August 2000

Jake Niceley: Inside the Band: As one of the first engineers in Nashville to get involved with surround mixing, Jake Niceley, owner of Seventeen Grand Studios, has seen interest in 5.1 skyrocket during the past two years. And now he's reaping some of the financial rewards for being a pioneer. Recently he was assigned two DVD-Audio remix projects that are set to be among the first such releases by Warner Bros. in the fall: one by the vocal group Take 6, which is a 5.1 remix of their classic first album, along with bonus tracks from the second and third Take 6 discs; and the other a surround version of Bela Fleck's brilliant last album, Tales From the Acoustic Planet, Vol 2: The Bluegrass Sessions (the recording of which was covered in Mix, September 1999).

In the case of the Fleck disc, which put the banjo great together with top Nashville bluegrass pickers Sam Bush, Tony Rice, Stuart Duncan and Mark Schatz, and guests such as John Hartford and Vassar Clements, Niceley decided that the DVD-A work could be done most efficiently by keeping the project in Pro Tools throughout, since it was originally recorded that way by engineer Bil VornDick, and Fleck has a setup in his home.

"I went out to Bela's house, where he has his little studio setup, and he had installed the Smart Pan Pro plug-in on his Pro Tools, which allows you do a 5.1 matrix," Niceley says. "He'd already been experimenting with surround and listening to things, and he had an idea of how he wanted the whole project protrayed: He wanted it to be as if you were standing in the center of a bluegrass jam session and all the players are around you. So that's what we went for.

"He would work on it and I'd come out and listen and we would work on it together and make decisions and try different things and experiment. Ultimately we decided that it would be better if we brought the project back to the studio here [Seventeen Grand], and I upgraded my Pro Tools system to match his. The limitations at his place were primarily acoustic: His studio is a home studio, and it had all of the inherent limitations of being in someone's home; it wasn't built acoustically. Whereas here we had a control room that was tried and true. We had done several surround projects here and knew what to expect."

Using the Pro Tools system for 5.1 was new to Niceley and he notes, "It was definitely a learning experience for me. I'm used to having a console with a panner that works a particular way and I'm used to having access to outboard gear that works a particular way, and by not having those things I had to try to adapt to the Pro Tools environment, because we decided to use the Pro Tools plug-ins [for effects, etc.] too. The disadvantages of using the plug-ins, as opposed to the real hardware, weren't much; the plug-ins sounded good. It took a long time to work that way, but it ended up sounding good. Bela emphasized from the beginning that he was interested in learning how to use his equipment better, and if he's paying for this-and he is; he's the artist and it's coming out of his pocket-then he wants to learn something along the way. So not only is he paying for a project; he's paying for an education. So there was a lot of value in staying with the Pro Tools system. But we still needed to come to an acoustically correct environment to make a commercially viable product. I don't think we could've gotten it right at his house."

Because of the unique perspective Fleck wanted to achieve with the surround mix, there was more discrete localization required than on most music projects, "but you don't want to make it so discrete that it sounds disjointed," Niceley notes. "It still has to meld and feel like you're in an acoustic space; there has to be an environment. So there is information from each of the instruments in each [of the main channels]. I used the center channel mainly to anchor the string bass, and I also used it to kind of help position whatever happened to be in the left and the right, as well. So I was creating a 360-degree environment. It's like there's a natural bleed, which is the way you'd hear it if they were standing around in a circle.

"It's interesting when you start to rely on the rear speakers to handle as significant material as the front speakers," he adds. "It remains to be seen how it will translate into some of the more inexpensive home systems that have little satellite speakers in the rear, but most of the ones I hear sound pretty good. I've heard this mix in a few different places, such as at the CES Show in Las Vegas, where it was in several different booths as part of a sampler disc Warner Bros. made to promote DVD-Audio. I heard it at the Toshiba booth and Panasonic and even in a car, and it sounded just like what I expected. That's great material no matter how it's released, but by having it in 5.1 you really get to hear every little nuance of every instrument."

The first Take 6 CD was originally cut on a 3324 by engineer Don Cobb. Not surprisingly, remixing for 5.1 gave Niceley the opportunity to create an interesting dimensional image of the six singers spread around the soundfield. But again, he cautions, "you still have to create a coherent acoustic space, and in the case of a record that a lot of people know and love, you have to be faithful to the original mix to a large degree or it won't sound right to people. You have to be respectful; you can't just have everything all over the place."

That doesn't mean there was no room for creativity, however. "There's a song on there called 'I L-o-V-E You' that was 48 tracks," he says. "It had multiple voices, plus they used their voices to sound like instruments. They had two passes for each singer-the first was for the primary vocal, and on the second pass they would double the part but also they might change the part very slightly here and there. In the 5.1 mix, I separated those two parts and flipped the doubled part to the opposite speaker, so if someone was predominantly in the left front, then their double would be in the right rear. Then I also used a lot of very tight stereo delays and some longer delays to create even more space. Everything was tempo-mapped and there's a lot of panning going on in the Take 6 stuff, particularly when they're imitating instruments. I have that flying all over the place. 'I L-o-V-E You' is like a roller-coaster ride. At the end of that you're exhausted," he laughs. "But that track was more the exception; the rest is more straightforward, though hopefully still fun to listen to."

Though Niceley is certainly appreciative of the label work coming his way, he believes that for DVD-A to really take off, the record companies are going to have to quickly move beyond putting out mostly remixed catalog releases. "Unfortunately, I think the record companies are missing the demographic," he says. "I think they've assumed that it's going to be the 30- and 40-plus age range-the breadwinners who are buying big home theater systems-when in fact it's going to be a lot of younger people. High school and college kids want surround. They're pretty sophisticated and they like new things; they like gadgets and high-tech stuff. And they don't want their parents' music. I think the record companies are missing a huge opportunity by not releasing current material. I mean, everyone's excited that there's a Beatles surround mix [Yellow Submarine], and the Eagles disc [Hell Freezes over] has sold a lot of copies. But you know, if it's going to become the next thing, they're going to have to start putting things out for the younger crowd. I think it would be wise to start thinking about simultaneous releases-putting it out as DVD and CD, or just DVD, which would be playable in stereo, too.

"With DVD-A, in the mastering process, like if you're working in a Sonic Solutions system, you get to determine how the stereo is created in terms of how the rears [of the 5.1 mix] are brought to the front-maybe down a few dB, or whether they're in phase or out of phase. And the same with the center and the sub: You get to direct how the stereo is created, and that information is programmed into the DVD disc so when it gets played back in a DVD-Audio player, the stereo plays back the way you decided, instead of it being an arbitrary downmix, like with Dolby Digital. And that stereo mix will be available at the headphone jack on a DVD player. It's really a very versatile platform and we're just beginning to learn what we can do with it."