Real World

The Immersive Audio Camp, produced by Watershed and Real World Studios, was a chance to work with legends.

The camp was designed as a blind collaboration between participants and offered an amazing array of engineering options. Whilst all participants were professional sound designers, it was a compositional and technical challenge to work in the new Dolby Atmos format.

This picture is of myself and Natalia, my collaborator, who I had first met that morning. We are talking to Chris Hughes, a producer who has worked with Tears for Fears and Adam and the Ants.

There was so much to learn from Chris about producing. Having him work with all of us, experiencing the process of him drawing out ideas without being imposing, was a true lesson in the alchemy that is creative collaboration.

Every compositional process needs a starting point and Natalia and I opted to kick off the camp by recording a Soma Laboratories Lyra-8 improvisation. We both have one of these syths and so this was common ground. The thing about Lyra is that they are designed to have a life of their own. You give the filters an educated tweak and see what it does. We recorded the joint improvisation in one take and moved on.

Here’s a Lyra-8 for those who aren’t familiar with them.

Here’s a couple of little snippets from that initial Lyra improvisation session.

People kept stopping by to listen to the track and nodding with closed eyes. Something was working!

To build the track out, we worked with musicians Nicole and Howie from Lux Jury. They tolerated us asking for what we wanted in vague but firm terms. Nicole sang lyrics written in ten minutes as though she meant every word. Howie, having had one drum performance rejected on the grounds that it was “too cymbally”, gave us a killer track that helped glue it all together.

Here’s a little burst of drum magic.

We were due to deliver a final mix in Dolby Atmos. Play out sessions were scheduled daily throughout the weekend. This did suggest that we would have polished tracks every day ready for everybody to enjoy. We didn’t. We just kept re-recording and writing, keeping our focus on gathering raw materials for the final mix.

More detail about this technical mix approach can be found on the blog.

And here is the track

The residency was intense and exhausting! It was a little like being in an experimental lab, being observed whilst working. Luckily, Real World studios had a policy of locking up at 10pm so we did not end up labouring late into the summer nights.

Thanks to everybody involved in setting up this opportunity. I learned that multi-channel audio is very fiddly and that musicians are the best.