing as well which is um when you're doing a binaural mix there's a set of settings for the binauralization of um the audio as it goes into the binaural engine that is only for the binaural and it has four settings off near mid and far and that is to spatialize for lack of a better word how far away the sound should sound in the binaural rendering that is ignored in speaker playback and it's ignored in some other areas too which we'll get to when we talk about the consumer side and how you actually can listen to this stuff but that is the one extra set of metadata and that is not automatable per object but it can be different in any every mix that you do so you set that distance for the binaural render that's what the metadata is okay so and the last last thing i wanted to touch on was you're saying that um this wav file is not delivering it's not a 128 channel wav file that then gets it is if you use all 128 objects okay normally i mean like a normal size bounce for a four minute song will be anywhere from probably half a gig up to like seven or eight gig if you're using a million objects we're coming for your video guys yeah now yeah finally but then in the out in the world obviously like if you're streaming a song on apple music or on amazon music or on title they're not trying to stream you six gigabytes of so there are interim file formats that will allow them to be streamed so there whatever some stuff is combined along the way and whatever but that adm is the discrete master that has all of the audio it needs separate to replay the metadata to recalculate how much should come out of each speaker depending on what you're playing it back on so that stuff is recalculated on the fly as you listen depending on how many speakers you've got awesome okay all right i'm going to let you go back into it um we are having a lot of uh comments about is this relevant to people at a more independent level so we're gonna touch on that eventually so hang out cool yeah we definitely will um as a technology it's super cool i mean like i say the the holy grail for a lot of engineers has been to make stuff sound more spatial than the speakers that are in the room and i think a lot of people were really into quad when it happened and a lot of people were really hoping 5 1 would um stick but the problem with all of the multi-channel formats up until now is like we were talking about before they discrete monitor formats you either have four speakers set up in quad or five speakers in a subwoofer set up in 5.1 or you cannot play back that format correctly that's it whereas atmos is has the ability to accommodate any monitoring setup you can technically play back an atmos mix on a single mono speaker and it has rules about how it will fold everything down and there you go it'll play back it's not going to be the most spatial experience in the world playing it back on a mono speaker but it will play back um okay so i think that covers that in terms of the pro tools and the renderer and having those two pieces of software set up um and then what you print as i'm not sure that there's really anything else about the process so are there any questions about just the setup from a kind of general standpoint mark is there anything else uh let me see in crowdcast here and just going through the questions real quick uh a lot of stuff wrong and apparently steve jenowick is around so he can he can sort this out yeah absolutely um hi steve uh hi steve stop okay here's you're gonna be on the panel by the way i'm putting together a panel for atmos for either october or november and obviously steve is top of my list steve for people who don't know him uh worked without schmidt for years and years and years um capital engineer fantastic engineer and has been doing tons of amazing atmos mixes since i think basically since anybody started doing them for music wow yeah awesome okay uh we have one um well maybe we can hit a little bit of this now uh just for anybody who's wondering if this is um something that they're just gonna kind of ignore uh so ethan bm asks as a local touring band is this attainable for us and i'd like to just kind of change that into like independent artists well it's absolutely attainable because like we said you can just get the render software and work in headphones and that is a very valid way to work there are a lot of people who do atmos mixes like professionally that's what they do who will actually start their mixes on headphones and then go to speakers later on and that could be just a logistical thing because they don't happen to have 16 speakers in their house or whatever or it can just be because that's the way they like to build the mix up and it can also just be because the binaural is a very important version of the atmos mix so yes it is it's certainly attainable you can do it in pro tools um you can definitely do it in nuendo i'm sure because cubase is made by the same folks that there is some atmos functionality in cubase i don't know for sure um i would imagine someone is going to say in the chat that studio one blows everything else off the face of the planet and does it better and has atmos and has had it for 900 years who knows like they will all do it um logic obviously because apple has really committed to atmos music it has some integration right now and i can only imagine that they are ramping that up like crazy so you don't have to work in pro tools i work in pro tools and i love the implementation i mean obviously everything can always be better and the good thing is this is atmos has been around for a long time for theatrical but it has not been being used for music for that long and so hopefully we're still at the point where there is going to be rapid development and improvement in the tools in terms of the ui and the way they work but also just sonically like the way the binaural renderer works there's no reason that can't keep getting better and better and better so yeah and okay so then the other side of that is well okay what do you do with your atmos mix once you have it if you're an indie band and the answer is that especially with apple stepping in and saying now we do it as well you've got two major platforms and title numbers-wise is not you know one of the big three but it is still it is a major platform that's been around for a while they fully support streaming atmos and there are more and more ways you can submit your atmos mixes to online services and it's gotta only be a matter of time before all of the independent um distributors uh which i can't even think of their names right now but the ones where any artist can just say hey man for 25 bucks put this out on every service they will start to accept atmos because the services want content now there has to be some sort of quality control on this and that's been a big part of getting the atmos mixing going um and i i would say that they we've actually been incredibly lucky that there have been some people like steve jenowick who were staff at places that were needing to generate content because at first it was being done in-house and because it had to be they're just the economics of it and nobody else was set up to do it so it had to be and that could have gone horribly wrong and fortunately there's some really talented people doing it and then there are some talented independent people who've been doing it uh really early if you guys want to go in the way back machine episode it's got to be below 20 with greg penny it may even be single digits he's been doing atmos and other surround formats from the very beginning and one of his tracks along with a bunch of steve's uh his greg's version of rocketman is like one of the gold standard mixes for how to do a really cool atmos mix now this is another thing we're not even really going to get into it but the creative side of what you want to do with atmos you could just spread the band out a little bit and put some ambience in the back you can make everything circle your head all the way through the song you can do whatever you want you can put me in the height channel i can put you in the high channel as a bat yeah so there are no rules about what you have to do but there are some guidelines now actually there are there are rules there are technical things so okay going back to being an indie band who wants to do this you can get the tools to do it yourself easily but there are also things you have to conform to like you'll notice there on my screen if you want to pop that up again for a second in the renderer there are a bunch of um loudness indicators and you can also use the nugen plug-in on the 5-1 version of your mix i'll talk about re-renders in a second because they're actually quite useful um you have to be at -18 or below for a mix to be accepted now technically it'll play back if you're louder than that but it has the capability to distort quite easily because if you think about it like right now i have 14 speakers in my room all 14 channels could be going with a bunch of audio but then if you listen to it on stereo speakers let alone mono speakers all of that stuff has to be crashed down to two speakers and that's just going to get louder and louder and louder so minus 18 is allowing for all of that audio to show up in one channel and not just be a square wave so that's the deal so there are guidelines dolby has published them they're very easy to find um so you know you don't need to take notes with them guidelines for technically how you have to deliver your files so if you're an indie band and you want to start getting into this just do some reading and um actually what we can do is stop uh don't share my screen for a second because i've got a browser tab open somewhere and i've got links open to [Music] the two dolby documents i'm so well actually i'm not going to show you this i don't know if these are public links or whatever but dolby has a published spec of like what the file should be for level and all that kind of stuff so yes right okay so um i've i've had people uh clients ask me because they've heard about stuff online um is is that most something i should worry about or uh will i need to have it in atmos in the future or what should i do with this you know yeah i mean you know i love that that it's it's something i should worry about like yeah you should worry about worrying about atmos no i think thinking like if this becomes the format yeah something stereotype yeah it's a very big issue it's a huge issue for a million reasons um which we could just touch on now well what the hell we'll have this bit of the discussion right now so the thing is that the way records have been made for a really long time is you end up with a mix of your song right and for a while it was mono and then it was stereo and then there were a few other formats but you would always make a stereo stereo is the standard for mixing a song you want to end up with a stereo mix but now you also need an atmos mix now you could make the stereo mix from the atmos and there are arguments to be made that maybe we should be thinking about mixing an atmos so that the crash down to stereo is the stereo mix but that's just a very different thing like there's stuff about atmos where you don't really have a mix bus but then when you're mixing in stereo maybe you like to have a mix buss so you wouldn't necessarily want to make those mixes the same thing which means that all of a sudden you need to do two mixes of every song and economics come into play there because there was a mixed budget and they just spent it to get their stereo mixes and now they need atmos mixes and that is something that's still being worked out it's not even the same across the board at all labels as to which department pays for it some labels um maybe they've all changed now but some labels were paying for it out of marketing budgets as opposed to a r budgets it wasn't even really seen as part of making the record the record was a stereo thing and now for our marketing budget we're going to spend money getting atmos mixes because that gets us on to better playlists on apple or whatever it is so it's complicated and weird and that is still shaking itself out but the good news is that there are a lot of mixers now who are set up for atmos and are cranking out atmos mixes and the more we do it the more we find workflows that allow us to even if we're not going to work on the stereo at the same time as the atmos but to transition quickly from one to the other so if i'm mixing in stereo and i've got to go to atmos i just have a second set of stuff in my template and i reassign a bunch of buses and i start off with my stereo mix but it's going through the renderer and then i can immediately just start spreading out and that works really really well and everybody has their own version of that depending on how they mix the problem can come up when you are doing catalog work and you have to match mixes so you got to match a stereo mix but then you've got to do the atmos mix and there's not a whole lot of money to do it you're technically doing two mixes but for less than a normal mix fee so that stuff is all in play but you know getting getting paid to mix a song in stereo is really difficult sometimes so let's not pretend that that's worked out weird you know there is no standard rate for mixing a song right i don't even right only the very very top mixers have a standard rate for themselves to mix a song and i'm not one of them my mixer we just need to talk to one of those guys yeah maybe you should maybe you should so i am yeah well um we do have a question that is right in line um not with the rate stuff but uh with starting with the stereo mix so i'll just read this thing it's from steve foster and he says hi andrew what is your atmos workflow do you start with a solid stereo mix and then spread elements to the sides back top or start from scratch thanks yeah i i will if i've done the stereo mix like i just said i've got um i'll show you really quickly without going into any details so right here is my stereo router so this is what printed the mix that i was working on um then i've got down here a 7-0 router which is part of that mix bus i was talking about before where i've made myself a 914 mix bus kind of thing but i make it with a 7-0 bus a stereo bus to add those second two channels that are wide then an lfe router and then a quad up top and that gives me my mix bus and like you can see my wide and my 7-0 router are sharing the same processing so all i need to do is just start panning so i start from my stereo mix and then i just start panning stuff and then i'll start picking things out of the mix buss and putting them into objects because i want to do fun stuff with them and i want to make sure that that fun stuff is preserved no matter what happens in terms of the monitoring setup so i don't really want them in my bed technically i could just mix everything through this seven plus two one four set up down here and just use the pro tools panning and the sends and things like that to make stuff move around but the objects like i was saying before are more discreet in terms of how they will get to the speakers on the other end so whenever you're trying to do anything that you want very specifically placed or you want the movement to be very specific objects are 99 of the time they're the way to go but you'll see on this mix i mean this isn't done but i've just chosen to take uh like the strings and the trumpet stuff and some of my weird programming that i did that stuff is an object because i'm moving it around and i think um like if we look at this guy i could be wrong but i think that this is changing position let's find out each time we go to a new yeah so these guys are moving i've this is basically a phrase that happens three times with three trumpet parts that are doing kind of a reverse pyramid and each time they play from different places so it's like a little fanfare that moves around the room that is much better to do in objects because i know exactly where they're going to be but i could do it inside of my 7-0 mix bus and even make a 712 mix bus so i would have some height information but i wanted to be very discreet about where my stuff was going to go so that's what i did and i've got all three of these guys um just change position so you can see i'll put them here and this is just really simple pan automation and you can do it manually by drawing it in you can grab knobs in latch mode or touch mode you can use controllers you can do whatever you want and this is just the regular pro tools surround panner but you can see because that dot is red that it's sending metadata and actually here let's watch these guys move around in the render why don't we so if i hit play what you're going to see they're going to be some dots for those trumpets and unless i've screwed something up they should move when we get to the next phrase they're not going i've messed something up with my i o setup because this is a mix i haven't worked on in about a month and i've changed everything about my atmos setup but anyway normally those green balls would be bouncing around the room so the fact that they're not is me screwing up it's not that it's difficult or doesn't question was but i've definitely over explained everything that we needed to say about that oh that was that was how do i transition into the atmos mix yeah i start from my stereo mix and then but now i've already gotten to the point where while i'm doing a stereo mix i get frustrated because like oh man i can't wait to do that thing and like it's gotta wait i can't do it yet it's it's not at most yet right okay yeah so you're you're thinking about the atmos mix in the stereo mix you're kind of plotting and knowing you know i'm going to end up doing yeah now let me let me real quickly actually show my screen again for a second because i want to talk about um something that in the render is called re-renders so what this means is four because those are the speakers in my room so that's what it will create hold on let me move this out from under my ugly head um so that will create a 914 output that's feeding my monitor controller and that's how i hear it through the speakers but at the same time it is crashing that down because i've set it up to do this to a 7 1 a 5 1 s stereo and then i also have my binaural so the binaural is going out of different outputs so this is just what outputs is it coming out of and i've left one through 16 for my speakers so it skips a couple of channels then my seven one is coming out of outputs 17 through 24 then the five one is coming up 25 through 30. then the stereo is on 3132 and the binaural is 3334. so 33 and 34 are routed to my headphone amp and all of these are routed to different inputs on my monitor controller so i can flip between the 9147151 stereo of my mix as it will get crashed down by the atmos playback when it's played back on a different discrete set of speakers as well i can hear my binaural which what it is technically is the stereo mix sorta kinda but with things rendered based on the binaural settings so first of all it's the distance settings that i showed you before so it might have a little bit more ambience on it and be spread between more speakers and the phase relationships will be different because i've said it to be far instead of near or mid or if you switch it off it's exactly what would happen in the stereo mix so if you set the binaural settings of every single object in here they're identical there's nothing to say how do you want me to make this binaural for people wearing headphones it just comes out stereo so it's what's called a little bit there so um so in this in this can you explain how you're addressing the binaural piece one more time yes sorry so the binaural piece is addressed by the settings that you have for the objects where you can say what the distance is so it's either off which means there's no binaural processing whatsoever and it's exactly the same as the stereo version of your mix or you've got near mid and far which are how much binauralization do you want how much spatialization 3ds whatever the you want to call it it is what is trying to put in the phase relationships that will make your human brain think it's coming from over there even though you're wearing headphones that's what binaural sound is now there's some people who argue that binaural is actually just a microphone technique and i guess okay that's true maybe um but what it is is it says binaural recording is put microphones where your eardrums would be and record stuff and when you play it back in headphones it will sound very spatial you hear the difference between something in front of you and something behind you whereas if you have a normal microphone and you just capture something mono the only way to make it different between being in front of you and behind you is to do some phase tricks because the difference when you're listening in an acoustic environment between something directly in front of you and directly behind you you've gotten rid of the time difference between when it hits your ears right because it's still the same distance from your ears when it's directly behind or even overhead or in front but the frequency response changes completely because the shape of your outer ear we talked about this in the hearing health panel so i'm not going to go into it but the pinna here is all right to reflect and focus at 3.5 k ish and get it down your ear hole so you can hear it when a pterodactyl is going to come and kill you right pterodactyls not so much but i said that because pterodactyls are above you and it's why it's actually very hard to get stuff to sound above you because we're not used to listening for things above us like that's just not as important as things that are off to the side or behind so the brain is better at picking up audio cues so okay but here let's touch on something else with this so the way that a human in an acoustic space figures out where stuff is and this has happened okay anybody who's had like an old-school old-school alarm clock go off like one that's just beeping not something that's playing a song or whatever but something that's just beeping like a pure tone it's almost impossible to find in the room right and if it's if it's like a smoke alarm that's stuffed in a drawer somewhere and you can't find it you have to move your head while it's making the noise and then by picking up on all the different reflections and the different amount of early reflections and reverb that are added to the sound from different directions your brain goes oh it's there but if you stay perfectly still it's very very hard to figure out where it is so binaural on its own is trying to add the processing that would happen if stuff were making noise outside of your head and you were hearing it through your ears from somewhere as opposed to it's being blasted right into your ears from two little speakers that are strapped to it then you've got the apple spatial audio which we can go into this in a minute or later or whatever but what they do is they add a head tracking component to it so that as you move your head it moves your head inside of the binaural space which helps your brain say oh wow that's actually coming from over there because it does change and it's one of the reasons why a lot of people have a lot of trouble with binaural when they listen to headphones because when you can't figure out where something's coming from you without even knowing you do it move your head a little bit and that completely helps you localize so the idea behind the apple head tracking spatialized audio is that they add that now when you do it with audio that goes along with video that makes life really really easy because the front is always where the picture is always so if you're watching something on your ipad and you're looking at it with your airpod maxes on with the gyroscopes and all the rest of the stuff it knows you're looking at the screen so if you move your head to the right the gyroscopes and everything inside the headphones know you've moved your head so it will shift the audio to the left a little bit right and then when you look back it comes forward that's all great and works really well especially because visual cues will help you set up spatial stuff really easily but what do you do with music when you got the thing in your back pocket like what way are you facing and and what like if i make a left turn because i'm walking inside of a building and i got to make a left down that hallway well do i turn the audio and leave it sideways the whole time you walk down that hallway no you kind of have to bring it back so it's a lot more complicated but the whole idea behind it is to give you some of the head movement cues that will help you locate audio within the binaural stream that you're listening to hmm very cool okay that's that uh we have a um a question which i think would be really uh good to go over here and [Music] uh [Music] oh hold on a minute okay so this is something to to address and it's it's kind of assuming pretty far out like we're really in the weeds right now and we're gonna we're gonna go pretty far yeah but i live in the house okay here like literally no uh okay so this is from karen bassett and uh karen asks are people going to have an atmos system installed in their home most people listen on earbuds these days or gasp their cell phone speaker so i think that um to to answer some of these questions and and how relevant is this to us uh i think we do actually have to kind of back up and and go to the well we had quad at one point and that failed because and then surround and then surround failed because but this could work because you know wait maybe you can hear me there i am okay like we were saying earlier the thing about quad in 5.1 is to listen to them you needed a quad or a 5.1 setup so when karen's asking will people have an atmos system installed on their phone when they're listening on earbuds well airpod pros and airpods maxes are full at most capable with head tracking playback systems any pair of headphones is a binaural playback system so the binaural part everybody already has all new macs even on their built-in speakers support atmos they are throwing sound all over the place and like i was saying before amazon echo speakers for what it's worth do it there are lots of different sound bars that have atmos built in so even if you don't surround yourself with speakers and you don't put speakers hanging from the ceiling a lot of the more modern playback things that you can get that aren't even that expensive will have some version of atmos decoding and they might have extra tweeters to bounce stuff off the walls or whatever they do they listen to their acoustic environment and they're ridiculously smart for what they do and then once they know the environment they're in they will attempt to send audio out in ways that will make you feel more immersed than it would be if it was just a mono speaker sitting on your desk playing stuff back so yeah will lots of people have 914 systems in their homes i doubt it right but you can build you can build a 5-1 system out of sonos with a sound bar a sub and two little speakers at the back and it sounds awesome it sounds great i've not heard that nice so i mean that's what i've got where where we watch tv that's it yeah wow huh i'm gonna have to look that up that sounds interesting and it's because it's an object-based system that it can translate to any playback system if you decode the atmos it will figure out the best way to represent what was mixed on whatever playback system you've got and i'm not saying it's going to work on two old school speakers and be awesome necessarily but it also won't be destroyed it won't be like you've got the 5 1 mix but you only get to hear what was coming out of the left and right it will fold everything down to the left and right speaker and you will get a version which is why it's important to check out your re-renders what that's for is to hear what people will hear when they have smaller speaker setups than you have right okay so uh two things about that so first one is i think that that's the best explanation i've heard about why this can translate to somebody who doesn't have a massive theater system uh because of the object orientation and and hearing how it collapses down uh next to that so are you how often are you checking the re-renders and comparing playback systems i check the um binaural and stereo re-render a lot i switch back and forth i've got um i've got a monitor controller that will switch sources and the three that are up for my headphones at all times when i'm working in atmos is the original stereo mix the stereo re-render and the binaural and i'm constantly going between those three and the original stereo mix is a really important one to have and you'll notice in this session the stereo mix is turned down 7 db because it has to be feedback um because that's what will level match it with the minus 18 adm file and as much as i would love to push the adm for better for worse there is a limiter built into the renderer which supposedly is the same limiter that you'll get on playback um when you start crashing down to fewer channels and it's there are better limiters and i think part of it is because it can't have a huge delay on he's coming again there is why are we frozen so there is a limiter to keep it from just distorting the hell out of everything but it's not a good sounding limiter because there's no look ahead there's no tweaking it's just a limiter so you've got to stick to your minus 18 for stuff to sound good and for that to match most stereo mixes especially for me i'm coming down at least seven db maybe more so that is an important thing to keep in mind right right uh yeah i was gonna gonna ask uh you you won the loudness war so now you're back to minus 18. yeah but i haven't i haven't delivered a stereo mix at minus 18. no way i mean they're better than they used to be i'm not at -6 anymore but yep and this is 11 ish this one you know this song was at minus 11. um and i still there's stuff that's louder so you you just have to level match with game that's your only choice yeah okay um so we have a uh a couple couple more questions to kind of jump into here um and this one's pretty important uh oh that one's stone's actually really good so moog music has two questions for us uh and i'm wondering when the first atmos synth is coming uh so question for you guys and the first one is do you have any tips on how to use twizzle flangers within a mix if i knew what a twizzle flanger was all right and this is from oh wait here's their other one why are we freezing so much i know yeah um so okay so so the the real question is how do time-based effects like phasers and flangers translate okay if you're not listening in binaural they will translate exactly how they would in any multi-channel format mix because the way you crash down from let's say 914 to something smaller is it's just a chart of coefficients that says okay you don't have height speakers take those turn them down three db each and put them in the four corner speakers like whatever i just made that up but that's something like what it's going to be so you work your way down to whatever the number of speakers you have just with level that's it and that's why you have to be at -18 because you're going to keep going up man we are freezing a lot it's happening a lot yeah i'm not not not a fan of that um so when you're in binaural you obviously have phase stuff going on and some ambient stuff to move things further away um but i have not noticed anything weird with that type of effect if anything your phaser gets phasier like it's cool i really haven't noticed it and i do use effects like that not on every single mix but i'm a big fan of phasers and flangers and i haven't noticed any problems here's here is something though here's something i will tell you for free is think about for your binaural for a second the difference between something that is equal in the left right and something that is in the center ah man freezing again i'm waiting till we come back this is important okay when you're equal loudness left and right you get what's called a phantom center right and if you just mix in stereo you use the phantom center all the time your kick your bass your vocal all that is in the middle but it isn't in the middle is it it's just equal in your left and right speaker okay when you are binauralizing that it is very different to algorithmically decide what something is going to sound like coming from two point sources that are supposed to be exactly equidistant through a room to get to you your brain gets rid of all of that ambience and you just hear it as not being that different from listening to headphones right it's just right there left and right it's very different to take two sound sources and calculate some as they travel through the air to get to you to make a binaural version of that than it is to take a single point source from the center and have it come to you and hit both ears at the same time that's where you'll actually find the biggest difference in dealing with i mean i i'm saying i call it this but i want to define it the front wall which is the left center right dealing with the left center right as you do any surround mixing but especially binaural is critical and i think when apple music launched and they had all this content there were some mixes that sounded crazy like the drums were in the next room and i think some of that when you were in binaural was the fact that the quick way to do a an atmos mix of a song is to get stereo mix stems and just slam them up and do some panning add some effects and then you print it but your kick is stereo snare stereo dry lead vocal is stereo everything is stereo and if you leave it hard left right with phantom center on speakers you'll never know the difference in binaural totally different and it's different between streaming the dolby binaural which is what you get if you listen to title or the apple spatialization which is what you get when you listen to apple so be very very careful about true center versus phantom center when you're setting up your atmos mixes um because that is where things can get destroyed the easiest that i've found at least right once you're out in the weeds and other speakers like it doesn't matter like you're you're fan be back in a moment frozen okay your phantom center that's behind you who gives a like you don't even have a speaker back there so it doesn't matter but your left center right that front wall is super important and the one thing i would say is that some mixers have started turning off the binaural settings so you remember you've got near mid and far right for the binaural settings but you also have off which basically just says don't binauralize this it's the easiest way to get your binaural mix to sound like your stereo mix but that's because it isn't a binaural mix anymore so try as hard as you can to leave that on even if it's all on no and then my camera browser okay um yeah try really really hard to leave that on and here's the reasoning behind that you could say well yeah but it sounds better if i turn it off so i'm just going to turn it off who cares it'll sound better but the binaural encoding on these things is fluid it's like mp3 encoding and aac encoding it will continue to get better and better and better so leave as much binaural information as you can or eventually what could happen is your mix when people listen to it once binaural has gotten awesome we'll be like oh man that's one of those 20 20 mixes that didn't have any of the binaural information on it that sounds boring like right the binaural will get better and better and it is a playback real-time encoding thing that can be improved it's not like you would have to go back and reprint your mixes it's made every time from the adm or the mp4 which is a smaller version which is what they use to actually stream so try and stick with the binaural but don't use phantom center on things and i think you'll have a lot more success making your binaural feel present the way the stereo mix does in headphones right right awesome um so uh yeah steve uh janowick said in the comments that binaural is changing literally every day i know what he's seeing um he also added great quick explanation to beds when you hear andrew refer to a bed if you're tuning in later beds are a speaker configuration objects are places in space yeah awesome um yeah so uh quick question for any maybe like live sound guys that might be thinking about uh phase relationship when you introduce multiple speakers into a playback system like this so can can you kind of i guess quickly summarize like how the actual calibration of uh of a system this large is done yeah it's actually really simple you just have dolby come and set it up it's it's um you you have to calibrate the system you cannot put this many speakers into a room and just hope for the best now that said i was shocked at how good it sounded just when i put the speakers up but eq'ing the speakers is a big deal there are recommended dolby curves for things but i would argue a little bit that you should just listen to your on headphones and if it sounds good to you and it translates well don't worry too much about the eq curves because all of the dolby atmos eq curves were developed for theatrical and it's super important that you stick to them you have to stick to them because there are also level differences between sets of speakers as you move further back like you cannot get that wrong you have to set up your monitoring system exactly the way the spec is eq you just have to eq your system so that stuff translates just like but then again you know a lot of people don't set their up right for stereo either you know no room is perfectly symmetrical so technically you should be doing time alignment between left and right but you don't you move your head around and it's fine okay so the two components are eq and time alignment time alignment is really really important the way you do it is i'll give you the basic setup and then you've got to find software and there's some software that makes this incredibly easy but you could do it just by recording things back into pro tools so let's say just set up a click track in pro tools bus it directly to an audio track and bus it to an output that goes to actually bust it to an object put that object in your left speaker hit record you're gonna get the baseline which is the going through a bus inside of pro tools and then sorry and you put a microphone at your listening position technically you should have an array of microphones and things will start to average out as you're especially for doing eq eq with just one microphone is tricky because you're not where that microphone is your ears aren't there and if you move just a little bit stuff changes but let's just talk about time alignment so you have a single microphone basically at the listening position but the big thing is is you want that microphone exactly equidistant from your left and right so it's exactly in the center because that's kind of your baseline for everything so it's wherever you're going to sit as close as you can get to the middle of your left and right speaker as far back from the center as you're normally going to be microphone there record the click through a bus record it through the speaker to the microphone record that for every single speaker whichever speaker is closest will have the smallest delay between the bust click and the recorded click through the microphone that's your baseline you leave that speaker at zero and then i think you can even do it in the renderer i don't do my speaker alignment in the render so i'm just looking here but i believe uh can you do delays in here not in the speaker setup hold on speaker calibration gain and delay yes you can so if you show the screen for a second yes um this is the speaker calibration page inside the renderer which is just one of the option windows so you can set level but you can also set delay and this is in milliseconds so whichever speaker was first and let's say it's probably going to be your center speaker or it's going to be one of your left center right because those should really be sort of equidistant the way you've got them set up and then whatever the difference is between the shortest delay and the delay of the other speaker you're listening to put that in this setting and that will timeline the arrival of signals and that will take care of any weird phase stuff um you would think that there would be some comb filtering and things like that ooh video feedback i love it um you'd think that there would be more comb filtering and stuff but i have never ever ever been bothered by it and i wasn't bothered by it before the time alignment so it's much more forgiving than you would think which doesn't make much sense to me but i'm all for it it works great right okay that is that cheap man's way to go ahead and time align your speakers yeah that's pretty brilliant actually because i i've definitely messed around with it uh with in stereo and using different softwares uh that even just like i don't know like room eq wizard and everything and you actually like find out you know it'll do a quick impulse and all that and then but yeah just using a click track with pro tools is duh yeah i mean you can get it down to the sample and it's repeatable so you know right it's it's it's going to take you more work to do it that way but it it definitely works now the dolby guys did help me set up my room um and what they've got is they've got really cool measurement software and it ran on a mac so you can get it i don't know how much it cost it but it's not an audio precision or anything like that and they literally took uh pink noise i think they were still running pink noise and just they had a cheap audio interface and they ran it out of two outputs one of the outputs they just looped back to the input and the other output went to a speaker and they had had the microphone and they could measure what's that oh sorry was it smart by chance it might have been it might have been nice yeah that's a popular one for big pas and everything while we're waiting for andrew to come back yeah so so there there's there's plenty of software that will do the measurement for you but the reason i explained it the way i did is because that tells you exactly the concept of what the hell it is you're doing so you don't try and figure out what the time is for every speaker you just figure out what's the difference between direct and the speaker and then that's your baseline and all you need to know is what's the difference between the speakers the absolute doesn't matter at all it's just who's late right right okay uh let's do this away and you don't touch that and you delay all the other speakers i i said it backwards earlier and then because obviously all right i said i said it backwards earlier obviously you take the time of the speaker that's furthest from you and that's your baseline and you delay all the other speakers to match that not the closest speaker because you can't un-delay the other speakers that's ridiculous right i said it backwards okay um we have a question while we're almost still in the stereo thing here um okay this one is from shelley do you see that on your screen yes uh while you are checking the stereo premix version against the atmos version how do you route the output of your stereo version direct to it two output channels or two of bed inside the session yeah you definitely don't put your stereo version through the renderer definitely not and it's why you kind of have to have some sort of monitor controller you've got to have a way to switch between what it is you're listening to without relying on doing it inside of the pro tools session you could do it inside the pro tools session but it starts to get really messy when you're mixing in stereo like i always mix through my print track and i just swap the input on that track to go between my live mix and my last printed mix or the rough mix or whatever but because i'm not only listening to a stereo version of the renderer i can't do the same thing now if you're only listening to stereo you could do that you could route the stereo out of the renderer back to your print track instead of your mix buss like just think of the renderer as a piece of outboard gear on your mix buss right the problem is it usually is coming back wider than stereo so it helps to have a monitor controller so what i use i mean we could talk about the specific hardware i've got it's going to take a while if you want to do that do we want to go everybody everybody loves hardware yeah yeah i wonder if i should look for any basic questions before we move yeah do that okay because when i talk about my actual hardware setup we'll get into some of the like weirder more esoteric things about trying to work in atmos that yeah you've got to figure out okay um this one comes from uh a vladimir putin or am i saying it right so vladimir wants to know if you had one shot one opportunity to seize everything you wanted in one moment would you capture it or just let it slip and i thought you were gonna have a recognizing yeah i thought it was the eminem song but i think vladimir got it wrong so uh mom spaghetti is the answer vladimir 42 or mom's spaghetti yeah yeah uh okay and this one is from alex alex asks how is this going to affect small or home producers i don't think it will i mean look at the moment you can still just deliver stereo there are labels that require atmos but they're not expecting every mixer on the planet to be able to deliver at most so what they will ask you to do is to deliver mixed stems that can go off to somebody who can make the atmos mix the way it should affect smaller home producers is to start thinking about what you want to do in atmos there's a really good article with dave way who set up his atmos setup and then he was tracking i think it was some stuff with john doe i can't remember exactly who it was where he was tracking thinking about atmos he was setting up extra microphones and this is like if you think about just really briefly we'll go left turn and talk about well okay i need to do a reverb in atmos and you think like oh i got to go get a multi-channel reverb right now well yeah you could do a multi-channel reverb but why don't you just do three stereo reverbs one that goes to the left right one that goes to the sides one that goes to the rears and you could have slightly longer times in those three reverbs as they go back like three copies of valhalla or whatever it doesn't matter what they are or what about the uad ocean way plug-in which gives you three different sets of microphones near mid and far we'll have three ocean waves set up stereo just and it's all off one send yeah i have three stereo delays and the ones in the back have less top end than the ones in the front and have a little more regen and stuff just sweeps to the back of the room oh my gosh but it's just a vocal slap so your effects don't need to be gigantic multi-channel things and in fact i've had better luck setting stuff up with revive than a lot of the crazy multi-channel reverbs just for whatever reason it's it works for me and the valhalla plate i've done like a six channel plate with that and yeah it's you can make it with anything don't think you need at most specific production tools just think about how cool would it be if the brass were changing position like the trumpet players just running around the room right yeah cool so now i can make that happen so talking about this stuff definitely goes from the like how the hell does this work like what's the routing i got to think about okay this thing's you know what all of that stuff then it gets really fun and i gotta go try it out so see you bye all right just kidding yeah it's really really fun so i think the way it should affect you is you should just start thinking about how you can do it and how much fun you can have doing it yeah yeah it's it's definitely uh sounding pretty cool i mean it's just another tool right like everything that we try to do as mixers or musicians or everything is just how can we connect with people and this is just another way of getting into it up until now up until now any multi-channel format you were mixing for very very few people yeah but with the binaural component especially as it gets better you're mixing for everybody in the world who's got a phone you know because you don't need the the airpods pro and airpods max for apple stuff gives you the head tracking and their version of spatial audio any headphone playback is binaural by definition so you don't need special headphones to hear the binaural mix any pair of headphones will do it yeah yeah i mean yeah the i think one thing that's that's kind of important because um i i have seen things in forms and everything of people saying uh you know oh this is a gimmick um you know it's ridiculous what are you gonna do like always have the singer flying around your head and all of that stuff but no no just like you're saying like with the arrays of microphones i've done things where like the those artists wanted to have it sound like they were walking out of the studio while they were singing and they wanted to hear the car door or the studio door shut and they wanted like the depth and everything so it was like trying to accomplish that that in stereo but if it was also uh you know yeah there's a great article with steve albini talking about setting up like four or five different microphones for the singer and one of them was inside a bucket and like well why not do the same thing just for spatial you don't have to be gimmicky when i was like years and years ago i got uh i was able to work on a fabulous thunderbirds live dvd mix with ed journey five one we had to do five one and this was when five one was pretty new and he it was a live concert and he's like i'm not doing anything crazy but he built this wall of sound so the band was in the front you never felt like they weren't there was nothing gimmicking but man the stereo version sounded tiny compared to the five one wow absolutely tiny and that's what you can do you can do crazy stuff if it's called for but it's just like the background vocals wrap around you a little bit instead of just being hard panned yeah that's kind of cool yeah yeah definitely okay um let's so we do have questions piling up but i think it would be great to talk about your personal setup okay so we've kind of gone through this everybody like you can do it with headphones you can you could go download the renderer now and try it if you have pro tools and you know or another daw that that actually works with that so it is something that you could you can do without having andrew setup but we want to see your setup well we're not going to see it we're just going to talk about it because i'm not going to move the camera around but okay so the most basic setup is pro tools you set your playback engine to the dolby audio bridge that sends all your audio into the dolby renderer program which can be running on the same computer and then the output of the dolby renderer application is what feeds your speakers and like we talked about before you don't even need to have a monitor controller there's a volume pot in the dolby renderer that's just sitting at the top of the window and there you go so that's the simplest version of this okay i don't have the simplest version of this i have the really crazy version of this and there are a few reasons for it one is because here's that volume pot i was talking about before so that can be your your monitor pot and you could hook your speakers directly up to your audio interface and that's it um and if you go into the preferences you literally set input audio device and output audio device now i'm running the renderer on a separate uh mac mini which for reasons i will get to in a second in fact i can get to it right now the dolby renderer runs at 48k and 96k and that's it and the reality is you can't deliver a 96k adm to anybody they don't want them they want a 48k adm an adm is that multi-channel wav file with all the panning metadata and all that crap that actually is the deliverable it's the equivalent of the stereo wave file but it's the atmos file so the render really wants to run at 48k if you have the renderer running on the same computer that means your pro tools session has to be at 48k right because the audio is going directly from one piece of software to another through core audio there's no sample rate conversion on that so that means that your sessions have to be at 48. i get stuff to mix at every sample rate known to man basically and i don't want to have to sample rate convert the sessions especially because i never do that for the stereo if they've tracked it at 96 i mix it 96 i've even got a couple of things in the last couple of months at 44.1 whatever but then i mix it 44.1 because to me sometimes i'll go from 441 to 48 if i just feel like for some reason it's fighting me but generally i feel like there's less damage done by leaving all the audio exactly as it is then to sample rate converted if you're capturing something from scratch and you know you're going to be doing something for atmos then work at 48 and it makes life easy okay so because i didn't want to do that all of a sudden my setup got stupid like really really stupid so i have a an hdx system using the hdx hybrid engine which we're not going to talk about tonight but it is the second coming of hdx cards it is the best thing avid has done in years and years and years and it's why i can still run gigantic sessions on my imac pro and it doesn't even break a sweat anymore so i've got hdx cards but the mixer is running native then for my audio hardware i have an avid matrix not the matrix studio i've got the big boy and the reasons for that and it's i priced everything out and i could have probably saved some money by doing certain things certain ways but it all would have been much more kludgy and not as streamlined and not as simple and there would have been certain things i couldn't do so here i'll bring up uh dadman which is the software that actually runs the matrix so up here i've got an a to d and d a's so i can record microphones and like this is the microphone input i use to record the intros and outros to the podcast um and i've also got my modular coming in and i notice inputs one and two are modular because they're the important ones um and because i'm just here and i'm not tracking bands here eight inputs is fine so that's the analog i o on there then this is the monitor this is the money this is the matrix of stuff but down the left here you can see what cards i have in my matrix i've got my a to d there's built-in aes ebu then they're digilink cards so i have three hdx cards and the reason is if you put the renderer on a second machine you have to have 128 channels of audio going to that second machine to be able to use 128 objects each object is an audio input so i've got 128 outputs of pro tools cards mapping to 128 inputs of the renderer machine and so that is on dante so digilink routing to dante and then dante is mind-blowing i don't understand how it can possibly work because it is basically thousands of audio channels up to 192k and you can have multiple sample rates coexisting at the same time which is how i managed to get around the 48k thing on 10 base t well it wants to be faster 100 base t gigabit ethernet but it's like cat 6 e cables it's not anything crazy you don't need fiber so i've just got like a cisco managed switch because i decided i wanted a really good router for this but you could just use a belkan switch and just plug all the ethernet in and everything talks to everything so my first 128 outputs of pro tools just take up the two hdx cards and they're just routed out to this is going to scroll it to see it um right go to 128 inputs on the mac mini on my mac mini i've got this pcie card in a little chassis that is 128 inputs and outputs that's it it is a pci card that just has ethernet connectors on it so it is a dante audio interface so that gets my 128 channels into the renderer and then back out of the renderer into this pci card and back over here and then that comes back in and is what feeds my monitor setup so here are all my re-renders that i showed you before right i showed you long ago i'm not going to go back and do it but that the 7.1 re-render out of the dolby render software starts at output 17 and there it is so it starts at 17 and it comes in here and then that makes its way up into the monitor matrix so this looks really confusing if you've never seen it before it's very complicated in that you can route audio from anywhere to anywhere but it is so insanely powerful and it remembers everything you can unplug a device plug it back in three years later as long as nothing has changed names it will reconnect itself to everything it was supposed to connect to and everything just works so it doesn't matter if you turn something on or off or disconnect stuff and then when you plug it in next time it will just hook itself up it takes a while to get your head around it and set it up but then it just works brilliantly okay the thing is what is feeding the render so i go from pro tools card to the dante card and my dante card if we look down here i've got my in my main dante which is hooked up to things that are not the dolby renderer this is just some extra dante stuff hooked up we'll follow the sample rate of the session so if i open up an 88.2 session most of the dante network just switches to 88.2 and everybody talks to everybody else and it's super happy the renderer would not be happy this dante expansion card and this is why i'm on the matrix studio not why i'm on the full-blown matrix not the matrix studio this dante expansion card has built-in sample rate conversion and i can fix it to 48k and the real-time sample rate conversion is astounding i have to say that the matrix interface a to ds d to a sample rate conversion all of it is the best sounding interface i've ever used it's insane how good it sounds so the idea that i'm sample rate converting in and out of the renderer if i'm not working on a 48k session sounds like that would take a huge sonic hit i can't tell the difference between 48k with sample rate conversion 48k without it it is that transparent it is genius so that part of my dante network is always running at 48k and that way the renderer is always at 48k no matter what sample rate my session is that was super complicated that's only for me because i'm a geek and because i don't want to sample rate convert my stuff you don't need to do that if you work at 48k inside pro tools the render will be very happy whether it's on another computer or the same computer and it will work just fine i just didn't want to have to sample rate stuff that was at other sample rates okay the other thing the matrix gives me is it gives me a full blown monitor controller and this is where the eq curves are for all of my speakers so all of the eq'ing that's being done in the room is being done six channels of eq i can't remember sorry you uh you froze for a second um so yeah all of the eq is being done yeah so all the eq is being done inside of the matrix and also all of the delays are being done inside of the matrix so it's the monitor controller here is taking care of what you can do some of in the renderer like if you do your speaker calibration guy here and you can do delays here um you can't do eq curves here but there are other places you could do it but um all of my eq and monitor setup stuff is done inside of the matrix and then um actually here let's see uh i don't really see the delays going um anyway it doesn't matter then i define lots of different inputs and this goes back to the question before about well how do you listen to different things easily i've got all of these inputs are available for my speakers so this is the renderer output so this is the 914 output that's coming out of this matrix of speakers because i have told it if i look in my room setup that i have nine one four i haven't turned on these extra two in the front i don't have the six extra i could have up top um so i told it i got a 914 and it goes great you've got 914 and i choose physical monitoring that's what i get now i can fold down basically do a re-render here by changing the monitor configuration but what i do instead is what i showed you before i've got re-renders running live so i've got my 914 coming out that feeds the speakers then i've got a 7 1 a 5 1 and a stereo that all feed my monitor inputs so here's my re-render seven one re-render five one re-render 2.0 so those are my re-renders that are simultaneously coming out so if i want to really quickly hear my mix in 5-1 i just select this guy i want to go back to my atmos i select that guy and i've got a little monitor controller that does the switching for me so i can go between things by hitting buttons because i'm that kind of guy but you can do this in the pro tools control app you can do it on a pro tools dock you can do it by coming into the dadman software and then i have a separate output which is headphones that is an aes that's feeding my dangerous source so i'm going aes into the back of that using that as my d a and that can monitor pro tools stereo which is just two outputs that don't go to the renderer so when i'm working in stereo i don't use the renderer at all i've got the imac coming in because one other ridiculously cool thing about dante is there's a program i think it's 29 bucks or something that's dante virtual sound card that gives you up to a 32 channel i o core audio interface that just shows up on your dante network so i've got an eight channel interface set up and i can route my stereo out of my imac of any program into my speakers directly through dante the dante stuff makes things so flexible that you do not need a patchbay i don't have a patchbay anymore i don't need one you can also mult stuff in dante so that pro tools stereo goes lots of different places one of the places it goes is to the aes for the uh headphone monitoring but it also goes other places to be printed or can show up on the imac speakers or whatever i want to do okay anyway um so then my headphone monitoring i can be switching between the pro tools stereo the imac or i've got the binaural here and here's the stereo and then i've got a couple other things that i've been messing with um so the main setup is my imac pro with an hdx3 and a matrix then that goes dante out to a focusrite dante card that's in a chassis on a mac mini that's running the renderer then i come back out of the renderer onto the dante back into the matrix and then that gets routed around to go to my speakers and to my headphones and all my other stuff that it has to go to that's the basics of the setup i've got other weirder things set up i've got there's focusrite x2p uh which is they actually show you a little picture of it that's that's the basics everyone yeah and the reason i did it was so that i didn't have to sample rate convert the sessions right that became a big deal to me and maybe it wouldn't have been a big deal but the thought of having to generate all of that extra audio every single time where now i'll be mixing at 882 and i'll just flip over into the render and chuck some stuff and atmos just to kind of hear things and then go back to stereo so because i've got dante then i could get this focusrite x2p which is what's sitting on top of the modular so i've got a headphone amp at the back of the room that can have anything that's on the dante going to it and it sounds really good i've also got a 16 uh channel focusrite line um it does it has 16 line in in and out sorry can't speak anymore um but then dante as well that i have hooked up to all sorts of different things like uh guitar pedals the modular has extra outputs coming in here that aren't going into the a to d on the matrix um as well as i've actually got a workflow set up i've only done it a couple of times where i can take a microphone into the a to d or a di into the a to d on the matrix route it through dante to the red 16 line then it comes light pipe out of the red 16 into my apollo x8p with real time uad plugins running back out light pipe from the apollo to the red 16 to dante to pro tools and i can just put an ampeg svt on a bass i'm recording and the latency is nothing and it's the uad stuff in real time tracked but that's because i'm a geek you don't that is amazing any of this but it works that's genius like zero latency oh my gosh plugins through the console app back out into pro tools i'm gonna go do it right now see it all right sorry gotta stop doing that everybody's gonna leave so okay now there's another piece of the puzzle and i'm surprised no one has asked this question yet and the question that this answers is well how do i listen to like apple music atmos on my atmos mixing system i've got this gigantic set of pmcs and i want to hear apple music on it it turns out that is so hard and expensive that it makes me want to vomit so what you need you need the trifecta of something that has an atmos chip inside of it that can decode it that turns it into multi-channel audio not binaural that you can then get into your monitor controller and route it to the speakers that's really hard the ways to do it that work are you use consumer atmos enabled preamp makes one that is it froze on you at preamp so you use a consumer preamp so marantz makes a couple of them where you can get atmos in through hdmi and then it will spit out up to 16 channels of analog audio on xlrs that you can use to drive speakers the problem with that is you then have to go back into an a to d so you would hook that up to one of those like red 16 lines which is a good sounding interface but you've just gone through a d to a conversion and then an a to d conversion you're not necessarily level matched your volume control is before the d to a and then you're coming back in and going to the monitor controller on through another knob it's not the best thing in the world so i found this jbl sdp 55 which has the holy grail of atmos enabled hdmi in and dante out and so it is a preamp that's sitting on the table and yes it is very very expensive but if you add up all of the pieces you need to make it using a marantz and then the red 16 and then the blah blah blah it actually isn't a whole lot more expensive than doing that and it sounds amazing and you can stream bluetooth off your phone to it and it's a really great great great preamp but it costs a lot of money but that is the way i do it so i listen to apple music on my apple tv which goes hdmi into this amp and it just shows up as this monitor source right here turn it on and i've got full discrete atmos through my pmcs so i can hear what everybody else is doing in atmos and then feel terrible about myself because none of my stuff sounds only good at all just like i can do in stereo so i spent a lot of money to make myself feel horrible um so that was that was the last piece of the puzzle because it was really important to me to be able to do that now another question nobody is asked is well but how do i audition stuff or how do i give it to a band to listen to okay if you send an adm to a band they're not really going to be able to play it back unless they've got the dolby renderer software then they can open it up and hit play and it'll come out through the monitoring configuration obviously that's not going to be an option for everybody what you can do is you can convert the adm file to an mp4 which takes the gigantic 128 channel with metadata thing and it makes it much much much much smaller then the practical side of how you can send it to a band so they can hear it the easiest thing to do is on an iphone there are ways to do it on android but i don't know what they are yet but if you send the file to somebody with an iphone they can save it to their iphone and then they can play it back using the music app and that will do all of the atmos decoding and they can listen to the binaural that's the way you do binaural mixed checks with a band you send them an mp4 one thing i would highly recommend is you also send them a level adjusted version of the stereo mix because if to be at -18 you've had to turn your stereo mix down 7 db if they're a being against the released stereo version it will be 7 db louder that will sound a hell of a lot better even if it doesn't actually sound better so you have to explain at the very beginning of the process when you're working with somebody on atmos mixes what the deal is with the level requirements because you cannot get around them without risking your stuff sounding absolutely terrible down the line you have to conform to the minus 18. i think that's it really is there anything else well oh here hold on hold on um i got something else which is i just because i show you what speakers i've got so this this is my left right are the mb3 xbda's which are just phenomenal speakers i have wanted these forever and it turns out if you sell a neve console and an entire room full of outboard gear you too can get a pair of these speakers they are absolutely great and then my center channel is a version of this without the extended bass cabinet so my left and right are those and then my center is that and then the rest of the speakers are all uh these wafers which are built as sort of industrial speakers you can flush mount them inside walls on walls whatever the great part is they weigh almost nothing uh and they're fully they're passive speakers so you run some speaker wire two and you use an amplifier and then what amplifier you're gonna use well this um again this is an expensive amplifier i'm using the 88c06 version i believe it's an eight channel amplifier that has dante input so other than the sample rate conversion going to and from the render if i'm not working at 48 i have a true fully digital chain all the way from pro tools to the amplifier and then it's converted to analog and put out of the speakers yeah you can do it much cheaper there are lots of other options i just decided i wanted to do this app once and i didn't want to want to upgrade anything and i'm definitely not going to be upgrading this is awesome and works great you do not need to do it as crazily as i did it yeah andrew but if you guys have needs to sell then you know feel free feedback feedback oh sorry that's right you're getting feedback now no the uh video feedback oh right right i'm in the 90s video i was looking at your instagram um you have a really good picture of your room on instagram actually if people could oh good yeah it's just fish eye lens off the it's hard to photograph because it's a small room but here i'll show you guys here let's see if this will work uh hold on hold on you should show the picture of the slug actually there we go there you go show the slug though because that's cooler hold on where's the slug uh it's it's pretty recent there you go that's love that slug is insane that guy was huge is that a rock that's a rock right yeah it's going down like a bit of sandstone and the stupidest thing was it got down there and where it's going was a patio with like no green things on it so it had to do a u-turn and it just took forever it was like the whole time we were eating dinner this guy was turning around and getting back up that bit of rock and you named him kev yeah there was a word of this yeah there you go that's great all right let me put the speakers back outside awesome yeah so here's the the height channels up there yeah the rears are closer to you than i would have thought no those are the wides they're the y so sorry yeah that's what i was talking about before yeah originally i thought that those wides should go out to the wall you can't really see the sides because the side ones there's one just next to that couch um so they're all the way back against the wall but the way the wides work as they are to extend the width of the front wall which is i said i defined that as the left center right that's what the wides are supposed to do they're not supposed to be several feet away from the left and right speaker they're supposed to be extensions of the left and right i suppose that would be deceptive too if it were so far away yeah i don't know i mean obviously they you would your delay calibration would be different on them and technically it would sort of sound the same but i think the idea is they are supposed to be as present as the left center right so you don't want them further away wow they're just supposed to give you a wider front wall with a little more control right even that seems fun to mix on just the u-shape of that with the the wides and the left center right it is yeah it is it really is and as soon as you build the first like effect that works for you to spread something around the room without it being crazy it gets really really fun it really really does oh man and i know that at the moment like i'm mixing for 11 people in the world who are going to listen back on large speaker setups hopefully those 11 people will appreciate it and everybody else will get the binaural or the slightly smaller version of it and that will work and like steve said that stuff is getting better every single day right right all right um let's see i i'm still thinking about the dante routing to affects chains thing the dante thing is insane dante is dante's it's like magic like how the does that work right yeah i've heard people just realize normally what's that we maybe we should do one of these on dante at some point might be a shorter one but yeah i mean look i can just show you like this is dante controller so this is the matrix takes care of all of its internal stuff but once you get onto the dante network these are just all of my dante devices so i've got the imac pro which is i told you before like an 8x8 virtual interface on my imac so it's just on the ethernet and it works fine then the focusrite renderer i o that's that focusrite card 128 in and out of the mac mini then this is the built-in matrix dante this is the renderer io dante so this is the one with the sample rate conversion on it then i got that red 16 line which is feeding all kinds of things but it's what's doing the crazy um dante to light pipe conversions to get in and out of the apollo and then this is the little headphone guy and then you've got all the same devices here including the sdp 55 and they just route places yeah like this i'll show you the the routing here i'll actually just open this up and it shows you that you've got these channels coming out of the sdp 55 and i set that up to be the same as mine because it'll do up to 16 but i don't have that many speakers so i just set it up to be my speaker's setup and then if i look at the built-in dante and i look at those inputs what i should see no it's not that dante i oh no it just goes into the matrix oh where is it i can't even remember where it goes in but the sdp 55 there it is just shows up and gets patched into that dante interface so all your patching of dante just happens in this app and this app can be running on any computer on the network yeah so yeah for anybody going cross-eyed this is completely running over ethernet and it's just two pieces of software like andrew said there basically sets up another sound device inside of your your mac it's a core audio driver thing right and you can assign the output of your computer to a virtual dante sound card that would make that show up on the network other devices can show up on there it can all run down one ethernet cord yeah you could have things yeah all over your house crazy yeah i mean the hookup between and obviously i'm going through a switch to get there but you could literally take one cat6 ethernet cable and go between the dante output of the matrix and that focusrite card on the renderer and that's 128 channels of audio that sounds fantastic yeah and it's clocked perfectly yeah and it makes it there and back that's two ways you could also put your uh your actual home theater on your dante network and go check your things out there although i don't know how much how much checking on different playback systems would you be doing with um with atmos no you're in a calibration situation and the reason that's one of the reasons i really decided that i had to do the pmcs i have no reason like my tannoys are not set up in here if you look at that picture there are no tannoys right i don't need them anymore i don't need to switch to anything the pmcs and my headphones are all i will ever need to listen to mixes well that's not true because i will actually take the stereo either re-render out of the renderer or when i'm mixing in stereo take the stereo mix route it to the dante virtual sound card as an input and listen on my imac speakers because that's a perfect consumer shitty way to listen to stuff right right all right that all happens we are way far down the hole right now and we have questions all right let's do questions because i'm realizing that on other mondays when i'm interviewing people i don't have to talk very much right i've been hoping for two and a half hours and my throat's getting it so yeah awesome all right let's get to it all right so let's let's just do a basic one here so um this is this is true i mean there are there are a lot of people who haven't experienced that most at all um and don't know how to get it at home so i this is worth talking about for a minute if those people are still with us i'm surprised but yeah so there are a few different platforms that have at most music content so apple music has it if there is an at most version of a song when you listen to the song that's what you get if there isn't you get the stereo um amazon has lots of atmos content on amazon music it will only play back through their amazon echo speaker so you don't have the option of taking that to other things um title will stream at most binaural and i believe that deezer which is a french company i believe they do it and i'm sure spotify cannot be far behind they can't get left out of the amazon and apple club like it's just i can't believe for a second that they're not about to do this i don't know anything so in terms of actually listening to the content for binaural that's the way you do it just on your phone or on your mac or whatever you listen to any of those things or on your echo speaker if you're going to listen to the amazon stuff if you want to listen on speakers then it gets slightly more complicated but if you've got an apple tv 4k that has an atmos chip inside of it and its hdmi output will have at most audio so if you have an atmos enabled um what the hell do they sound bar that will play back the atmos and if you have uh a more complicated like uh system of sonos thing where you've added a couple of other speakers the sonos knows how to decode for that past that you have to get into these more expensive atmos enabled consumer preamps and then hook up your speakers that's the only way to hear it on speakers is to do a setup and if you want to hear it on a studio setup then you've got to do something stupid like i did and get this crazy expensive but amazing sounding stp 55 that's the professional way to do it there are other ways to do it but that's the way to get at most decoded onto a professional monitoring environment yeah but home stereo wise they're just stereos that have atmos built in right yeah so the um in in just a discussion of the viability of the format and stuff there's a there's a really good talk with um i think it's manny marrakeen uh uh now i can't think of his name zane lowe is it right um and then uh sylvia massey was a part of that and they i think it was the day that apple uh sort of dropped atmos as a possibility on on apple music they talked a lot about why they think the format will survive and all of that on there um and obviously there's doing a setup like that and even taking the time out of your schedule to figure all of this out and decide to do it that's a business decision for you as you know as running your mixing business and uh it's a significant purchase and a significant amount of time so how do you feel um i mean you obviously in through your actions you feel pretty strongly about the format surviving and there being work yeah absolutely feelings yeah anything that can be done the reason the reason is because it is not tied to a physical monitoring format and that's why 5.1 and quad had a hard time yeah because if you didn't have the exact right setup you weren't listening to it whereas atmos can transfer to anything and i i strongly believe that the binaural component will get a million times better over the next several years it has to right it has to because people are researching it constantly now yeah awesome all right so let's go to the next question here and let's see what we have okay uh is that my cat meowing or is that your no that is my cat yeah all right i'm sure somebody can hear that yeah i should let the cat in all right hold on one second let me get tee up a question and then i'll get the cat uh okay so yeah we just kind of covered that so did you get okay uh santiago asks um he says hello andrew glad to have you back in our mondays question when you first decided to go into atmos did you get any of your colleagues to maybe send you one of their mixes or their mixing sessions to check out how they work or did you just start from scratch i talked to a lot of people and greg penny was really really helpful from the get-go steve jenowicz has been very helpful as well greg wells as well i've been sent a couple of people's mixed templates i haven't gotten anybody's mix session because they you know you can't just send me the audio of someone else's record but i have been very lucky to be shown some other people's templates and i have stolen liberally from it but what's great about it like with everything is it's just getting the concepts you see like like building the three stereo reverbs that go further back in the room as opposed to oh god i have to find a multi-channel reverb that i like it hadn't occurred to me yet so once that occurred to me it was like oh and i didn't need to see anybody else's template for how what they were doing there it was just like man oh he's freezing frozen a good face that time just like yeah so just like i get super excited about building a new effect in stereo like oh man what if i pitch shift and reversed on the way into the reverb and then gated that with the thing and i'd take an hour and a half and i build it and 90 percent of time it sounds like ass but then the other 10 of the time it's genius and it goes into my template and i keep it right that's happening with the atmos stuff all the time and it's like ways to make my life easy which i'm always up for and ways to make this stuff fun and quick and yeah that's awesome yeah so i got a lot of help and i did a lot of talking to a lot of people early on hello [Laughter] this is stinkers stinkers would like to start mixing in atmos i think stickers is going to need some thumbs yeah yeah that's the problem yeah i think so you can push that yeah it's an opposable at least to handle the mouse he keeps on thinking it's the other kind of mouse he's very amenable though yeah yeah very kind my god my guys would have been like clawing me right at that point yeah so all right yeah so people have been saying everybody i haven't been able i'm freezing i've seen some template stuff yeah now mark's gone he's just ditched me the cat cut the cord i'm assuming we're still streaming we're still streaming all right yay [Applause] okay uh probably the most important question of the entire thing from salomon does atmos change the way you use parallel compression you've got a lot of rear busses now yeah well in my template i've got a 7-0 rear bus so because i use multi-mono compression for the rear bus anyway so to make it seven channels was fine i'm using less and less parallel compression just in general in stereo as well i'm using less of it all the time um but no and what's good about it is once you put something into an object it can no longer go through a mix bus it's impossible but it can go to parallel stuff that goes into the bed and as long as you make the panning follow what the object is doing on that hey it's not great it's not necessarily the best way to do stuff um you just have to think about what you're doing i mean you have to think about it when you're doing it in stereo but we're all so used to it that it's like everything is second nature in stereo right so you just have to keep track of what you're doing and be smart basically okay um i mean there's a whole thing to unwrap there about um the stereo mix bus and everything you know you know but it's well that's why i built my weird object bus which is basically 914 so that if i need to i can put stuff all over the room but it will have mixbus processing on it obviously um everything is multi mono but everything on my mix bus is multi mono anyway because i'm weird so right yeah yeah i like that actually but we'll keep moving through the questions okay uh let's um [Music] okay so sorry somebody's there he is not happy you know what it is it's 4 30 or it's past 4 30 and 4 30 is tuna time for stinkers oh really yeah he gets very upset if he doesn't have his 4 30 tuna uh let's see and it's just he and i in the house right now oh well let's say we're gonna go for another 20 minutes make it around three hours and then uh we'll it'll be tuned to time yeah otherwise i don't want to piss off the door yeah you don't yield manager will call your manager and it's going to be a thing you know fax me at the car phone okay uh oh okay so this one's from glenn um do you consider atmos mixing more fun rewarding or interesting than stereo and then he says or to put it another way this feels like a pain in the butt to me as someone who's honed my skills as a stereo mixer for 30 plus years is this something to be excited about or annoyed by oh and froze right on the start of the answer sorry you froze right at the start of the answer okay yeah um i'd say both in a way once you've got to figure it out i spent three full days doing nothing but trying to build an atmos template based on my own template and based on the stuff i'd seen in other people's templates i have since spent hours and hours tweaking that template as i use it because of course none of it was right from the get-go but i built the tools i named the buses but just like for stereo mixing just get your together at the beginning don't think you're gonna figure it all out and build it as you mix because then it will be a pain in the ass and it won't be fun get a template together and that temp will change and evolve a lot just like if you started building a stereo template it would change and evolve a lot and then it sort of settles down and then it just becomes a creative thing when you change it once you're set up excuse me once you're set up and your system works and the stuff is super solid like i don't think i've ever seen the renderer crash like that's just not a thing it's not like oh now i'm not getting all the audio channels like there's nothing frustrating at all about that that's cool yeah andy froze again [Laughter] yeah so tech the technology of it just works great but you've got to decide how you're going to use it and set up a template so that you can be as fast as you are when you're mixing stereo once you do that what's the difference and it is so much fun and you can basically do a stereo mix and just spread some things out that's the way some people do the atmos is just take advantage of the room a little bit but not do anything crazy or you can go nuts with stuff or just go nuts with one thing like take the you got a tambourine part and they do the little rattle snake at the end we'll pan that overhead like that why not yeah and that'll be something where everybody's like what the just happened and they'll listen to the mix again just like when you do something crazy with a delay or something in stereo so you've got to spend the time to set it up it is absolutely a learning curve but it isn't a technical learning curve it's a creative learning curve it's figuring out what you want to do with it right right yeah i think you froze or you're pausing you're frozen i believe there you are i just said it was rewarding nice it's very rewarding there you go yeah um so yeah and i mean anything that you would do you can do gimmicky things in stereo too you know absolutely the argument about you gimmick or whatever and you just hope that it works whereas in atmos you know it's going to work right yeah it's helping to sell your gimmicky idea okay uh aj teshen asks um are any music elements are any musical elements forbidden to move about during a song by who [Laughter] i mean who would who would have forbidden it no the render whatever the hell you want obviously the whole point of a mix is the listeners experience so you might not want to do stuff that's so distracting that it makes people nauseous or just as like i don't even know what the hell the song is doing so generally the core of the band doesn't move around a lot but no you can do whatever the hell you want why not make the lead vocal move around the room if it's appropriate for the song yeah no i mean that that's like asking you know am i allowed to compress my mix bus like you're allowed to do anything you want if when people listen to it that's what they want to hear right yeah i mean same same as having taste in the stereo format i think too yeah um yeah yeah there are there are no rules about it there are rules in terms of the level the minus 18 thing obviously you've got a mono sub so your sub is not going to move around but you can do full bandwidth audio into the other speakers but the thing you need to keep in mind is if you're lucky and they've got multiple speakers most likely they've only got good sounding stuff at the front so you don't want to rely on somebody having a great sounding speaker for the main guitar solo because you decided to put it rear right right that's not necessarily going to pay off right yeah you don't have the xbc's are they xpds no no it's got the waveforms back there in your heights the wafers sound amazing um but yeah i mean so you want to be smart about like what people might hear when they listen back to your thing but if it's binaural well whatever right everybody's got headphones they're the same you don't have a right rear headphone it just so yeah but you just got to listen just like anything else right okay so our next one uh let's see who's this this is from anthony differed and uh he says hello andrew i've just retired as a live musician and set up a studio i'm currently working on my first production my question would be am i wasting my time on stereo mixes and would i be better off uh looking to work in a newer format so well as we said earlier no stereo is going to be around for a while and at the moment it is still the standard at most hopefully especially if the binaural gets really really good and it can encapsulate a stereo mix it could get to the point where the stereo mix is a component of the atmos mix like that's possible but that's not where we're at yet so you're never wasting your time but what i would say is important is to think about what the possibilities are in atmos as you're producing so that you could say like you know what let's triple all the background vocals because then i can spread them out more in atmos or let's double the guitar solo with the kazoo because i'm going to tuck that in and put it in the center speaker even the guitar is off to the right and then it's going to go overhead or whatever you'll start to have ideas about things that can actually affect the production that will work fine in stereo but will really take advantage of the more immersive format right right yeah okay i just had a thought about um [Music] in front far speakers or something like that would be a fun thing to have well that's why you don't remember you don't get them in speakers but you absolutely get them in the binaural put it in the left and right on two objects and put those to far and they go behind the stuff that's near ah and that's only in the binaural i want to do the joke about i'm gonna go try it out but i'm not i'm just gonna pass this time because that's because your cat will kill you if you wasted yes exactly um okay so there is a question uh let's do two quick-fire ones so um what operating system is andrew running on his atmos max and is he running the latest big sur or an older os no i am running i'm running catalina 10 15 7 at the moment um i believe that all this now works but like major operating system upgrades i always wait a long time just so i don't have to deal with plug-ins like catalina when it first came out was a nightmare for pro tools when i upgraded it's the best operating system upgrade i ever did because everything was worked out and everything worked faster it was like getting a new computer so yeah i'll be on catalina i'll probably skip big sur and go straight to monterey whenever that works because when i do that i would imagine that's when i'm going to get an m1x or an m2 thing like my my dream is that the m2 half size mac pro is an actual thing because when they were saying we're going to bring out the new mac pro we're going to bring up that's all i wanted i wanted like a kick ass mac mini with a couple of slots same so if they actually make that because it's portable you can pick it up plug in a monitor anywhere but you can stick it in a suitcase easily and it doesn't take up the whole suitcase yeah or so in the machine room without a display running 24 7 yeah yeah yeah yeah okay awesome uh the other one on that same kind of line is um how about all your buffer sizes so about and how about those buffers uh how are your buffer sizes doing andrew they're fantastic they're in need of tuna i just run i i mean just like if i'm working in stereo the buffers set as low as i can go with everything playing back and then when i get errors i up the buffer size and the renderer doesn't come into it at all it's like that's not part of what's going on atmos doesn't do anything to buffer sizes yeah right right uh and you you talked about it a little bit earlier but you are not feeling like your system is super taxed from doing all of this no and again i am running the renderer on a separate computer but before i got that mac mini i was running the renderer on the same computer and didn't really notice much of a hit it's not that c u intensive i mean all it's doing is some panning and a binaural render really that's it it's not there's there's a lot going on but it's not processor intensive stuff going on right really right there's a limiter there's panning and there's a binaural encoding yeah so it's got a pretty small footprint okay on uh this line hello andrew when you say you can use the bounce offline option from pro tools instead of the does this hold true for the binaural version that's from neon yes because the binaural is what you end up with when you do that bounce is the adm then what you can do is you can open that adm in the renderer and just hit play and your binaural will come back awesome the adm ah we froze you can export the adm as an mp4 as well um so yeah the binaural is is the atmos decoding has the binaural encoding in it so when they update the binaural encoder every adm file in the world will have better binaural encoding it's not baked in you can print the stereo binaural then that's baked in there's no more metadata there's no more anything it is two channels of audio and all of the phase stuff that the binaural rendering did is baked into that file that's not something that's actually used very often the mp4 is what is used to generate the binaural on the fly in most cases there are places depending on the streaming systems are different they'll have multiple different streams going at the same time and it's all about payload and blah blah blah but they will re-render binaurals as that stuff gets updated so if it ever is rendered it'll get re-rendered to be updated but in general the binaural is a playback time inc i think it was encoder at the end of that from that uh okay so question about that though does that mean that your mix won't sound like your mix in five years when all of that the binaural will sound different yes the binaural will sound and i'm all for it because right now the binaural is pretty good but it can be so much better yeah because the binaural is just a representation of the multi-channel object-based atmos mix right it isn't the binaural mix you're not mixing separately you might tweak your atmos mix based on what you hear in the binaural like dealing with phantom center and stuff like that and you should to make it better but if they find that there's a better way to crash down for different speaker things they'll change that as well right and then that could sound different so yes it is very possible that the binaural version of your adm will sound different in the future and i would say that's a really good thing because i think it can definitely be better right right it's cool now but it can be better and will be better right yeah i mean my my brain is going to like we're back in uh you can't perfectly recall something again but yeah but you can you can i mean it's yeah yeah moving on moving on um okay uh glenn says i'd love to hear angie talk about why he's going away from parallel compression so lightly teased at that just make it brief just the way it sounds it's like the trade-off has always been you can make things louder without losing the uncompressed transients and things like that but it makes everything really dense and brings the level of the mix way up and i'm just starting to get sick of the sound of it that's all i mean there's still i use plenty still especially on drums like it's how i get the drums to do what i want them to do and whatever but i'm just using less of it i've got all the returns of my parallel stuff on a vca that vca used to always be well the vce didn't even used to exist then it was always at zero for a while and now it'll be at minus eight minus fifteen like there will be almost no parallel stuff because it's just yeah it's just changing taste it it's not because there's anything wrong with parallel compression you hear stuff different and you get you get sick of stuff like my template gets a save as on average at least once a month i'm on version 58 of my template since i moved into the box um and with the atmos stuff i've been doing a save as you know three or four times a month but yeah just stuff changes that's all it's just taste my taste has changed awesome okay uh let's see so cobb would also like to know when will we get channels for wind and temperature and smells and it kind of exists not in atmos but there are they call them 4d movie theaters look you want to go in the wayback machine go on wikipedia and look up smellovision [Laughter] it's from the 50s maybe 60s it's awesome there were two competing formats for aroma induced theater experiences this is real yeah i always thought that was a joke when people would say that no no it's real it's real go down the rabbit hole that's a little wikipedia challenge for you guys later on love to watch jurassic park in smell-o-vision yeah okay uh let's see i think that we are mostly through them um oh sorry you were frozen oh yeah i think there were mostly mostly through them um this i mean there there are more here but there's there's a lot of um a lot of kind of repeat things that we've we've touched on like uh which audio control do you use for your atmos mixers or your atmos monitor uh well i didn't mention that actually so the monitor switching is happening inside the matrix and dad who make all the audio stuff for the matrix make a thing so dad dad is the company and they make the mom which is the monitor operating module so the dad mom is my monitor controller and it is literally just a metal box with buttons and a knob and an ethernet connection on the back and it's expensive for some just to turn a knob but i'd worked without it for about two months and it drove me crazy because you had to have the dock on and certain things focused for the dock to control the monitors and switching between things i'd have to look and see what i was selecting for a source whereas with this controller it just it's very tactile it works and it's heavy and i really like it so i if you've got the money it's a fantastic monitor controller and it's got four layers of buttons so like on my top layer i've got my three main inputs for my headphones and my three main inputs for my speakers and the volume knob and dim and cut but then on layer two i've got six sources for the speakers layer three is six sources for the headphones so i can get to everything really really fast with it yeah that's really cool yeah uh and there are lots and lots of third-party monitor controllers out there as well if you want to look into those because if you're not going full-blown matrix then you're not going to take advantage of any of that stuff so there are plenty of other monitor controllers so uh the next question let's see there sorry there are plenty of other atmos monitor controllers well no it doesn't have to be atmos right the render is what takes care of all the atmos stuff so it just has to be a multi-channel speaker controller so whatever your setup is like there are plenty of seven one monitor controllers so if you're only gonna have seven one then that's all you need right right okay uh just the volume knob for that many channels of audio going to speakers right yeah uh gov also asks uh andrea have you had support from dolby in getting your system up and running i'm curious as it's in the developer section of dolby whether support is available for people working only on headphones i didn't get that much of a reply with any support from dolby um yeah i mean i got help from dolby but look i do shows like this and i get to talk to lots of people and i'm really lucky and i've been in the business for a long time and i happen to know people so um but they they were super helpful but there's not there really isn't that much to know it and they've got a lot of really good documents it's not the best organized thing in the dolby developer site to find all of the how to's but there are a lot of really good documents about it and if you're just going to work in headphones there's almost nothing to know run the render on the same computer set pro tools playback engine to dolby audio bridge that gets everything off into the renderer how you work in atmos in pro tools is all in the pro tools manual you don't need any dolby manuals for that at all right the renderer application is actually really really simple and you just have to say well okay what playback engine am i using inside of the render to get the binaural out to my headphones and you could select built-in audio and use the headphone jack on your macbook pro and that would work fine yeah so there's not a lot to know if you're just using phones it's actually really really simple to set up but dolby yeah i mean they're obviously going to be as proactive as they can because they want people to use this they're not trying to be opaque and make it only for exclusive you know upper tier people like they want everybody using this stuff yeah absolutely okay um let's see and anthony would like to buy you a beer so he's asking if you'll come to whales where in wales he didn't say actually no i'm not at the moment i'm not going anywhere anywhere because the delta variant is not a joke so yeah unfortunately we'll take a rain check on that beer and i'm very much looking forward to doing another we're thirsty event and going to a pub and having a beer with a bunch of you folks yeah but i don't know when that's gonna be awesome okay uh steve jenowick asks is andrew using any pro tools controllers doc s1 i have a doc and two s ones which i love when i turn them on and i'd say probably 80 percent of the time i don't have them on i turn them on when i'm starting mixes and i just want to grab stuff and i've got a great workflow with vcas and spilling those and all that kind of stuff and that's really really cool but once i've got the mix kind of going i generally don't and sometimes i'll just turn the dock on and not even turn on the pro tools control software so i've got one fader and then whatever track i select it's on that fader and i can do rides um but i don't need more than one fader that often and it's just the beginning of mixes and i don't use it for the atmospan stuff i just haven't gotten used to doing it i'm really used to doing that sort of stuff on screen there are also some very very cool apps i would like to give a little shout out to uh sound particles who've got an app now um hold on what's it called i gotta find it so i don't mess this up uh oh energy scanner no no no no it's just come out and it is a panner that uses your cell phone you put a plug-in on the pro tools track and you use your iphone and it uses all of the gyroscopes and motion sensors in it and so if you if you automatically enable the pan it is by far the best way to make stuff fly around the room it's awesome uh dolby has a plug-in called the dolby music panner which is great and it's got this crazy step sequencer mode where you can draw shapes and have them go and those can run the uh the built-in panners as well but i need to do a caveat that you guys are going to have to get down the rabbit hole and figure out how to do it all of the plugins that do panning will not create metadata in the renderer so you have to get that plug-ins panning as pan automation [Music] in the pro tools session and there are ways to do it you pop the track into latch mode you automate enable all of the pan parameters you run the plug-in and the dolby music planner will actually write pan automation to the track then at that point that automation will get to the render now if you are bouncing your adm inside the renderer you don't need to do that because the audio is being panned as the session plays back in real time when you bounce offline inside of pro tools there's no round trip for that metadata to make and then it doesn't get seen so it's kind of a pro tools bug but it's really it's like it's it's an implementation hole that is very difficult to do because a plug-in isn't supposed to do panning the mixer is supposed to do the panning so there's some amazing panning plug-ins but if you're doing offline bounces inside of pro tools you've got to make sure that that metadata gets respected in that offline bounce and if it doesn't you need to bounce it to pan automation and i'm not going to say any more about it but that's a big topic that's a little squirrely but it's easy when you know how so i can go find out how elsewhere right okay there it is yeah space controller there it is it's really cool and it's just for automating stuff i mean i don't know how useful it is like oh i'm going to place that perfectly well if you're going to play something perfectly you're going to do it with a mouse on screen or a hardware controller but man for moving stuff around in a creative way it is awesome i just just realized that there's going to be of course um a whole nother batch of tools for atmos you know brightness panner here for example like these are going to be atmos specific plug-ins and that's going to be a whole thing so yeah and they're already a ton of people doing reverbs uh that are wider even than seven one there's some 916 reverbs now in spirada does it uh i can't remember the names of a couple others uh oh um uh uh i don't want to forget their name because the inspirato one's cool but then there's also one by the same people who did the brocassi emulation and i'm totally spaced on their name but they do a truth around yeah seventh heaven the guys who do seventh heaven also do a true surround um reverb with height um yeah but then again like i said you can also build some amazing atmos spaces out of stereo things multiple ones with slightly different parameters longer pre-delay little more damping longer time that sounds further away put it in the back it's great yeah ah amazing that's that's super cool i mean this now it's starting to turn into a into a wii game which is great yeah i'll tell you yeah and you know it's it's really fun and then you say well but that's not very useful but it's really useful yeah yeah that actually does look very useful so cool um yeah let's see here uh i'm just gonna see if anybody else had anything to say over on youtube and we're almost getting to uh the regular cut-off time on the andrew talks to awesome people exactly well and i think i think that thinkers is probably going to be posting in the chat real soon yeah yeah where the is my tuna yeah there's busy yeah video evidence of the cat neglect that is going on in my house right now yeah yeah well all right why don't why don't we why don't we wrap it up there and we'll just say real quickly what's coming up so next week is another episode and andrew talks to himself and mark but next week is going to be all about sound flow which is something i am super into uh and i'll show you how i use it uh some of the really really simple scripts that i've written that changed my life and some of the really really complicated things i'm working on i'll show you guys some stuff that i am it's not even well i guess it's all in beta now but like i got stuff that does stuff and soundflow is cool so we're just gonna do this again and then we have two weeks of interviews so two weeks from today a man who was the answer to a question on mastermind frozen frozen are we unfrozen i think we're unfrozen oh and there's mole there we go so i got a cat too who does not need i just uh i put you full screen for the big announcement and then we had all right it was perfect and then we had the big freeze so so two weeks from tonight we were interviewing someone who was an answer to a question on mastermind of all things so that's how you know you're famous uh bob rock cannot wait for that that's gonna be amazing and uh then the following week on the 27th is part two with jakeer and that wraps up september for us and like i said at the beginning if you weren't here you didn't hear this um we're continuing to do things we'll do almost every single monday but there will be evenings like this where i blab about things there will be evenings which are just q and a's not interviews with people we've already talked to there will be some panels because i think like the hearing health panel was amazing but i want to do a panel on atmos so i want steve jenowick to be on screen because he knows way more about this than me but i just hogged the whole evening so um hopefully we'll get steve and uh greg penny and dave way and manny uh you know i think that'd be a pretty good panel um and then there will be two interviews a month that is the plan because i think my brain can keep up with that so yeah anything did i forget awesome i don't think so i think that's oh and it makes a lot of takeovers we're going to do more of those as well the mixed review stuff and for people who don't know what mix tank is it is this awesome platform for pure mix subscribers to submit mixes and there are peers reviewed basically there are tons of people who just listen to your mix and go man i would turn kick drum up or i don't like that harmonica solo or whatever but really constructive great feedback and then every once in a while they do mix tank takeovers where people come in like john paterno did an amazing one uh daryl thorpe's done one where just come in and like i did one last week and for three hours i listened to people's mixes and made comments so we'll be doing that as a semi-regular thing on here yeah awesome that was that was great last week everybody had a blast the chatroom was on fire so very cool excellent all right well i'm gonna go have that beer but not in wales so but a tuna for my cat yeah you better awesome all right so from stinkers and mole that's all we got that's all we got frozen [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Puremix

Views: 40,727

Keywords: andrew talks to awesome people, pureMix, mentors, Andrew, Scheps, talks, to, puremix, andrew, scheps, andrew scheps, puremix mentors mixing, puremix mentors recording, puremix mentors, mixing engineer interview, puremix live, audio engineer, andrew scheps talks to awesome people, mixing, music production, producer, andrew scheps puremix mentor, andrew scheps interview, puremix andrew scheps, andrew scheps puremix, atmos dolby, atmos dolby songs

Id: PCS3_vxtBUE

Length: 158min 15sec (9495 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021