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With more and more engineers and studios adopting Dolby Atmos every year, the experimental novelty of the format has slowly worn off, and certain best practices have begun to emerge. Just like panning guitar solos back and forth in stereo eventually became a cheap gimmick, it’s no longer impressive to spin a vocal track around the room. Today, creating a great Atmos mix means using both innovation and restraint to best serve the music.
Drawing from interviews with seasoned pros like Andrew Scheps, Sylvia Massy, Bobby Holland, and Michael James, we’ve put together a shortlist of Atmos-specific mixing tips, technical standards, and specific guidelines on panning, effects, and Renderer settings. Use this guide to avoid common pitfalls and get your mixes off to a solid start, but remember: as with all things creative, there are no rules to immersive mixing, so don’t be afraid to go off the beaten path and do whatever sounds right.
One of the top suggestions from pro Atmos mixers is to focus the main elements of the song in the front wall (meaning the left, center, and right speakers). Typically, that includes lead vocals, drums, bass, and important melody instruments like guitars and keyboards. Placing these elements up front keeps the listener’s attention on the core of the song instead of distracting them with too much “ear candy.”
“The concept of the front wall is important to me,” says Andrew Scheps. “It's always weird to me when an important instrument is coming out of the sides or the rears; I feel like that's distracting from something you should really listen to.”
Sylvia Massy uses a similar method. “When I approach a rock mix, I'll generally place the drums and bass in the left, center, and right speakers,” she says. “Most of that punch is going to come from the front wall, and then different colors like piano or vocal parts will come from behind or above.”
Often, those core elements will change throughout the song, like when a guitar switches from supporting chords in the verse to a lead melody in the chorus. Automating your panning to keep the most important content up front can help your mix stay cohesive and keep the listener’s focus all the way through.
Although Objects can be panned anywhere within the 3D soundstage, it’s usually best to keep them on the outer boundaries and only bring them inward as a special effect. Colloquially known as the “balls to the walls” technique (named after the little spheres representing Objects in the Renderer), mixing this way helps Objects sound more localized and helps your panning choices translate better.
“Creating a phantom image on the walls only ever takes two speakers, but as soon as you bring something inward, it takes more than two speakers, and it can make the listening position feel smaller,” Scheps explains. “It can also be problematic in headphones because the level can go up more than it should, so mixing this way usually makes things translate better for me.”
Objects aren’t always necessary for static panning, so many Atmos mixers use Beds to assign tracks to discrete speaker locations. But because Beds are limited to 7.1.2, it’s common to create “Object Beds” using arrays of Objects in 7.1.4 or larger configurations to take full advantage of the height channels. And if you really want to ensure pinpoint spatialization, you can use Speaker Snap to tell the Renderer to play an Object out of the nearest speaker in the listener’s array (for example, if you mixed in 7.1.4 and the listener has a 5.1.2 system).
While speakers are essential for creating a great immersive mix, the reality is that most listeners will hear your work on headphones, earbuds, or AirPods. So, to ensure accurate translation from speakers to headphones, Dolby Atmos allows you to assign custom binaural settings for every Object in your mix (plus a global setting for Beds).
Each element can be set to Near, Mid, Far, or Off. The first three settings add distance-related aural cues like early reflections and high-frequency damping, while Off bypasses all of that and only uses the existing panning data. By default, everything is set to Mid, so you’ll have to go track by track to find the best settings.
For example, dry lead vocals will probably sound best on Near or Off, while background vocals might benefit from Mid or Far processing. And don’t forget your effects tracks; for 100% wet reverb returns, you’ll probably want to avoid adding more early reflections, but a mono delay Object might sound good on Mid or Far mode.
However, Apple Music ignores these settings in favor of proprietary processing, so your binaural mix might sound very different on Apple Music than it does on other streaming services. To make sure your binaural mix sounds good everywhere, be sure to preview the Apple version using a plug-in like AudioMovers’ Binaural Renderer for Apple Music.
Stereo is still the default format for most listeners, so remember to periodically switch the Renderer output to 2.0 and listen for any major changes in balance or panning. “I definitely focus a lot on just the stereo re-render, which ends up being the stereo mix that gets sent to mastering,” says Bobby Holland. “It takes longer than just mixing one song in stereo, but it doesn't take as long as mixing in stereo and then mixing in Atmos.” If you consistently find that the rears or overheads disappear in stereo, you can always adjust the stereo downmix settings in the Renderer.
Fortunately, distributors like Distrokid allow you to upload a separate stereo mix along with the Atmos version, so you can master your track with traditional bus processing that you can’t do natively in Atmos. Simply route the 2.0 output to a dedicated stereo track and run the mix through your favorite mastering plug-ins or hardware chain to give it some “glue” and boost the loudness from the Atmos maximum spec of -18 LUFS to the typical streaming standard of -14 to -16 LUFS.
You can even do an entirely separate stereo mix before moving into Atmos, like producer Michael James does. “The stereo mix is outside the box in the analog domain, but after I print a variety of stems, I create a new in-the-box Pro Tools session for the Atmos mix,” says James. “All of my bus processing is baked into the stems. It’s the only way for me to accommodate the layers of people who may want revisions after I’ve reset the analog patchbay.” Just remember that Apple Music requires the stereo and Atmos versions to be the exact same length to enable seamless switching during playback.
The Low-Frequency Effects (LFE) channel is one of the most misunderstood aspects of immersive and surround mixing. Originally intended for theater-shaking bass effects in movies, LFE is a discrete channel that is sent directly to the subwoofer and typically low-passed at 120 Hz. (Note: LFE is different from bass management, which is when low frequencies from the speaker channels are sent to the subwoofer.)
While it might feel satisfying to send a kick or bass track to LFE for extra oomph, it also presents a few problems. For starters, only Beds have an LFE send, so you’ll have to set up a dummy Bed if you want to send Objects to LFE. Furthermore, you never know if the listener even has a subwoofer, or if it’s calibrated correctly for LFE. In the absence of a sub, some playback systems fold the LFE track back into the mix (with or without filtering) while others discard it entirely, so you never know how it might sound.
However, since Dolby recommends using full-range speakers for Atmos whenever possible, there usually isn’t a reason to use LFE in the first place. If your kick or bass tracks need more weight, simply use EQ and compression like you normally would. It might feel weird to see the LFE meter empty, but that doesn’t mean your mix lacks low-end. When in doubt, we recommend ignoring LFE entirely as it can do more harm than good.
Whatever you do, make sure that your mixing choices always serve the song. Immersive mixing may present more options than stereo, but this age-old advice rings as true as ever. Take it from Andrew Scheps:
“There is no format easier to destroy a song in than Atmos,” says the Grammy-winning mixer and producer behind the sounds of Low Roar, The Black Keys, Beyoncé, and many others. “It's about finding the stuff you can do to make it cooler as opposed to making it distracting. That's what I'm always trying to do: to use the new tools I have just to amplify what somebody else was trying to do in stereo.”
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