Recording Reverb with Immersive Worldizing | Behind IMMERSED: Episode 16

🎧 Listen to IMMERSED: https://justingray.lnk.to/immersed

This video takes you behind the scenes of the immersive worldizing session I did at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto while producing the IMMERSED album. In this session, we played back individual parts of the record (largely soloists and lead melody performances) over a single loudspeaker, and then captured the natural reverb in the hall using a collection of carefully placed immersive microphone arrays. This process is called Worldizing.

Every layer of this album was recorded with immersive microphone techniques, with the goal of capturing spatial information at the source. Many of the solo instruments, however (voice, sarangi, esraj, saxophone, and violin), are not quite loud enough to fully engage the studio space. Hence, the ambient capture at the source was quite subtle.

The immersive producers of this album, Drew Jurecka and Morten Lindberg, and I found ourselves wanting a larger sense of space around those instruments in the mix, which were positioned mainly in the center channel. So I began experimenting with digital reverbs, but I couldn’t find anything that felt right. That’s when this idea began.

The auditorium at the Aga Khan Museum is one of the most beautiful and acoustically rich spaces I’ve ever worked in. Its reflections are lush, and the decay is remarkably even across the frequency spectrum. It doesn’t have an exceptionally long tail, which was perfect for this music, as I didn’t want the mixes to become muddy with too much sustain.

By playing each performance through a speaker placed on stage (facing downstage) and capturing the resulting ambiance with a series of immersive microphone arrays, we were able to record the room itself responding to the performances. I ultimately brought those ambient recordings back into the studio, and they became the primary reverb sources supporting much of the center channel content on the album.

Here is the mic setup we used for the reamp session:

Ground Floor: 15-channel “Gray Array”: A cardioid equidistant spherical array of Schoeps MK4 microphones in a 9.0.6 configuration.

Balcony: 5-channel surround array of DPA 4006 omnidirectional microphones.

Ceiling: 4-channel height array of Line Audio OM1 omnidirectional microphones, hung close to 75 feet off the ground.

We also placed a Soyuz 013 ambisonic microphone directly at the center of the ground layer array to provide a first-order ambisonic capture for future mix experimentation. The mic sounds beautiful, and I’ll explore its use in an upcoming video.

🎧 Watch the process, hear the space, and experience how the hall became part of the music itself.

Recorded by Justin Gray & Patric McGroarty

Assistant Engineers: Alex Gamble, Eric Bernhardt, Azuma Ishiyama, Marin Stemmelan, & Haris Javed

Special thanks to Amir Alibhai at the Aga Khan Museum & Dave Meisner from OMS Canada

Video by Michael Fisher

#JustinGrayImmersed #BehindIMMERSed #DolbyAtmos #ImmersiveAudio #ReverbCapture #SpatialMusic #ConcertHall #AgaKhanMuseum #SoundDesign #RecordingTechniques #BinauralRecording #AtmosMixing #SoyuzMicrophones #DPA #Schoeps #Ambisonics

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