'You Can Actually Hear Action' - Will Yip on Experiencing Rock Music in Surround Sound
'You Can Actually Hear Action' - Will Yip on Experiencing Rock Music in Surround Sound
Producer Will Yip talks about mixing La Dispute's "Panorama" in 5.1 surround sound for a Blu-Ray physical release. During a pandemic, it sure sounds like a nice substitute for live music.
More than a year after its 2019 release, Grand Rapids, Michigan’s La Dispute announced that it would release a special Blu-Ray edition of Panorama, mixed by producer Will Yip in 5.1 surround sound.
Panorama is such a cinematic album for La Dispute, so this decision makes sense.
It was partially influenced by the physical landscape of a drive through the band’s native Michigan. It’s a wide spectrum and color palette of sound, too. There are tense and blistering highs, reflective lows, and more room to breathe than on previous albums. It keeps pieces of the band’s trusty post-hardcore sound, but explores a lot more space around it. There’s still plenty of punch. But (just like the drive that influenced it) there’s plenty of sonic gear shifting.
If that doesn’t sound like an album that needs to occupy more actual real estate in a room, I don’t know what does.
At a time where streaming rules music, I was interested in this. What makes a surround sound mix that different from a stereo mix I listen to? Are we all going to be buying Blu-Ray discs instead of vinyl to prove that we like better than everyone else?
We’re also in a time where we literally can’t see live music (unless you risk your health to see the Chainsmokers in the Hamptons with Goldman Sachs’ CEO as the opening DJ). So, a surround sound mix where it sounds like you’re in the room with the band sounds like a nice alternative, doesn’t it?
I had interviewed Will once before for GRAMMY.com, and I was glad I could do it again because he’s really fun to talk to. It would be easy for him to be jaded given his resume. He’s so excited about the things he works on, and it’s never just media-trained bullshit or smoke up anyone’s ass. (If it is, he’s a good faker.) He sort of becomes a fifth Beatle for the bands he’s in the studio with.
He’s also obviously a producing wizard with quite a list of credits and critically acclaimed work. Put simply, he knows his shit. So I wanted to hear straight from a guy with so much experience Making Music (intangible and tangible products) why an album on a Blu-Ray disc is such a step forward for recorded music, and whether he sees the industry following that trend in the future.
Here’s my conversation with Will Yip.
Brendan: For someone like me who doesn’t understand the behind the scenes aspects of making a record as much, could you explain this whole Blu-Ray thing?
Will Yip: Yeah. So, the goal was, when Brad [Vander Lugt] hit me up—the drummer—he’s such a talented guy. He’s kind of the musical director [for La Dispute.] He hit me up and he kind of explained to me the idea of Panorama. The name was already there before we finished the record. And the second he said it, and the second I heard a demo, I put those two things together and I heard the record in surround. Like, I felt myself engulfed in the music. Fully immersed in the music. And I knew that I wanted to mix this at some point in surround—on my dime. I couldn’t really convince a record label, I’m sure they’d be down, but I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m passionate about this. Let’s do a fuckin’ 5.1 mix.’ Because that’s the only way I feel like I can fill my sonic vision after talking to Brad about Panorama. It’s a shame, because not too many people have access to listening to 5.1, but luckily I have a 5.1 system at home, and my brother does, and every time we listen to music, we listen in 5.1. The sound literally surrounds you. Things are mixed where that sound comes behind you and forward and all that stuff. I thought the best feeling about those songs, my favorite times listening to the songs, were in the room where I was surrounded by the guys and I felt music coming from everywhere. I thought that was the truest form of those songs. We mixed it 5.1 so you have fucking five speakers and a sub that fucking literally encapsulates the movement of the song. And it’s a shame because there’s no way to make a fucking 5.1 thing available on Spotify right now. It’s a shame that the only platform we can get to get it out there is a premium audio disc like Blu-Ray. Kind of just like film. That’s the very layman’s term of the technical side behind it and the reason why we did it at first, or at least why we wanted to explore it.
Have you ever heard of any other band or artist doing this?
Um, I know Foo Fighters did a live 5.1 mix of a live show. I know a few bands that have done that. I don’t know of any bands in our world that have done a 5.1 mix. Again, it’s just not that essential for people who are listening with two earbuds, two speakers, in their car. People aren’t listening to music with five speakers around them, you know what I mean? It was definitely meant—not that it was meant, but definitely, I guess, more so available for people with a hifi premium audio rig, a 5.1 rig. It sucks man, cause when I heard my partner Phil [Nicolo] mix a few orchestral things in 5.1 here at the studio. I was literally blown away. I was like, All music should be like this. This makes the experience so much more of an experience than just listening through speakers. You can actually hear action. Instead of hearing something pan from left to right, you hear shit move around you, vertically, horizontally. It’s not that it’s just about tricks. It’s not. It’s about actual movement. It just adds another dimension to the music. Music can feel 3-D and can actually feel like things are on the side of you, behind you, moving from behind you to ahead of you. I don’t do too much of that in the 5.1 mix. I wanted to keep it more so classy and pretty transparent. But I fell in love with it when I was sitting in the studio listening to [Phil] mix 5.1 stuff. And I was just like, This is more than just listening to a song, this is an experience. That was the goal for Panorama to begin with—here’s a band that has so many records already, and Brad’s first question to me was, “How can we make this record different?” We had such a big vision for this record in terms of it being unlike any other La Dispute record. The 5.1 element was definitely a small element after the fact, after the stereo master version, to kind of make this release a little different. The songs were so different and the presentation of the music is so different that we wanted to fucking come across different and give people another platform to enjoy music and to experience the music.
(Quick note: My buddy Hunter Siede edited this video.)
I know you said you paid for it on your own dime, but did you have to do any real convincing with Epitaph Records to make this happen?
No. No, no. For one, Epitaph is one of the most supportive record labels that there are, and once they saw that the band was so behind it, and once they heard the record, they were like, “That makes fucking sense.” To me, the stereo version is one of my favorite records that I’ve done. But, straight up, to me, the 5.1 version is more accurate to Panorama to me. This record was about five people. Past records have been … you know, especially mixes I’ve done on the last record, Rooms of the House, it’s [vocalist] Jordan [Dreyer]-driven. And that’s cool. That’s fuckin’ awesome. Obviously it’s fuckin’ beautiful. But these musicians, the guitar players, the bassist and the drummer … Brad’s way more than a songwriter. Chad [Sterenberg] is way more than a guitar player. They’re all more than people categorize them as. And Jordan’s more than just a fucking singer. They’re all instrumentalists. They’re all such brilliant musicians. The goal was to showcase the five musicians, less so of what people expect from us. They expect spoken word over dynamic or whatever brand music that you call it. Our goal here was to showcase five musicians. And I think doing it in 5.1 where you can really feel it, you can really feel Chad over here and you can feel the extra keyboards in the back, you just feel a lot more. And it gave us a little more to play with than just two speakers. Obviously, I spent my entire life between two speakers and it’s great, I love stereo records. But this gave us more of a platform to showcase what I thought the initial vision was for this record, and that is to showcase five musicians.
Did it take any learning curve on your end? Did you have any experience mixing for 5.1 or did you kind of have to learn on the fly?
I’m naturally a perfectionist. I’ve only ever assisted on 5.1 records, so I never mixed a 5.1 record from front to back by myself. I’ve always assisted Phil, my partner here. I had a handle on it, but it was a lot of figuring out. A lot of trial and error. I did a few passes before I sent one to the band because at first I was going crazy. A lot of tricks. Like, Oh, shit, it’s 5.1 so I can make people fuckin’ swirl around. I pulled it back, but it was just kind of fun to fuck with, because you never listen to a rock band like that, where things are moving. And then I dialed it back. Things stayed predominantly stationary. But you feel things in different places. You feel the room. When you’re in my room that I track drums in, you’re staring at the drummer. You get a very direct drum sound. And the second you turn around or the second you back up ten feet, you hear less so of the drums in front of you, and you hear the drums reflect off the wall behind you. I wanted to capture a bit of that on the surround sound recording so you feel like you’re in the room surrounded by these five guys. It took a lot of trial and error, but I’ve mixed a few records in my lifetime before, so, you know, instead of mixing two channels with two speakers, it’s six channels. It was definitely not so easy, but it was worth it. It was worth it because it was one of the best experiences I’ve had mixing.
Was the gap between the initial 2019 release of Panorama and this mix on purpose, or was that just the time it took to make this happen?
A little bit of both. We finished it a bit ago. We finished it a good bit ago. But, we didn’t want people to think that this was the way you had to listen to the record. Because it’s not. It really isn’t. It was a passion project of mine doing a 5.1. The record is the record. We know people have two speakers. That is the fucking record. We wanted to make sure that Panorama could live on its own and people could form their attachments to the record the way it was really, at the end of the day, supposed to be. It’s supposed to be for everyone. We would never make only one record that was only 5.1, and if you don’t have a 5.1 system you can’t listen to it. The main masters were the record. The 5.1 was just a passion project, especially of mine, where I started doing it after we turned in the stereo mixes. It took us a minute. It took us a while. A few months to finish it. Not that we sat on it, but we just wanted the record to breathe and have people fall in love with the record as is, form their opinions as is, and then drop this as a little treat for people. Especially audiophiles that can experience 5.1.
Do you think this will become more common, and bands will use this as a new medium in the future? Do you think they’ll see the success in this and want to do the same?
I hope so. I hope so. The realist in me says no, just because it takes a lot of work. But, I hope so, because I feel like it’s such a special thing. The only reason why I’m not too optimistic that it’ll be a regular thing is that people just don’t have the access to listen to a 5.1, other than people that have one for their home theaters. It’s just not that common. And until someone experiences listening to 5.1, that’s the only time that they’ll be sold. I’m confident that anyone that listens to a 5.1 record will fall in love with it and have a desire to have a 5.1 rig at some point. Until that happens, I don’t think so. But hopefully that does happen. When you fucking get to hear a record that was actually mixed for 5.1 with all the channels … it’s really a special experience that makes you kind of fall in love with the music differently, and I just want people to experience that whenever they can. It’s such a new way to experience music, and I think music can use anything right now to help get people to experience different things. So, you know, I’m reluctant to say yes that I think people will follow. I think it’s just really tough. People just need to experience it before they fall in love with it, before they fall in love with the idea of it. Because it just sounds so fucking nerdy just talking about 5.1. It’s not until you experience it that you fall in love with it, so hopefully they do.
I think Music as an industry has tried so many times to reinvent the wheel in terms of high quality listening and experience, and it just hasn’t worked, like when Neil Young tried to make Pono happen. And it usually hasn’t caught on over convenience. But this is the kind of thing that might actually catch on with people, especially people who really love listening to movie scores.
Exactly. People tried this back in the day with Super Audio discs and DVD audio. People tried doing it. But it was the same time people were working on fucking iTunes. It was the same time where the whole industry was shifting. Now, not that the industry normalized, but the way people listen to music has normalized. People listen to music on Spotify and Apple and Tidal and they stream. People are now more thirsty than ever for a different way to experience music. People who love music and are audiophiles. So, hopefully, this is the time that we can give people a new experience, you know what I mean? Hopefully La Dispute is a frontrunner or at least a flag waver, because, again, they’re more than just a band to me. They’re a group of brilliant musicians. And the way I experienced their music is the same way I experienced the Philadelphia fucking Orchestra that we tracked in here. It felt that fucking big to me. Those orchestral records are mixed in 5.1. There’s a 5.1 version of all those records, because you want to hear the bigness, Nowadays, man, now that everything is just streaming on shitty quality—well, not shitty quality, but you know what I’m saying. Streaming quality. There are people who desire more. And I just want to give them an option here. Hopefully more people follow suit and it works better than in the ‘90s or early 2000s when the whole movement was shifting and people were trying to figure out how people were going to consume music. Now people know how they’re going to consume music. Just give them more shit. Just give them more experiences to consume.
And especially right now, this feels like the closest thing you can get to being in the room with a band playing live. And who knows when that will come back.
Exactly. I hope people can experience it and really enjoy it. Really just shut their eyes and sit in the middle of the speakers and experience the band in the room. Because that’s how I’m mixing it.
Moral of the story – please don’t buy the Blu-Ray and listen on your blown out 2010 Macbook speakers.
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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Bartees Strange (who coincidentally just announced an album on Will’s Memory Music label).