Studio One: Mix in a New Dimension with Jeff Ellis

The GRAMMY-winning recording and mix engineer shows us how he uses Studio One to create an artful immersive mix.

Jeff Ellis is a force to be reckoned with. The LA-based recording and mix engineer started his career as an intern at the legendary EastWest Studios, where he was selected to engineer Frank Ocean's debut album - the dynamic and lushly layered Channel Orange.

Just one year later, Ellis' work was nominated for both Record of the Year and Album of the Year at the GRAMMY Awards, where he won Best Urban Contemporary Album - a success that led to engineering Ocean's critically-acclaimed sophomore album, Blonde and building a star-studded CV of artists like Doja Cat, Odd Future, The Neighbourhood, Akon, Skylar Grey, Nick Jonas, and more.

Watch this episode to see how Ellis uses Studio One to create an immersive mix in his Atmos room at EastWest Studios.

In this episode of Mix In A New Dimension, Jeff Ellis uses Studio One's spatial audio to create an immersive mix of Mayer Hawthorne's horn-heavy love ballad, For All Time.

Having mixed the record in stereo, Ellis was already deeply familiar with the track and felt it was ideally suited to a spatial mix. That particular album is so high-fi, and there's so much depth to it. It's so well arranged, and it's just like a classic album.

For Ellis, the single greatest piece of guidance when mixing in Atmos is making sure that the Atmos version is not a different piece of art: I don't want you to get a different emotional response from the song depending on if you listened to it on stereo or spatial audio. If I'm able to get the song to be more immersive and have a little bit more depth without any of the artistry of it changing, that's gonna be my ultimate goal.

In this particular song, the drums are right in the center. I took the overhead cymbal sounds and widened those out a bit. And then for all the percussion elements, I put the overheads up and widened it out. The kick and snare are pretty much right up the center, or close to it. And I'm just massaging the sounds out into this big, Atmos field. And as I'm doing it, I'm going back and forth between the Atmos mix and the stereo mix to make sure none of the intrinsic level relationships between the parts of the song are changing as I'm panning these things out.

Any final words of wisdom? Make sure that the balance between the elements in the song and the aesthetic don't change between stereo and Atmos - it's just getting more immersive. Be sensible, be artful, don't be a technician, and have fun with it.

PreSonus products used: Studio One

Try Studio One+ and check out the rest of our Mix In A New Dimension series here.

LINK:	https://blog.presonus.com/2024/02/07/studio-one-mix-in-a-new-dimension...
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