![]() ![]() ![]() Smalling: Yes, the current best practices––current workflow––is still doing a traditional stereo mix. Is that what artists need to send to their distributor––2 mixes? MC: For my new single in Atmos (“Our Sweet Secret), I had to send my distributor the special Atmos file along with a regular, traditional mix. So, my hunch is that they’re doing some mixes and doing some very exclusive artist agreements so that when they do offer Atmos, they just have this amazing catalog that just suddenly drops, just boom. I don’t have any inside information, but I think they’re planning something big, because Spotify announced a new Atmos-enabled studio. MC: Do you know if there are any plans for Spotify to offer Atmos in the future? If you don’t know the Dolby logo, it’s a shaded-in forward “D” and a backward “D.” That’s how you’ll know you’re hearing Atmos. How you’ll know is when you look on the app, you’ll see where the song title is, the little Dolby logo will appear. If you have an iPhone and have some AirPods, you can go into Apple Music, and pretty much every current pop song, rock song, hip-hop song, and country song––so many genres right now––it’s already in Atmos. The easiest way for people to experience Atmos is through TIDAL, Apple Music, or Amazon right now. The nice thing about Atmos is that it doesn’t require any sort of special speakers. Smalling: With any audio, the better the speakers, the better the experience. So, how can people best listen to Dolby Atmos? Like, you’re probably not going to get the full experience from free earbuds on an airplane. MC: I’m sure the quality of the speakers matters. And then when we go to the chorus, we can push it back out and let the chorus get big. ![]() So, at that point, we just bring the vocal right here (motions right next to his ears), and it just feels like they’re singing right here, right in your ear. Maybe it’s just piano and a vocal – the singer wants to convey something very intimate. We’ve done mixes where there are very intimate sections – where everything gets very stripped down. We now have x, y and z axes to move along. MC: So, instead of typical horizontal sound, you also have vertical, and front, back and all ways, like you’re in a sphere or a bubble. I can put a guitar right by this ear, I can put a keyboard over here, and it doesn’t have to be at the speaker. Imagine, as a musician, if, in the chorus, you said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if the vocals came up a little bit, so things got a little bit more exciting?” I can say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be better if the vocalist takes a step towards you, musically, like we might do on a stage?” And then that gets artists really thinking about like, “Oh my gosh, we can do anything we want to in this hemisphere. So, I can take a vocal, for example, and we assign it what’s called an “object.” And then I can grab that object, and instead of just panning left and right, traditionally, I can now bring it into the room. What that does is that creates a dome or a hemisphere. Here in the studio, there’s four speakers above my head right now. But, what Atmos does is it adds height speakers. What Atmos is… We’re all familiar with this horizontal idea of surround sound. Right around 2018, though, they started experimenting with Atmos with music. Atmos actually debuted in 2012 with the movie, “Brave.” So, it started off as a cinematic experience. It’s quickly becoming the new format.Dolby Atmos is not a new surround format. Music Connection: What is Dolby Atmos and how is it different from typical recordings?īrad Smalling: I’m really glad that we’re talking about Atmos, because there’s a lot of excitement about it. In the following interview, Brad gives the lowdown about the basics of Dolby Atmos sound. I chatted with sound engineer Brad Smalling of Evergroove Studio in Evergreen, CO. Plus, a new spatial audio format is just plain cool! So, I jumped right in and decided to release my pop-reggae single, “Our Sweet Secret,” in this fancy new type of surround sound technology. In a saturated, impossibly competitive music market, I realized that anything I can do to gain an edge is probably a good idea. Some even speculate that Atmos sound will one day make stereo audio as obsolete as mono recordings.Īs an artist, the idea of Atmos intrigued me. In a world of fast-paced, ever-improving, technology, then, it’s not surprising that music industry gurus say that Dolby Atmos is the future of music. Atmos is a new audio format that delivers fully immersive, spatial audio. If you’re not familiar with Dolby Atmos yet, chances are you will be very soon. ![]()
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