Tracking With Immersive Music in Mind, Part 2

Don’t pass up Part One!

BRING IN THE MUSICIANS

The four musicians were seated facing the array and surrounded by gobos, to limit room reflections. However, they had been rehearsing in a lively room, Wallace notes, “So I ended up flipping the gobos around to the hard surfaces so they could hear each other.”

Porter was positioned at the center-channel mic with singer Carmen Nickerson to his left, in the right-front channel. Ryan Pearl, on resonator guitar and mandolin, sat at the mid-right channel mic, also to Porter’s left, with cellist and vocalist Mai Bloomfield, guesting with the band, sitting opposite him. Bloomfield and Pearl each sent their instruments through a pedalboard to a QSC speaker diagonally opposite their respective locations, adding ambience to the immersive array’s rear channels.

“I have to give credit to Matt Wallace for that suggestion,” Porter says. “It was a great way to utilize the soundfield in all of its dimensionality.” Porter also used a QSC wedge, behind him, to bolster his acoustic guitar’s low end.

Immersive and Dolby Atmos have become almost interchangeable terms, but there was no Dolby software involved during the session. “Each of those 11 mics went through the Neve [8078] console to ‘tape,’ no EQ, then went to their corresponding speaker in the array,” Weidmann explains. The engineers adjusted the control room monitor level within Pro Tools. That said, the engineers are mixing the tracks in Dolby Atmos at their Studio Delux in Van Nuys, Calif., which features a Kali Audio 9.2.4 rig.

“The microphone array is based around Atmos speaker placements,” Kennedy points out. “From that perspective, we were very much thinking about Atmos the whole time.”

Once everything was set up, Weidmann adds, “I put a calibrator on each of the mics. It puts exactly 94 dB at 1 kHz at the diaphragm.”

That was crucial, Kennedy notes: “It allowed us right out of the gate to set all the mic pre’s at, say, -18 dB, and gave us a stable platform. You don’t really want to have one mic balanced higher or lower than the others, because it skews the whole spatial feeling of the room.”

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Ultimately, the engineers added two more microphones—an AKG C12 for Mai’s vocals, allowing them to balance the two backing vocals either side of Porter, and a Neumann KM 54 to better control Pearl’s guitar and mandolin in the mix. “We were trying as much as possible to pull all of the sounds that the audience in the control room was hearing from the mic array and have what few close mics we were using be secondary,” Kennedy stresses.

With zero opportunity to overdub or fix anything, the recording method requires exemplary musicianship, and Porter’s ensemble was up to the task. “The part that’s so appealing to me is that you can’t really edit anything,” Porter says.

Tracking an ensemble live flies in the face of most modern recording workflows. “We’re being trained to hear perfect pitch, to hear everything so metronomically,” Porter says, “and this is a reintroduction of humans in a room. We really had to mix ourselves so that not one of us was dominating the sonic field. In that context, without monitoring, it was fun, and very liberating.”

The next IDL immersive music recording day with Willy Porter and his band is scheduled for June 12, 2025, at Ocean Way Nashville.