Immersive Audio File

Dweezil Zappa knows how to push the boundaries of surround sound. He was already testing the limits of 5.1 when I asked him to be on a surround-centric panel I hosted at CES two decades ago after hearing the 5.1 mixes he’d shepherded for a pair of Frank Zappa DVD-Audio releases—2003’s Halloween, and 2004’s Quadiophiliac. More recently, Dweezil has been laser-focused on mixing in Atmos, and his highest profile Atmos mix to date is the truly immersive 24-bit/96kHz mix he did for the 50th anniversary 3CD/1LP/1BD super deluxe edition box set celebrating Deep Purple’s seminal March 1972 album Machine Head, which was released via Warner Records on March 29, 2024.

Zappa’s Atmos mix of Machine Head—which has quite specifically and very deliberately been dubbed a “remix”—will most definitely challenge the ears of any Deep Purple fan, new or old, who knows the core album inside and out. As I noted in my review of the Machine Head box set (which posted here on S&V on June 7), the Atmos version of “Highway Star” is a balls-out ferocious assault wherein you can better discern the layers in Ian Gillan’s stacked lead vocal tracks, and then get blown over by the clockwise swoosh of the keys-and-guitar-solo section. You’ll also be riveted by the height-channel ascension of Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar solo during the forever-iconic “Smoke on the Water” and the full 360-degree dimensionality of Jon Lord’s literal keyboard clinic on “Lazy.”

Of course, there will be those listeners who don’t want to hear something quite so adventurous—and, hey, no one is stopping them from listening to the original version of Machine Head, if they so choose. But, just like Zappa, I prefer to be challenged as a listener whenever I enter the immersive arena in my listening room. “When you listen to the Atmos version in speakers, you really get to feel the immersive quality, versus what happens just in headphones,” Zappa clarifies. “One of the challenges in this format overall is you have compromises that have to be made when you encounter translation things that happen in headphones versus speakers. I think some people opt to let the headphones be the winner, but I feel like that’s not the way to go. I feel like the speakers should be the winner because, eventually, there are going to be more places where you’ll actually hear it in a speaker environment—and cars are probably going to be the main play.” (Let’s go space truckin,’ indeed. . .)

Dweezil made many a good Atmos point during our recent Zoom call—so much so, in fact, that we’re going to present this interview in two parts. Here in Part 1, Zappa, 54, and I discuss his “bookend” approach to “Highway Star,” how he put an additional spotlight on keyboardist Jon Lord on “Lazy,” and what his specific directive was for the Atmos version of “Smoke on the Water”—and how he honored the song’s references to his late father, Frank Zappa. No matter what we get out of this / I know we’ll never forget. . .

Mike Mettler: Let’s go right into it. Did you get the original Machine Head master tapes to work with for your Atmos remix?
Dweezil Zappa:Yes, I did. In my experience with the immersive formats, there’s really no point in doing stuff from stems unless that’s the only thing that exists. Whenever I ask for the multitrack and it’s not possible, then I’m like, “Ohhh, I don’t know if I can do that. . .” In this case, I got the 16-track multitrack, and I had individual tracks for every song.

Mettler: That can make all the difference. You really set a high bar with the way the opening track, “Highway Star,” sounds in Atmos, I have to say.
Zappa: I appreciate that. Well, there were a few things with that song that were a little mysterious.

Mettler: Like what?
Zappa: When the vocal happens in the beginning where he [DP lead vocalist Ian Gillan] does the stack, he sang that to the actual track. That was recorded after the song was recorded. He did five tracks of vocals that were all in free time. He just sang them, and they turned into the stack. Even back in the day, they would have had to have taken that and flown it in from a two-track onto a new master for the mix, and then made sure it worked in the right spot for the mix.

I actually had to redo the same thing, but then I also placed it at the end of the song as a bookend because I felt like it should be there. And it’s funny, because I always felt like it was there—but it never was, you know? I felt like it was a really nice thematic way to bookend it, so I added it back in. (You can listen to the Atmos mix of “Highway Star” on Apple Music here, after following the setup instructions here.)

Mettler: It really is the perfect bookend for that song. When we talked about surround sound together in New York City in October 2016, you made an interesting point about how you wanted to give us a “visual sense” of where things were in the surround mixes you were doing at the time. Fast-forward to what you’re doing now in Atmos, and a great example of that concept is what you’ve done with Jon Lord’s keyboards on “Lazy.” Tell me a little bit about your “Lazy” work—which is the exact opposite of the song title, by the way. (chuckles)
Zappa: Well, in the intro, there are some things in the original mix—like the sort of distorted phaser sound that’s on there—that I had to recreate. My guess was that, at the time, there were really only two options to get that sound. One was the Eventide Instant Phaser, and the other would have been actual tape phasing. It sounded much more like the Instant Phaser than tape phasing to me, so the plug-in actually worked very well. The Eventide Instant Phaser gave me very much the sound I needed to create that.

What I wanted to do with the intro was to have the ability to make it feel like you’re in the space, and it can move a little bit as the music sets the feel. I’m moving it a little bit to where you get this sense of emotion from what he [Jon Lord] is doing—and then, you might have noticed when he plays that “amen” chord, where it goes to the basic major chord, it lifts up. (You can listen to the Atmos mix of “Lazy” on Apple Music here.)

Mettler: Oh, yes—you utilize the height channels really well in “Lazy,” and this is what a 5 1 mix couldn’t do, because now you can get this high [MM raises both hands above his head] above me. Like, literally, we were going to church at that moment.
Zappa: Yeah, that’s exactly it. And then the extension of the low frequencies—at the same time as it goes up and does this [raises hands]—it expands up. And that was definitely the key factor, in that it was to create this feeling that you could be in the room, perhaps right in Jon’s position for that intro, and you hear it also somewhat traditionally.

You know, some people call it “four-walling” when they try to put the stereo stuff and leave it stuck to all the walls, and they don’t do anything else. I don’t really like doing that so much. I like to give the perspective of where the thing is. But if I’m going to move it around, it does need to be related to the source that’s in front of me, but it has to be modulated or time-shifted in some way that is musically responsive and not just a preset, or just a preset time. It’s like the stuff needs to be able to breathe. That’s how I approach it.

Mettler: Do you also approach your mixes differently since, besides being a producer, you’re also a musician yourself?
Zappa: Yes. The difference for me is, as a musician, I have an interest in certain parts of the performance as opposed to the engineering side where it’s just about a frequency range. It’s about trying to figure out, “Oh, when he played this one part, musically, this is the thing that really stands out, so I need to focus that more.” I feel like there are times in the music overall where certain things get exposed that might not have been heard before.

Mettler: Obviously, we have to talk about what you did with “Smoke on the Water” in Atmos. No pressure, by the way, on you to do one of the most famous songs that way. (Zappa laughs) Did you feel that pressure? I mean, was that a thing you had to consider while you were working on it?
Zappa: (chuckles) Yeah, well, the thing about that song is, there was sort of a directive from the band overall since they weren’t all that familiar with the format—it’s still quite new to many artists—and there’s a fear that if you take apart something and you expose it in a way that “unglues” the thing, it might give people an experience that isn’t similar to what their nostalgic memory is. So, I took what they were saying as, “Don’t make it too Atmos-y.” (You can listen to the Atmos mix of “Smoke on the Water” on Apple Music here.)

Mettler: I can understand that. Even so, I do feel like you made [DP bassist] Roger Glover’s low-end churn feel a little more prevalent. It had more of a presence throughout the song, maybe more than I’d heard of it before. Also, I love the crispness of Ian Paice’s cymbal work at the very beginning. You really got the precision of how the band was playing without changing the character of that song.
Zappa: Yeah. And part of it was, if you were to watch a keyboard player play, there’s “left hand, right hand” play—but you don’t ever really hear left hand, right hand in a recording unless somebody is very specifically trying to mix it that way. In this case, I did experiment with that, so the low stuff actually pulls to the left, and the high stuff stays more on the right. When you get this little movement, you’re starting to hear things that are details that were never really focused on in the song.

In the stereo version, it’s more of a document of, “This is a band in a room. Here’s the keyboard on this side. Here’s a guitar on this side.” What you hear in “Smoke on the Water”—the most amount of movement in the early part of the song is that, whenever the chorus comes around, you hear these sweeping things where Jon Lord is raking across the keys. It will spin around the room, and then introduce you to, “Okay, here’s the chorus.” It just jumps in that way.

And then there’s a little bit of delay on the vocals that have some little slight repeats. Those are the kind of little differences that are subtle. But then, I think you really hear at the end of the song more stuff that moves around, and that gives it a little bit more of some of the feeling of taking up the whole spectrum of what’s possible in the immersive world. That being said, I still have used the room. Right from the beginning of the song, the guitar [played by Ritchie Blackmore] is in the front where you want it to be, but it’s also in this sort of triangle—it’s above you, and it’s in the sides.

Mettler: Ritchie Blackmore is important to you in terms of being a guitar player yourself, and I’m sure you felt the weight of—I mean, I don’t want to say you were being cautious, but this is one of the most iconic riffs and solos ever. You decided to present his solo like the literal star of the song when it was the time for it to arrive without changing anything that much.
Zappa: That’s right. There are room mics that give you the room they played in, but I also did a few things where I wanted to make sure the guitar was unadulterated. It’s like the ultimate sound of what was recorded. I didn’t want to change the EQ or anything. I wanted to be like, “All right—this is just the sound that he made,” so that is as raw and pure as it has ever been.

What you might also notice is there’s no count off. You don’t hear the hi-hat anymore. The guitar is just completely open in a way that it never has been, and it’s interesting. A couple of things I did to give a little bit more space—certainly for the drums, but I did it with the guitar sometimes too—is I actually would re-record the guitars in my studio room. I would send it out to a 5.1 microphone in the middle of the room, and I would have a stereo set of speakers playing the audio into the room. And then, instead of using reverbs and plug-ins and things, I would have an actual acoustic space to enhance the rest of the audio—and it worked very well for the drums.

I think you’ll find the drums have a girth to them, and that’s a very cool feel. It’s mostly from the re-record of the drums, and then just hearing the actual panning of the whole room, just from the one 5.1 microphone.

Mettler: It really is something else in Atmos. Now, there’s a—we’ll just call it a direct DNA reference in that song when Ian Gillan sings, practically right out of the box, “Frank Zappa and The Mothers.” Did you even feel for a second, like, “Should I do anything here? Should I just let the line go as is?” In a way, it’s a full-circle moment since it’s a very specific reference to something that happened to your father in the song. [“Smoke on the Water” is, in fact, a factual, narrative tale about what happened to Zappa, Deep Purple, and others when a fire started by an errant fan burned down the Montreaux Casino in Montreaux, Switzerland during a live performance by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention there on December 4,1971.]
Zappa: Right—and it is highlighted a little bit differently than you would hear in the normal mix. It’s just maybe a touch louder. There’s a little bit of a slap reverb—a delay thing, but that just makes it have a highlight moment.

Mettler: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. And then—and I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t heard it yet—at the very end of the song, there is another very specific vocal reference about something that happened to an appendage of Frank’s.
Zappa: (laughs) Yeah, At the very end, you hear the new vocal thing that you’re talking about—but it’s one of those things where, if you are not that familiar with the differences, you might not even notice some of these things that happen.

The interesting thing about the song in general was that there were a few little extra moments that hadn’t been heard before—vocal stuff, and the song is now a little bit longer than the normal version because the outro is extended all the way to the point where they stop playing. It kind of disassembles itself. You start to hear certain things moving around. There’s more flanger, and you hear some other vocal things.

You know, this is one of those songs where it’s weird because it’s so famous— everybody knows the riff and they know the chorus, yet they don’t actually know that it’s about my dad, and they don’t really know what happens in the fadeout.

Mettler: You know, I often felt the original “Smoke on the Water” faded out too fast. I always thought to myself, “Hey, I want to hear the rest of what they’re playing there.” I’m not sure why they chose to fade it that way, but it gets to breathe now with what you’ve been able to give us here in Atmos.
Zappa: Well, I appreciate that. I think the subtle differences are how it winds up into the choruses. You get these big swirls from the keyboard, and sometimes a little bit of delay is heard after the fact on those swirls. The guitar solo is more in its own space, and it also has a little bit of movement here or there for some of the notes.

It’s all about trying to make something work on a musical level for making more of an immersive connection with the listener—without destroying the nostalgia memory that somebody might have of the song.

In Part 2 of our interview—which posted on June 30, 2024, and can be read right here—Dweezil and I discuss some of the other Atmos mixes on Machine Head, how Deep Purple responded after hearing his Atmos mix of the core album, what he plans on doing next in the format, and much, much more.