Febuary 2000

When Dave Cline and I started formulating plans in early 1997 to build a surround room at Seventeen Grand Recording in Nashville, there was little information available to guide us. There were no standards that we could find regarding construction, technical layout, angles of speakers, or even, at that point, the number of speakers. Our room, in fact, would be the first in Nashville built specifically for surround sound mixing.

Our motivation in taking on the challenge did not come from foresight about where the music industry was headed. DVD-Videos were then brand new, and no one knew if a DVD music format would really happen. Rather, we were responding to the slow-down in the music business, particularly in country music recording. Though Seventeen Grand had managed to grow each year since we opened in 1995, we felt the increases were not as good as they might have been.

Building a Surround Room

At the same time, we'd had some success attracting movie soundtrack work, including for such major film releases as Twister, Prince of Egypt, The Apostle and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. Our initial idea then, was to grow our business by attracting mechanical work for film and television.

So, we turned to the theatrical specifications for surround development by Dolby Laboratories, which were the only written information we could find to use as a design tool. We also talked to people at DTS and to others who were doing multichannel surround. With that information in hand, we took a 1000 sq. ft. room in our building that had been serving as an office and built a surround mixing room, with a small recording space, from the ground up. Which turned out to be a good idea, since retrofitting an existing studio for surround is often more trouble and usually more costly.

That's because the main issues in creating a surround monitoring environment are acoustical ones relating to reflections, angles and arrival time. Most obviously, in a traditional stereo monitoring environment, sound emanates from one end of the room in a very controlled, point-sourced way. But in a surround room, sound also comes from the back. So the back wall needs to be further away than usual, which may be difficult and even impossible to achieve in a wide, shallow control room.

When building a surround room from the ground up, however, such issues involve only an incremental increase in the cost of building any room. The only major expense is for extra speakers, amps and associated components. We felt our endeavor was low-risk because the worst that could happen, if the surround work didn't materialize, was that we'd end up with extra speakers.

We chose the Euphonix CS3000 console for the room because it's a common board in audio-post facilities and engineers are comfortable with it. But it turned out to be an excellent choice for surround music mixing because the CS3000 simultaneously makes a separate stereo mix as you create a surround mix. It has a multi-bus output, allowing six channels for surround and two for a discrete stereo mix. As I pan something in the surround matrix, the console uses a mathematical computation to create the stereo mix. It is not simply a repanning of the surround mix. My surround mix and my stereo mix can be identical or they can be different. It's my choice, and I like that kind of flexibility. I'll sometimes compare a Dolby Digital stereo downmix of my multi-channel mix to the discrete stereo mix created by the CS3000. They're always identical. This is important to me because I want to make sure that the listener at home, whether listening to Dolby Digital downmix or to the stereo PCM track, is hearing the same mix.

Thinking in 5.1

Among the projects we've completed with our new surround room are a two-hour George Strait special for HDTV, Tom Petty's Live at the Fillmore DVD, Orleans Live and remixes of a couple of Brooks & Dunn singles, and of recordings by Take 6 and Bela Fleck for the new DVD-Audio format. We also completed a pay-per-view program featuring Alabama in Las Vegas playing all 41 of their number one hits in chronological order. They played for three and a half hours, and we created a 5.1 DVD-Video of the show.

With live concerts, like the Alabama or Orleans recordings, which are original mixes in 5.1, it's fairly easy to conceive what I want listeners to hear. I want them to be in the front row in the best seat in the house. My job is to recreate that experience, with audience ambience and PA system reflections off the back wall. I've done a lot of live work, and I have very distinctive memories of some great live venues. I think that helps me recreate the excitement the listener may have had while seeing the concert live.

It's more difficult and more creative to mix in a 5.1 studio recording. On some projects, as with the Bela Fleck The Bluegrass Sessions, I've had creative input from the artist. Bela wanted the listener to feel like he was in the middle of the kind of jam session that always happens at bluegrass concerts. In the parking lot or off to the side of the stage, musicians will form a circle to jam, and Bela wanted to put the listener right in the middle.

Other times, I'm just given the multitracks and told to mix. I go through each tracks one at a time and try to come up with a concept for positioning them. If the material has already been mixed for stereo, I'll listen to the CDs to get ideas. In the mix itself, I'll experiment a lot with the surrounding panning to get the right sound.

Where it really gets interesting and more abstract is when you're doing the original mix or even recording in 5.1. The one project I've had the pleasure of recording and mixing in 5.1 is Bill Mize's Coastin' (HDS). This is Bill's third album, and though destined initially for CD, we decided to record it as if we were doing a 5.1 project.

The main difference between recording in 5.1 and stereo, and it's no secret, has to do with having more microphones and how you place them. You can't just rely on traditional mixing techniques because there is a lot more to every instrument than we have miked and captured on tape in the past. Surround allows you to capture a fuller, more true-to-life sound even on a solo instrument.

When you play an instrument, the sound is omnidirectional. It goes everywhere and the sound is everywhere. In stereo, you're actually only getting a one-dimensional view of reality. It's not even close to the whole sound of an instrument, and my goal as a recording engineer is always to capture the instrument as true to life as possible.

Of course, what I'm saying goes for the kind of music I generally do, which is acoustic. It's still "realistic," meaning it sounds like people playing in the room. Music with synthesizers and sequencers takes you away from that into a more synthetic aural environment. And I would love to get the opportunity to work in that genre as the creative possibilities are very intriguing. But with acoustic music, I'm using surround to capture a truer instrumental sound, and my primary means to achieve that is through miking.

Coastin', for example, is mostly solo guitar, with cello accompaniment, a Hammond B-3 organ, and percussion on a few cuts. I used four mics on Bill's guitar, positioning them to emphasize different characteristics of the guitar's sound. Those different characteristics, which I can put in different speakers, along with the room ambiance, go together to make the sound you'd hear if you were standing in the room with the musician. Or, to up the ante a little more, you could be inside the guitar.

I've also experimented with recording a band in 5.1 by having friends come in and do demos just so I can be prepared. In stereo, some people record in such a way that an instrument alone doesn't sound like itself, but sounds good when combined with other instruments. This is sometimes done, for instance, with acoustic piano, which may sound unpleasant by itself, but works well in the ensemble.

I have always tried to avoid that because I prefer to keep everything sounding as natural as possible. But in surround, I believe it's absolutely necessary to avoid that technique, because if the surround mix is done properly, you can hear the ensemble but can also focus quite easily on each instrument. And you will hear all the characteristics of each instrument. If something doesn't sound natural, it will be noticed more than in stereo.

In the same way, 5.1 is hypersensitive to all sounds. Noisy guitar amps that might no be heard in a stereo mix are going to be heard in a surround sound mix. The hums, buzzes, clicks, and punch-ins on vocal tracks that would be masked in stereo are going to stick out like sore thumbs in surround. Surround has that much more detail, which makes it a wonderful advance in capturing musical sound, but also makes it less forgiving.

Time to Record

Once we built our surround room at Seventeen Grand. I jumped into learning how to engineer in 5.1 myself partly because other engineers, even when I offered them projects, were reluctant to take on the work. For people who have already reached the top of their game, there's a natural fear of being asked to learn something new, which sometimes includes the risk of making mistakes. And it's true that, in this business, every time you put out a product, you name goes on it and your career is, to some degree, on the line.

But remixed catalog material will carry DVD-Audio only so far with the music-buying public. If the new format is going to succeed, artists, engineers and producers need to jump in the fray and teach themselves how to take advantage of this wonderful new format. Because there are still no manuals.

Jake Niceley is co-owner, with David Cline, of Seventeen Grand Recording on Nashville's Music Row.