Dolby Atmos Composer&Producer

Q: What are you working on at the moment?

A: Composing: At this moment I'm working on the content of my second fully immersive concert, taking place in roundabout six months in Alicante, Spain. Dolby Atmos® mixing: sending two beautiful albums into the immersive universe, besides individual tracks.

Q: Is there anyone on SoundBetter you know and would recommend to your clients?

A: Unfortunately not, the ones I know are not on SoundBetter - of course I would recommend them to my customers when they can offer them what I cannot. I've not been educated to be a competitor or see other producers as competition or even enemies.

Q: Analog or digital and why?

A: Digital, as I'm a digital guy and we make music today (maybe it's good, maybe not so good) for a digital world. And because we have more possibilities. Yeah, I know, the "real analog" character is missing a little bit for us high-fidelity-pros. But the end consumer on his headphones........

Q: What questions do customers most commonly ask you? What's your answer?

A: Dolby Atmos® mixing: most of them or have the misconception or - worse - they never "heard" about or even Dolby Atmos®. That's not a bad starting point - quite the opposite! I then present them all the advantages of a Dolby Atmos® mix and in 90% of the cases they understand it, we go on, and at the end they're more than astonished of being able to listen to THEIR music in a totally different dress.

Q: What's the biggest misconception about what you do?

A: Dolby Atmos® mixing: IT IS a new way to listen to and experience music - and NO: you cannot "recreate" it with a simple (but great) Stereo mix. At the end on headphones of course you'll listen a Stereo/Binaural mix, but the brain is doing for you what YOU actively cannot do: "read in between the lines"!

Q: What advice do you have for a customer looking to hire a provider like you?

A: The customer should be open to hints and expertise as in the same way I will have an open ear to his wishes, ideas and any input he gives me. Communication should also be important to him, as a composing- or Dolby Atmos®-mixing-work comes with a lot of intercommunication from my end, to fit as exactly as it could be the customer´s needs.

Q: If you were on a desert island and could take just 5 pieces of gear, what would they be?

A: 1.) MacBook Pro with DAW and synths-plugins 2.) SSDs full of sounds 3.) ROLI seaboard 4.) Dolby Atmos® setup 5.) my Violin

Q: How would you describe your style?

A: Composing: CDM - Cinematic Dance Music

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: I'm running two fully certified Dolby Atmos® Music Studios in Alicante, Spain. Studio_One "The Whide" is running a 9.1.6 setup, and Studio_Two "Arabic Cave" is on a 7.1.4 layout. I've got most of the typical 80's synths, and newer and exotic stuff to create all the atmospheric and ambient sounds I need in my daily work. Of course it's a pure Apple environment, Antelope Dolby Atmos® interfaces, AVID desk gear, special Dolby Atmos® controllers, Neumann speakers and LFE, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Cubase, Nuendo, Dolby Atmos® Renderer, ALL big FX plugins (Fab Filter, Valhalla, Waves, ...) and more than 10 TB of sound libraries and sound plugins like 8DIO, Arturia, BOOM, Crow Hill, FXpansion, keilwerth, KORG, Moog, NI, Roland, Sound Particles, Soundpaint, Spectrasonics, Spitfire Audio, u-he, Xfer, XLN, ....

Q: Tell us about a project you worked on you are especially proud of and why. What was your role?

A: My first concert mid October '24. Definitely! My role: composer, Dolby Atmos® engineer, responsible for the correct setup of the 9.2.4 layout - absolutely amazing and exactly what I'm lovin': from nothing to the listeners and concert goers. The aim: creating the very first full immersive concert in Spain ever! Succeeded :)

Q: What's your 'promise' to your clients?

A: First of all dear customer: your track is my track. In this way I will handle it exactly as my ones - with all the love someone (in this case: me) would give to his child or baby, because our music, our songs are our babies. Every step will be spoken about before, and not afterwards. Once my customer is happy with the result, I'm happy with my work I've done to get there.

Q: What do you like most about your job?

A: I love creating! I love creating new sounds, soundscapes, new worlds to be seen with ears, brain and soul. To be able to create songs from the scratch in an immersive 3D world, or to convert existing songs into that amazing and capturing environment, is a unique privilege to me and a fact that raises my heartbeat every time I'm thinking about.

Q: What questions do you ask prospective clients?

A: Reference songs, going the "traditional" way or if the customer also dares to experiment some new stuff. Of course also the standard questions: when, why, how and what.

Q: What was your career path? How long have you been doing this?

A: I'm - of course, as many of us - still on the path, after being composer for > 20 years now, from which the 24/7 engagement started in the early 2020's.

Q: Which artist would you like to work with and why?

A: Above & Beyond and Schiller, because both artists have a very wide spectrum of an artistic- and sound-level. In the same way they create EDM/house/electronic music to later being able to take them into a symphonic world and environment, like as-is, like the music always from the very first beginning has been made for both worlds.

Q: Can you share one music production tip?

A: Follow the rules until they're not fitting into your project any more. Then: break conventions and create something unique. We music producers are creators, not assembly line workers.

Q: What type of music do you usually work on?

A: Usually I'm working on EDM, symphonic/epic and complex but easy-listening ambient music.

Q: What's your strongest skill?

A: Composing and producing (mix and master) in a three dimensional environment.

Q: What do you bring to a song?

A: I bring to my song my expertise, being within a fully immersive world and environment for some years now - what is a privilege - and also my own spice end ingredients to create a unique and impacting or mindrotating (depending on the genre) experience. When composing a track, I always create something new, which maybe in some way may remember you very far away another song or track, but there won't be anything copied from this into my songs. Most of the sounds and instruments are non-stock ones, or extremely modified when coming out of a hardware synth or plugin.

Q: What's your typical work process?

A: In the composition area to get started, I'm feeling like a painter: after having defined more or less WHAT I'll be composing, I'm searching for the katalysing inspiration, which I could found or outside of the studio at the country side, mountains, sea, or within any sound I'd found within the thousands of them being on one of my NAS-harddrives. In the Dolby Atmos® mixing process my inspiration comes from the triangle of listening to A) the raw customer-track-mix B) looking in my brain for any comparison in between of the more than 100 already finished Dolby Atmos® mixes to then C) go on with a very unconventional and crazy start of "let's do something no one shall do with this track" by positioning stems in places they first of all shouldn't go to. After that comes the cleaning process by listening to the Alpha-Mix various of my people. After that the mix goes it's natural Dolby Atmos® way in Studio_One over all 16 speakers, loud, silent, super loud, extreme pumping loud, turning the sphere by 360º if every element/instrument/stem is on its settled place, to later double check over headphones listeing to different fold-downs.

Q: What other musicians or music production professionals inspire you?

A: As a "child of the 80's", I'm totally influenced by artists and pioneers as Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream. But also current artists are part of my listen-to repertoire, such like Schiller, Above & Beyond, Chicane (of course) and most of the Anjuna Family.

Q: Describe the most common type of work you do for your clients.

A: As being a full time composer, music producer and Dolby Atmos® Engineer, my customers are musicians to be mixed and mastered in both formats: Stereo and Dolby Atmos®, after having cleaned and perfected all their stems. Compositions are applied or to my own artistic work, directly in one of my certified Dolby Atmos® Music Studios or to the clients asking for special and to their needs adopted pieces.