Upcoming New Project

My project will be a two song cover EP of two songs by Green Day. These songs will be Bobby Sox and Whatsername. Both of these tracks will be mixed in Atmos and will be recorded with the intent to be mixed in Atmos. I will be attempting to recreate the “Wall of Sound” technique that is present on the stereo mixes of these tracks in Atmos, a method pioneered by Rob Cavallo who worked on some of the most prolific Pop Punk Albums, like American Idiot, the album that contains Whatsername. I will be keeping pictures and blog updates of my recordings on my website, taranwillisco.net. After recording everything, I will begin mixing in Atmos. By the end of this project I will also have a guide to the techniques I develop for Atmos mixing in this style.

A consistent problem that I have noticed with Atmos mixes since their inception was that on a lot of guitar focused tracks, they would completely lose any depth they had in their stereo counterparts. The inspiration for this project was Bobby Sox, one of the songs I am recording. The guitars in that Atmos mix have no bite to them anymore. I want to see if I can find a way to reintroduce that wall of sound that makes the stereo version so good. My hypothesis for what is happening in these mixes is they are not recorded with the intent of mixing for Atmos. This means that they do not have enough guitar tracks to fill the space that is being created by the additional speakers in an Atmos setup. The “Wall of Sound” technique that gives the guitars on these tracks their unique quality is achieved by panning 2 pairs of distorted guitars hard left and right. They then keep the bass in the middle and add an acoustic guitar to the middle to keep some clarity in the mix. Something interesting that is used in a lot of these mixes as well to fatten the tone a bit is a Hammond B3 organ playing the same part as the guitar. This creates one massive guitar that completely makes the song. That massiveness is what is missing in these Atmos mixes by splitting up the guitars too much.

For who will be working on this, it will just be me and possibly one recording assistant. Because of how experimental I want to be with this project, I have limited the amount of people working on it so I can be as precise in finding the sound that I want to capture as I can be. 

I have already begun my preproduction work, programming drum tracks and planning what I will be using to record everything. I plan to use the Daking preamps for the guitars, the UA for Bass, the UA for Vocals, and the Focusrite for stuff like keys. For an aggressive genre like this, I want everything to be a little colored. I like the way that Dakings sound on guitars and I want the warmth of a UA on Bass and Vocals. The extras, I want to be flat, so I will put those through the Focusrite.

I plan to start recording in the coming weekend. I will hopefully be able to get everything recorded in just 3-4 sessions over the course of a few days. This will give me plenty of time on the mix as I am learning Atmos mixing for the first time. The majority of my recording is what I hope to have completed by milestone 1.

I am going to be recording all of this in a combination of Studio F and Studio E. F has all of the pre-amps and mics that I want so the majority will be recorded there. I want to use E to have access to the staircase in the Conservatory. There are a few guitar parts that need to be heavily reverbed in the songs I am recording, so I want to get as much natural verb as possible for those.

Everything will be mixed in Studio C using Protools. This is a space that I am very familiar with for Atmos listening and I am very excited to get to mix in the space as well. Protools is also a program that I have a lot of experience using, so it will be the easiest for me to transition into Atmos mixing with.

The main challenge of this project for me is going to be learning Atmos mixing. This is an extremely new thing, especially for me. I am very excited for this challenge as I think Atmos is something that can be used more creatively than it is right now. It doesn’t have to just be used for film scores, it can be applied to so many different genres in so many interesting ways, we just have to figure out those ways. I am giving back to the discipline by figuring out some new techniques for genres that have not really been explored in this technology. Most Atmos mixes that are available right now for non-film score or classical music are in pop music. People have not experimented very much with the format of Atmos other than creating atmosphere with it. I truly believe that there is so much more that can be done with this technology and am happy to be able to do this experiment with it.

By the end of this project, I will have a few tangible things. Firstly, a two song EP of fully mixed in Atmos songs. Second, I will have a document, detailing the techniques that I use during this process to improve the methods that we currently have for mixing in Atmos. Third, I will have several blog posts detailing my journey with this project. Lastly, I will have a poster, explaining what my project is and what I have discovered with it.