London, UK (October 31, 2023)―James Auwarter, owner of Coda Room Audio, has introduced several of Nugen Audio’s plug-ins into his workflow on his way to picking up credits on 32 Grammy-nominated projects.
Auwater, who has recorded, mixed and mastered music across countless genres, working alongside artists such as Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Rihanna and others, was introduced to Nugen Audio by his friend and IMSTA FESTA Founder, Ray Williams. Since then, he has relied on several of the developer’s plug-ins.
One of Auwarter’s favorite Nugen plug-ins is Halo Upmix, which he used recently when creating Dolby Atmos mixes with producer Donald Lawrence for gospel singer Twinkie Clark’s new album. “One of the tracks that I was sent for this project was a vocal stem that was already married in with a big stereo reverb, as opposed to being separate,” he explains. “Putting all of that into the traditional left/right front stereo speakers often sounds boring in the Atmos realm and definitely doesn’t fully utilize the format’s potential. Instead, with Halo Upmix, I can easily turn the stems into quad, 5.1 or 7.1.2, among others. Halo Upmix is very smart with how it detects what element I want to keep center, and it can be manipulated to be very precise in what to spread out amongst other speakers.”
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For the Twinkie Clark project, Auwarter also turned to Paragon. “Paragon is awesome because I can use it both in stereo and with Atmos,” he says. “It doesn’t tie your hands like a lot of the other convolution reverbs. The presets are great, they get me 85 to 90 percent of the way there, and then I usually just mess with the pre-delay and maybe the depth a little bit. Being a convolution reverb, it just sounds really good and realistic.
“Another cool thing I like about Paragon, which I haven’t seen in other reverbs, is that it has a tempo button that automatically syncs to your DAW. It knows what your quarter-note or eighth-note pre-delays should be.”
