Stefan Boman: Remixing Roxette In Dolby Atmos

Photo: Peder Carlsson

Where better to reinvent the hits of Swedish pop titans Roxette in Dolby Atmos than Stockholm’s legendary Atlantis Studios?

When Stefan Boman was asked by Warner to remix the Roxette catalogue in Dolby Atmos, the Swedish producer and mixing engineer was adamant that it would have to be done properly. There would be no upmixing or psychoacoustic trickery to derive immersive audio from stereo. Instead, he insisted on starting from the ground up, recreating the duo’s hits track by track in three dimensions. And the label agreed.

It might have helped that Boman is not just any engineer. The 49‑year‑old has worked with local legends like Kent as well as international acts like Avicii, Ghost and Opeth. He is also part‑owner of Stockholm’s Atlantis Studios, where ABBA created hit after hit.

Polar Exploration

Boman’s personal history does not reach quite that far back. He started out at ABBA's Polar Studios, where, in a different age, he offered to work for free and was offered a paid position. “Back then, building my own studio seemed way too big of a dream,” Boman explains. “You had to have a large console and two‑inch tape machines, and it would probably have cost close to five million krona to build. So that wasn’t something I seriously considered.” And yet, after working at Polar Studios for seven years, he moved on. “I was having a discussion with my boss, and he suggested that it might be time for me to go freelance. So I did that for a number of years. I still worked at Polar, but sometimes bands also wanted me to work in different studios.”

A session at Polar with famed Swedish band Kent proved a turning point for Boman. “We became friends, and the lead guitarist and I started producing some other bands. This eventually led to the idea of getting our own place, since we always had to rent a studio when we produced together, and our production fee would be more or less spent on the studio rent. I came across a studio called Park Studios in the suburbs of Stockholm. It was pretty well known in Sweden, built in the ’70s, but at that time, it wasn’t really a studio. It was a Funky Junk. They were selling used audio gear. I talked to Sami [Sirviö, Kent guitarist and Boman’s business partner] about the idea to buy it together, make it a rehearsal room for Kent and a studio for me.”

Now they had the rooms, but a studio it was not. “It was without any technical equipment. The wires were still in the walls, but that was about it. And we couldn’t just put our little Mackie console into that big studio, that would have looked silly. So Sami and I bought a Neve V3, I think it was a used one from Hong Kong. I also brought in some other gear I had accumulated over the years. We then persuaded the other guys in Kent and their label to record with us. That budget allowed us to get more gear, a computer, microphones, that kind of stuff. Those were the building blocks of getting the studio together.”

As Kent were one of the biggest bands in Sweden at the time, and Boman brought in numerous other clients, they managed to create quite a buzz around the studio.

The Legend Of Atlantis

Stefan Boman ran Park Studios until three years ago, when a new opportunity presented itself. “Atlantis Studios had been for sale for a couple of years, and we had toyed with the idea of buying it, but we weren’t really sure. We still had the other studio, and it was running fine. But we finally decided to do it.” Initially, they wanted to run both studios simultaneously, but it soon transpired that this plan would not hold up. “The further I got into renovating Atlantis, the clearer it became to me that running both studios just wasn’t feasible. So we decided to let Park Studios go.” Park is now a Genelec showroom.

The main control room at Atlantis has also been sympathetically updated to retain its ’70s charm!Photo: Frank Mischkowski

While the legendary status of Atlantis is unquestionable, the studio required some care when Boman moved in. “I really wanted to update the studio to international standards and be able to bring in an engineer who could get to work right away. Back then, there were four different patchbays. You had to patch microphones in one place, and if you needed to reach outboard gear, you first had to patch that at a different spot. It was too difficult to work there as an external engineer who didn’t know his way around the studio. Also, since it was built in the ’60s, it had a lot of add‑ons over time. So I really thought it was time to do a reboot and get things organised.” In the end, it took more than half a year to get the studio to its current state.

As well as the main Neve 8026 console, the Atlantis control room also has an EMI TG12345 Mk3 desk available as a sidecar.Photo: Frank Mischkowski

Despite all the changes that were needed to make Atlantis a modern studio, its history was never forgotten. “It was really important for us that the main studio should be as close to the original as possible, so we only changed minor things. Everyone has always loved Atlantis.” This approach also paid off in a business sense, as Boman could bring some of his former clients in while also keeping most of Atlantis’ existing clientele.

The Atlantis live room is still recognisably the same as it was in ABBA’s heyday.Photo: Atlantis Studios

Going Immersive

One of the most important changes that was made in order to bring the complex up to date was to turn Stefan Boman’s own mix room into an immersive mixing space. “I was a bit worried that we were too afraid of the future and might get left behind. At first, I didn’t realise the artistic aspects to it. My main objective was the business part of it. I have worked in 5.1, but that format is pretty much dead for music. Dolby Atmos just made sense from a business standpoint.”

Actually installing an immersive monitoring system was a challenge, since the room itself is quite small. “This was the best room to use without destroying the big studio. So choosing this room was partly necessity, but also partly me thinking this is enough space for me. These days, I’m almost always working alone, so I don’t really need a bigger room. I talked to Dolby before making the decision and asked them whether it was possible. They said it’s a bit on the small side, but definitely doable. It is really a bit bigger than what you see, because there is an acoustic chamber which absorbs the bass.”

Stefan Boman’s immersive‑capable mix room at Atlantis is designed for hybrid working, with plenty of outboard and an Avid S6 control surface.

Once the room was finished, the next step was to figure out how to mix in Atmos. “The learning curve was steeper than I expected, but also really rewarding. I remember the first time I made a Dolby Atmos mix. I first made a stereo mix, working on it all day, and then decided to prepare the mix for doing it in Dolby Atmos the next day. As soon as I started, I was blown away. I texted my wife that I would be late, and then spent eight hours having fun with Dolby Atmos — after a 10‑hour day.”

Today, some years of experience later, Boman has changed his ideas about immersive mixing considerably: “In the beginning, I thought the band should be in the middle, and the vocals should come from all sides in equal strength. But I quickly learned that’s not a good way to go about it.” Instead, he now keeps the vocals mainly front and centre, but occasionally spreads them out with effects. “If you want the vocals to come from the back, it is better to make that signal a reflection, or maybe a chorus version of the same channel.” It all depends on the material at hand, of course, and how that material lends itself to the immersive experience. “If you have a lot of channels, it is a lot easier to build the world around the listener. I really want to use the format, I don’t want to have the band all in the front and just some reverb coming from the other speakers. But I am also not a big fan of flying things around the room unless it fits the musical intent.”

Boman has changed his ideas about immersive mixing considerably: “In the beginning, I thought the band should be in the middle, and the vocals should come from all sides in equal strength. But I quickly learned that’s not a good way to go about it.”

Boman says that he typically moves backing vocals, harmonies and non‑essential keyboards into the surrounds and overheads, keeping the song’s foundation more or less in the left‑and‑right dimension. At the same time, though, he enjoys the fact that there is no set of rules yet. “If you listen to music in Dolby Atmos, you hear different engineers taking different approaches. It’s not really set, which I find exciting. I don’t have to do things a certain way, I can find my own.”

The Great Swedish Bake-Off

For the Roxette project, Boman went to the original multitrack tape recordings, digitised them, and used that material to completely re‑imagine the original mixes. “Upmixing is a quick and easy fix,” he explains, “but it’s just never going to turn out as good as actually mixing for Dolby Atmos. Especially on headphones, an upmix is essentially the same as the stereo mix.” So he told Warner Music that he would rather take full advantage of the potential of the new format, and the record company agreed.

“The trouble with tape is that it is very hard to judge the condition before you have it on the tape machine, and then it can be too late. Then you might have already ruined a portion of the tape. It depends on many factors, among them what brand and what year the tapes were manufactured. For example, some of the really old EMI tapes are still fine, but the majority of the tapes had to be baked in a special oven to be able to hold together.”

To be on the safe side, all the tapes were baked at around 50 degrees Celsius for two days, since this has no negative effects, whereas playing a fragile old tape without baking risks destroying the recordings. “Tape is made of different layers,” Boman explains. “You have the plastic part, then a kind of glue, and the iron oxide that is magnetically charged to save information. If the glue becomes too stiff, the iron particles can come loose from the tape. If that happens, at best you lose high end, at worst you flat‑out lose the recording. So, since baking the tapes is a safe process, we just do it to make sure.”

The second best‑selling Swedish group of all time after ABBA, Roxette were a duo comprised of the late Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle.Photo: Dmitri Avdeev

Truly Individual

Once the tapes were digitised at 24‑bit/96kHz, Boman could go to work on mixing those legendary songs from the individual tracks — if indeed they were individual. “On tape it’s quite common for different signals to share a track, since the number of tracks is limited. One track might contain keyboards in the verse, but then additional vocals in the chorus, and perhaps a cowbell in the middle part. So I tried to find all the bits and pieces first and give each its own channel.”

That is not the only challenge in committing tape recordings to hard disk. “Tape can drift. That means you have to sync up the track so it doesn’t change over time.” Boman corrected these deviations by hand, with the stereo mixes as references. “That way you can quickly hear when it starts flamming or pitching against each other. Also, sometimes edits are done on the master tapes. For example, a second verse could have been halved, and that is not on the multitrack.”

The Atmos adventure proper began once all this preparation was complete. “It is always interesting, and sometimes even scary, when you start listening to a new track. You explore what you have to work with. All the keyboards might be together on one track, or they might be all separated.” This effect becomes even more prominent with well‑known songs like the Roxette hits. “You have heard this song a million times on the radio, and then you go through the tracks in solo and you discover things you have never noticed before. I then always went back to the stereo to double‑check if that signal was in the original, if it was very low or maybe even muted. Plus, figure out automation. Two words that go into a delay, for example. And what’s the timing of the delay? There are so many things you can miss.”

The first stage of actually mixing the songs is pretty much determined by the original stereo mixes. “I recreate the original mix first before going into Dolby Atmos. That is my starting point for the immersive mix. I might make changes to the original mix, but it is a good point of reference to first recreate what it originally sounded like. I spent a lot of time recreating the gated reverb sounds for the drums on ‘It Must Have Been Love’. I did end up changing the sounds a little for the Dolby Atmos mix, but I wanted to nail the original sounds first.”

Object Lessons

One fundamental difference between traditional stereo or 5.1 mixing and working in Dolby Atmos is that an Atmos mix contains both a channel‑based core, called the ‘bed’, and individual ‘objects’ that have their own 3D automation. Boman has experimented with this distinction and found it particularly important when it comes to headphone playback. “If you want to place a signal in between two speakers, for example halfway between the left speaker and the left side speaker, then you really need to be aware of whether that signal is a bed or an object. If you route it to the bed, that signal is going to be louder in the binauralisation process. That is one of the things to look out for when you start working in Dolby Atmos, as is the difference between bed and object in general.”

As a result, Boman prefers to work with objects, even though these are in limited supply. Does he ever run out? “Yes, sure. But then you just have to be creative in putting signals into packages together. Take 10 tracks that are in the same position, and route them to the same object.”

Objects also present new challenges for the mastering process. “If you work with only the bed, you have essentially a 10‑channel mix, which plays into the traditional work with buses. A hundred and eighteen objects, on the other hand — you really have to make your computer work mastering that.”

The different approach to mastering has a positive side effect for Boman. “A Dolby Atmos mix sits at ‑18 LUFS as opposed to a typical stereo mix at ‑8, so I don’t have to squash my master as hard when I mix in Dolby Atmos. I remember when I did the Avicii songs, I could not figure out how they made the drum sounds. I thought I was given the wrong kick. Then I limited my master really hard, and that’s when I got to that sound. So, sometimes you have to do that to create the sound you need. Or you add distortion to mimic the harmonics that come from limiting too hard.”

In general, though, Boman welcomes the change. “Where else can we go? The loudness has pretty much come all the way. Stereo streaming services ask for masters at ‑14 LUFS, but most people don’t deliver that — most stereo stuff is still really, really loud. In Dolby Atmos, you don’t have to make it super loud, and I think that is a very healthy development.”

Rediscovering Music

Equally healthy is Boman’s attitude towards the potential of immersive audio. When a new format like Dolby Atmos is introduced, there is always the danger of overusing its possibilities. “I was trying to not make things spin around just for the sake of it,” Boman says. “Apparently, the record label was a bit worried about that. But when they came in and listened to the mixes, they liked it and remarked how it was impressive, yet tasteful at the same time. That made my day, because that was exactly what I wanted to achieve.

Stefan Boman: The songs do not have to be the same, but they should feel the same.

“The songs do not have to be the same, but they should feel the same. As I said, at first I reference the stereo mixes a lot, but then I let go of them. It’s not just the jump to a new format. Let’s not forget that the original mixes were from the late ’80s and early ’90s. Listening preferences have changed since then. Sounds were different. I wanted to update the sound without changing its intent.”

Mixing in Dolby Atmos currently makes up between 50 and 80 percent of Boman’s work. But creating his immersive mixing suite has done more than help his business. “I get a lot more kicks out of the music again since I have gotten into Dolby Atmos. It is so much fun and I get so much back from the music. I get to invent new ways of doing things, I can innovate.”