New York, NY (March 24, 2023)―Tasked with mixing the Grammy Award-winning Snarky Puppy album Empire Central in Dolby Atmos, producers and mixers Nic Hard and Fab Dupont aimed to stay true to the original stereo release.
“When you’re referencing a stereo master and shifting that to Atmos, the goal is to enhance the stereo version,” Dupont says, “but in this case, we didn’t want it to sound like night and day, and that’s not as easy as it seems. [Nugen Audio’s] Halo Upmix was crucial to our approach. It’s a very subtle but incredibly useful tool for making something feel naturally immersive.”
Similar to many of the band’s other albums, Snarky Puppy’s Empire Central was a live-in-studio album with an audience. After initially being mixed in stereo by Hard and mastered by Dave McNair, the decision was made to turn the album into a fully immersive Dolby Atmos piece, and Hard called on his friend and colleague, Dupont, to help. The pair mixed at Flux Studios, Dupont’s professional recording, mixing and mastering studio in New York.
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According to Hard, a three-time Grammy-winning mix engineer, the Halo Upmix plug-in “takes a stereo source and puts pieces of it in each speaker, creating the sensation of being immersed. There are other tricks that you can do with delays and reverbs, but Halo Upmix definitely does something very special.”
Dupont, a Grammy-nominated producer and mix engineer, feels that the plug-in is aptly named: “It does exactly what it says it does. You can choose to have it come out of all the speakers, giving it this ‘halo’ effect. We used it a lot to touch up the keyboards to make an impact.”
Since the plug-in is also downmix compatible, it enabled the duo to create a mix that can be listened to using any device, without running into phase issues. “It’s beyond important that our work is compatible with everything,” Dupont continues. “When you have a small stereo or single mono source, any point that you supersize needs to sound good when it’s downsized back to stereo. Halo Upmix is the only plug-in that I know of that does that well. It actually does it flawlessly.”
