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When award-winning composer/producer/engineer Ryan Lewis (Macklemore, Kesha) decided to set up a Dolby Atmos rig for his new Washington State studio, he thought beyond the conventional possibilities of what an immersive audio setup can be. To realize his vision, he teamed up with Vintage King, who equipped the studio with an all-ATC rig comprised of the brand's iconic SCM45A Pro, SCM100A Pro, and SCM25A Pro Mk2 monitors.
As the finishing touches for the studio were being put in place, Ryan sat down with us to share his unique vision for what Atmos can do in a live room, why ATC was his company of choice for the entire rig, and how James Good and Frank Verschuuren of Vintage King helped bring his creative vision of immersive audio to life.
Let’s start with what inspired you to set up an Atmos rig in the first place.
Originally, I didn't think I would ever install an Atmos system, actually. Like a lot of people, I saw Atmos as a format that, in pop music, felt fairly mandatory; it reminded me of your radio master, master for TV, and all these standard things that you’re expecting from a mixer or mastering engineer when you finish a project.
On the flip side, I also saw surround sound and Atmos as synonymous with film scoring, sound design, and the entire world of movie audio, so I’ve always found it really interesting – but I’m not a mixing engineer first and foremost, so my intrigue about Atmos was a little different. I got excited when I started to realize the tremendous value it could bring to the live room of the studio in Washington, instead of the main control room.
The live room is a big space – 25-foot ceilings, amazing-sounding, with acoustic design by Kyle Mann – and it has this huge drapery, so it can have a diffusive live feel or dry up into something more intimate. The first thing I thought was reamping: all the placements and corners you could send sound to through the 7.1.4 rig, and then capture it back, whether you’re reamping for stereo or immersive. I imagined the crazy movement you could do in the room, like spinning a Leslie speaker – this ability to bring sterile or more in-the-box sounds to life in a big, real-life acoustic space. It’s kind of like supercharged reamping – way beyond a pair of monitors doing playback.
The property is kind of a content-capture paradise – the rooms, the environments, the scenery – and it has fiber, so full-on livestream concerts are possible. That’s where I saw the potential of the Atmos rig for live performance as well: blending an immersive experience with a live musician sitting in the center of it all, in front of an intimate audience. An acoustic piano or an acoustic guitar inside this surround experience around you… that just sounded really, really cool to me.
And you can blend a live performance with a reamp. Maybe you’ve got Mellotron strings, or a plug-in sound you really like – feed it into the room, let the performer play with it, and record it all back. That kind of thing was really appealing to me too.
Then there’s the other side of what the rig can do. The live room can flip into the biggest control room on the property – the big ATCs become your mains, there’s a massive screen for the DAW, two iso booths connected directly, and space for a whole team to sit comfortably. Or in the world of film, I imagined being able to edit in there, working on film scores, doing full Atmos mixes.
And the last piece of the puzzle: this property is intended to be a destination studio, where for blocks of time you’re out here with all this gear to use however you want. That includes watching 4K movies on the Kaleidescape in Atmos, at true HDR10 color, sprawled on couches in the live room – or playing PlayStation, because the projector runs at 120 Hz. A recording studio, a control room, a sound stage, and a full media playback system for staying on site. And most importantly, it just sounds unbelievably good in there. When you’re hunkered down on a project for weeks on end, the Atmos system can come to life in all sorts of really amazing ways.
What made you choose ATC monitors to build your entire Atmos rig?
Right around the time that I had started to think I would do this, I was just starting to enjoy the ATC SCM25s as nearfields, having been on PMCs for ten years. The Fig Street studio in Highland Park in LA will have PMC BB6s and PMC MB3s, which I consider to be some of the greatest monitors ever made. In Washington, you have PMC QB1s and PMC IB2s, so PMC were my dominant speakers for a long time. Once I started using the ATC nearfields, I loved how different they were from the PMCs – it’s a completely different character and completely different vibe. In some ways, it almost feels like a different era a little bit.
So getting the ATC SCM25s was me not only wanting a nearfield monitor that was smaller and tighter, but also offering something to complement the PMC and get me a little bit outside of the sonic world of PMC that I'm really familiar with at this point. Also, the ATC had the classic look that I wanted for the live room environment.
A major bonus of having the SCM100 ASL Pros with JL Audio subs is that, even if you're just in stereo in the live room, putting Pro Tools up on a fat movie screen, treating it as Control Room C – for instance, sessions for hip hop or pop that are mostly laptops and in-the-box stuff – the superpower of this studio would be that you would have two King Kong control rooms on opposite sides of the glass. Crazy.
I will give a shout-out to Frank Verschuuren and James Good from Vintage King – with an LCR setup, the biggest ATCs roll away so easily; the curtains can open up, and they're gone, and the screen retracts up into its case, goes up to the ceiling, and just disappears. So you can have a really spacious, open live room floor and then roll the LCR to its spot, pop in an XLR, the screen comes down automatically, and suddenly you're in a movie theater.
So that’s how I arrived at the choice of ATC: first, taking a real liking to the sonic qualities of ATC, and secondarily, they really fit the character of a live room that is full of natural finishes and has a timeless, classic appeal to it.
How do recordings and mixes on the ATC translate to other systems?
To choose a speaker, you have to really connect with it; it has to feel like, ‘when I work on these, and I go play it all over the place, on AirPods or whatever, I like the results.’ The decisions that I'm making when I go to hear them elsewhere, I would have made the same decisions – that's ultimately what I think a good monitor is to somebody.
ATCs and PMCs have different mentalities and different philosophies, and I like them for different reasons. ATCs, to me, have always felt very natural, while PMCs have always felt very pristine and modern, but also non-exhausting. I don't find either speaker overly exhausting, and that’s a huge prerequisite for me – if I'm stuck with this for days and days, are my ears liking this? Am I happy at low volume? I have to be satisfied at low volume, and I've been so bad at that my entire life! I am so the ‘Turn It Up’ guy! [Laughs]
So a huge piece of it is that I love the sound of the ATCs – and I also love the look; that’s a component too. There are a lot of speakers where I don’t even care how they sound, because I don’t want to look at them ever again. [Laughs]
And I’ll give ATC credit – I wasn’t looking to switch speaker companies. They earned their way in by complementing a sonic world I know really well, and by shaking me up a little at the same time.
Going back to the live room and Atmos re-amping scenario – is it right to say that the speakers become sort of another instrument in the space?
I think so, yes! To me, it’s the adaptability of so many speakers around you – one day it’s Pro Tools up on a huge screen in a room where 12 people are comfortably hanging, and the next it’s the most mega reamping space. The fact that the automation you’re writing in Pro Tools can physically move around the live room is just nuts.
And then there is the Dante component. When we built the property, we ran a lot of category cable around, so there are network switches all over the place – including at the end of the yard, 200 feet out into the canyon – plus speakers that enclose the yard. That means the studio doesn’t have to stop at the walls: I can send sound out into the canyon and track it back in. Roll a rack out to the end of the yard, put up a couple of mics, and play drums out of Pro Tools through the yard speakers – chasing that huge ‘We Will Rock You’ style sound – letting it echo and delay down the actual canyon while the mics capture it all coming back. Which is just wild.
Wow, I got goosebumps!
That's what gets me excited! As incredible as the world of plug-ins and impulse responses is – and there’s so much you can do just on a laptop, at this point – to be able to still experiment in the real world with real electricity and crazy ideas, and out the other end comes a sound that could only happen in this wild way that we did it… That’s where the fun comes.
It’s easy for music to become a job, for things to get stale, or to get tired, feel uninspired, or feel like we can just automate or code so much at this point… but to be in a little wonderland of gadgets and possibilities is what I want to be able to offer. All of this has that in mind, which is: how quickly could you do the crazy idea? That’s kind of the philosophy!
Have any projects been started in the space yet?
Frank is there right now, finishing up the space. I’m doing a lot of creative work with a film team to capture this special spot and get it right – to where it feels really representative. Otherwise, you tell someone about it, and they think of what they think of, but then they go there, and they’re like, ‘Oh! I just had no idea!’
Check out some of Ryan Lewis's most popular work on YouTube.
