Steven Schram is an ARIA-winning, Multi-Gold, Platinum, Top-10 and Hottest 100 record producer/mixer. He’s been making music for nearly three decades now, with a vast discography featuring acclaimed works from renowned artists like Paul Kelly, San Cisco, The Cat Empire, Tiny Little Houses, and Public Enemy.
Schram's latest project is Crowded House’s new album Gravity Stairs, which he produced, engineered, and mixed in both stereo and Dolby Atmos. Released through BMG Rights Management in May 2024, Gravity Stairs is the Australian rock band’s eight overall studio album and second to feature the current lineup of Neil Finn, Nick Seymour, Mitchell Froom, and Neil’s sons Elroy and Liam Finn.
Though you can stream the Atmos mix on platforms that support immersive audio such as Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music, it was also available on an audio-only Blu-Ray disc sold exclusively through SuperDeluxeEdition.com. Earlier this month, I had the chance to chat with Steven about a number of topics including his work on Gravity Stairs, his immersive mixing workflow, and where he thinks the industry is headed.
How did you first get into audio engineering and mixing?
I actually started in radio. I’d recorded music on a computer, but I didn’t know how to burn a CD—so I called my local station and asked to speak with one of the sound engineers there. When I got through, the engineer basically said “kid, you can ask all the questions you want if you come over and carry all my equipment around.”
We ended up hitting it off, so I just kept turning up to the live recordings. The station was called Triple J, which was part of the ABC network in Australia. The bosses just assumed I was a sound engineer since I kept assisting, so they started sending me out to do live broadcasts and recordings. I had no idea what I was doing and basically fumbled my way through those.
Since it was a music-focused station, the bands we worked with just assumed–because I was doing all this recording work for Triple J–that I also knew how to mix and make records. So I started to get more work on the side. I’d borrow mics and preamps from the station and go record my friends' bands, and then they’d give me money. And nothing’s changed in basically 25 years.
So you really just fell into it, completely by accident?
Totally. I was playing a bit of guitar, but my dream at the time was to train guide dogs or seeing-eye dogs. Then music came along and that all fell by the wayside.
When you started, was computerized recording already widespread or was analog tape still common?
We were still cutting tape at the radio station, but it was right in the transition period to digital. Pro Tools wasn’t around yet, so we used these Mackie hard disc recorders that had Apogee D/A converters. They were a bit flaky in the beginning, but once they became more reliable I moved completely away from tape.
I don’t like working with tape at all, because I quickly realized that it colors the sound to a degree. With digital, I know I'm hearing exactly the same thing I created before hitting record.
Looking at your credits, I see there are a number of projects where you're acting as producer, engineer, and mixer all at once. However, there are others where you’re just the mixer or the engineer. In your experience, how do these roles differ?
I usually mix all of my own stuff, and I'm mixing right from the moment we hit record–so there have only been maybe two or three projects across my entire career where I’m not the mixer.
But it’s a good question, and not something I’ve really thought about. I guess it’s more of a linear thing for me, but there are definitely differences between those roles.
I love mixing–both my own projects and other people’s stuff–and I love recording drums. If I could get a job where I just recorded drums nine-to-five every day, five days a week, that would be the dream. The one problem with recording drums is that someone usually goes and sings all over the top of your great drum sound. [laughs]
Home recording has progressed to the point where someone could make an entire record with a laptop in their bedroom, but tracking drums is maybe the one thing you still need to do in a real studio.
Yeah, I'm with you 100% on that. Once you have a great drum sound, everything else seems to fall in place quite easily. That said, I’ve developed a knack for taking home-recorded drums and making them sound great.
I got some good advice early on about this: if you're not in a million-dollar studio, don't bother trying to make it sound like you are. Lean into the character of what you've got.
Tell me about producing and mixing Crowded House’s new album Gravity Stairs. How did you come to be involved with the band?
It was a recommendation from Tchad Blake. Tchad engineered the first three Crowded House albums with Mitchell Froom, the producer who’s now actually in the band. At the same, a recommendation also came from an Australian artist called Paul Kelly who I’d done a lot of work with. Neil [Finn] and Paul have known each other a long time.
So after getting recommendations from both Paul and Tchad, Neil called me and basically said “Who are you? Why have we not heard of you?” I was living in the jungle at the time, riding out the pandemic behind Byron Bay in Australia.
The timing was really good, because the band were about to start touring and needed somewhere isolated to rehearse. They also wanted someone to do a bit of recording, in case they wanted to audition some demos or write during the rehearsal period.
The first song they demoed was “Magic Piano,” and I remember feeling really good about it during the playback. They were looking at each other thinking “oh, this is pretty good.” So from that moment on, we were making a record.
One of the most striking aspects of the album for me is how layered it is–there’s definitely a kind of retro-60s psychedelic vibe. Can a lot of that sound be attributed to your influence as producer or were the band always looking to go in that direction?
I think we all had equal say in that, but I do have a sonic thumbprint that comes across in the record. I guess I prefer a kind of dull, woolier sound. So while they were working out “Magic Piano,” I was entertaining myself in the control room.
With no one looking over my shoulder, I threw in a lot of my usual processing tricks–like using the Tel-Ray oil can echo, and just generally creating atmosphere. As you say it started to take on this wonderful psychedelic hue, and that sort of set the tone for a lot of the record.
There's a lot of distortion and compression in there–and since no one was telling me to back off, I just kept pushing and doing things to my taste. I don’t think any of us were consciously acknowledging these things at the time, but I like to give the band a headphone mix that’s as close to the finished product as possible.
Even with the mixes, though there was a lot of refinement we ended up keeping most of the initial bed tracks. There were lots of overdubs and flying in parts that were recorded remotely by people all around the planet, but they weren’t big on changing the overall tones.
When you put a new overdub in, you usually carve out a space for it with EQ. Then it might sit there for a week or a month before eventually getting vetoed or muted, but you forget to fill that hole back in–so things start to naturally thin out a bit. The beautiful thing about working with digital is that I could go back and re-import all my rough mixes, so I’d be constantly referring back to the tones we got when they first played it live.
Take for example, a song like “Magic Piano.” It’s almost completely live, and there’s lots of spill. I don’t think they even had headphones on for the take that ended up being the one. Everyone's all together in one room with a monitor wedge next to them, and that adds to the enveloping, psychedelic sound as well. Once I started bringing things out in the Atmos, the spill actually helped the immersive aspect.
You mentioned that the basis for each song would be a live backing track, with the band all playing together in the same room. What instruments would this typically include? I’m guessing drums, bass, and maybe some guitars?
It was drums, bass, two guitars, percussion, Mitchell’s keys, and Neil Finn writing songs. What could possibly go wrong? [laughs]
For keys Mitchell brought his live rig, so he had MainStage from Logic running. We also set up the Hammond and electric piano near him. Depending on the song, he could jump around between them and I’d be able to catch everything.
Another standout aspect of Gravity Stairs for me is the drum sound. Like you were saying earlier, there’s not a lot of top-end. The kit has a kind of wooly, earthy tone that’s really interesting and organic. The low-end thump throughout “Some Great Plan” in particular is very satisfying. Out of curiosity, do you remember what combination of mics and gear were used to get that tone?
Yeah, so that was done in the same session as “Magic Piano.” There was an old Gretsch kit in the studio, and I also brought it my old Rogers. A lot of it is swapping between those two, plus I have an old Yamaha kit from the ‘70s where the toms really growl–you can hear that in “Magic Piano” for sure.
All the tracking was done through a nice old Neve console that came out of Albert Studios, which was famous for all the great early AC/DC records. I like to do a Glyn Johns-style configuration, so the miking was really minimal. I don’t do a snare bottom. I have one mic under the drum seat that does a lot of the heavy lifting–it gets me all my bright stuff and all my low stuff.
For the kick, I’m using an Alien8–which is a mic that’s only been around for maybe four years now. It’s got two headphone drivers in it. So if you're into recording drums, it’s wonderful for the bass drum. The company that makes it is called DrAlienSmith.
I always have a stereo pair set up as well–it’s a stereo PZM mic called the Crown SASSP-MK2. It’s quite a strange-looking mic that was only made for a few years back in the ‘90s. Whatever you point it at, that's what it sounds like. So I’ll either bring that closer to the kit for a nice and tight stereo effect, or I’ll move it further out into the room.
Other than that, it’s pretty standard stuff–a couple of [Neumann] U87s as the Glyn Johns mics, [Shure] SM57 on the snare, and then an AKG D19 as a mono overhead. Sometimes I’ll also put [DBX] 160s over the kick and snare–and then I’ll compress those–but I don’t think I bothered doing that here.
All the other mics are quite dynamic, and only one of them is getting compressed quite hard up the middle–which just makes everything sound like it’s compressed, but you've still got a bit of knock and punch.
So you’re compressing on the way in, and then probably more so in the mix?
Yeah, I’m into committing on the way in. Sometimes I’ll also do a parallel distortion thing where I send the kick, snare, or that compressed mic to another channel and then bring that fader back up to varying degrees, depending on the song.
The best drum sound I ever heard in a recording session was two Flea U47s in Glyn Johns configuration, with a Neumann TLM-49 on the kick. It’s amazing how much power you can get with so few mics.
Yeah, that would work. I think he used to use U67s. There were three 67s at The Music Farm, but I think we ended up using them for guitar amps rather than drums. I’d usually put them in Omni, so the spill would sound better.
When Neil first called me, he had just watched The Beatles documentary where you can see them all sitting around playing together with no headphones. He told me he wanted to do something similar, so I said “sure, so long as I can dress like Glyn Johns.” [laughs]
It was a lot of fun, and we recorded all over the place. We did a few songs in L.A., a few at Roundhead–Neil’s studio, where I ended up mixing everything–and even some at La Fabrique in the south of France. I doubt I'll ever get to do a record like that again.
On that note, have you and Neil talked about doing another record?
If we do another one, I think we'd like to do it in six weeks and be done with it. They’d have it written beforehand, and then we could all get together and really hunt down each song.
One thing that’s been talked about a lot is how “Life’s Imitation” became “Teenage Summer” at the very last minute.
That was a doozy, because I did a few mixes that were quite dramatically different from each other. A lot of people liked the second half of mix B and first half of mix A, so I ended up pulling the two mixes into one Pro Tools session and editing them together. Then, when the name change happened, I was able to get stems and add that short vocal intro. I don’t think you’ll hear that on the Blu-Ray.
Interestingly enough, the Atmos mix on Apple Music has it but the Blu-Ray doesn’t. So I guess they are actually two different ADM masters for that song?
Yes. They didn’t tell me about the name change until maybe six days before the release, so I went in and quickly ran off another Atmos file. At this point, both the vinyl and the Blu-Ray had already been manufactured.
There were multiple versions of “Oh Hi” as well. I think when it first came out as a single, one of the videos used an alternate mix with a completely-different vocal. I saw someone in the YouTube comments who was like, “on the LP, I swear Neil wasn’t singing in falsetto on this phrase.” So I had a look and realized they’d put out the wrong mix.
There were all sorts of little mishaps like that, but I really like that kind of reckless ‘no rules’ way of working. It’s an old-school band, and the record company releases the album in the same way they’ve done for the last 50 years–with the same old techniques of marketing, releasing two singles ahead of the full album, etc. So you have to give them the record six months before, and to have Neil recklessly endanger all of that was awesome. I loved it.
The main thing that really drew me towards this record was the availability of a Dolby Atmos mix, and a fantastic one at that. So how did you get interested in the immersive format?
It was the beginning of the pandemic, and Paul Kelly's management emailed me asking if I knew anything about Atmos. It was quite early on, and there wasn’t a lot of material around. So I looked into it and basically concluded that all I had to do was make some stems and send those to someone with the proper setup.
Then we got a quote from an equipped studio, and they wanted something like $2500 USD per song. I was like, “you’ve got to be kidding.” It made me so angry that I was determined to figure out the format for myself.
The government was giving out some grants at the time to get small businesses through the pandemic, so I was able to use mine to buy the software and speakers. Then I started playing around with the binaural rendering. I still can’t really perceive any surround effect over headphones, but it seems some people can.
I bounced out a few tracks from a record I was working on at the time and sent it to one of the guys in the band. I didn’t tell him that it was binaural, just to see what his reaction would be. He came back to me and said “woah, the backing vocals are behind me.” So I thought “oh, maybe there is something to this.”
That project didn't end up going ahead, but I kept all the equipment and continued experimenting with it. No one else in Australia had an Atmos setup at the time, so I let people know on Instagram that I could do this. I ended up getting a few jobs through Mushroom Records, like The Teskey Brothers and The Rubens, and the mixes didn’t get rejected.
That said, I remember calling one of my friends at EMI and asking how they do quality control for Atmos. He said something like “Oh, we just wait until release day at midnight and then listen on Apple Music.” I thought that was extraordinary. It was the wild west. The engineers were saying “trust us, it’ll be fine” and no one was being sent mixes to approve before release.
I understand that there are certain unbreakable rules–like the long-term loudness cannot exceed -18 dBFS–but it’s still unclear to me who listens to and approves the mixes. Though there are exceptions, it seems like the labels are eager to build catalog and artists aren't really involved.
Yeah, that's one of my moral objections. Neil had a really bad experience with the format at first, and he wanted nothing to do with it for a while. They had played him an Atmos mix of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and it just sounded awful.
We really need to get them to take that down. I’m guessing they didn’t have access to the multitracks and put it through some kind of upmixer.
When it comes to mixing in Atmos, what’s your philosophy? Based on the Gravity Stairs mix, it seems like you’re definitely keen to spread things around and make it a really exciting immersive experience.
For one thing, I don't listen over headphones. I don't check the binaural stuff at all, because it’s a moving target. Every time they update the iPhone OS, the spatial processing sounds different.
Plus, it ignores the Dolby binaural settings that everyone else uses. And don't even get me started about Apple “spatializing” stereo, which is really just putting reverb over a stereo mix. It’s ridiculous. We work so hard on our mixes and creative decisions, only to have Apple decide they know better and ruin the mix for their latest marketing novelty.
It’s silly to say, but my philosophy for the mixing side is really “I've paid for all these speakers, so I'm going to use them all.” [laughs] I try not to let my brain get in the way of creating emotional content with music. I’ll move things around to where they feel immersive and right. For instance, it’s easy to pull backing vocals and other stuff out to the rears. The rears are there, and they're really effective in a 7.1.4 setup. So why not use them?
I imagine that I'm sitting in the middle of a big dome, and I’m working only on the outside. I never pull anything into the center of the dome. So I’m sticking sounds directly to the sides, or to the top.
Are you working primarily with beds or objects?
I tend to stay in the bed. But since the bed only goes to 7.1.2, I set up four static objects just to access the individual height speakers.
I also like being able to process the entire bed, which is closer to the workflow I’m used to for stereo. People have come up with workarounds for this, like making a bed entirely out of objects, but I found that approach just too convoluted with too much room for error.
I was unsure if I was doing it wrong, because everyone else seemed to be using the objects. Then, I saw Bob Clearmountain talking about his Atmos workflow and he mentioned relying more on the bed. So if it’s good enough for Bob, it’s certainly good enough for me. [laughs]
He’s also probably the only person mixing Atmos on an analog console.
Yeah, his big SSL. He modified it so that he could group all of those outputs together and then have all the VCA compressors working together. That might sound complicated because he's doing it on this big analog console, but that's his version of simplicity and the workflow that he's used to.
One thing I’ve found interesting with Atmos is that separating the individual elements into different speakers–like pulling apart a lead and background vocal–sometimes causes a perceived change in balance, even if you haven’t altered the levels of those tracks.
Yeah, that's perception and psychoacoustics. A backing vocal panned to the rear might get louder because you don’t have the bus limiter or compressor being triggered by the main vocal pushing that background out of the way. So it’s all to taste. You might pull them out and think they’re too loud, but then if you pull them back to compensate that creates a whole different set of problems in the binaural rendering.
I’m picking one reference to judge on, and that’s the speakers. In the stereo mix, I may have carved out a lot of the low mids in my guitars to make room for the thickness of the vocal–but if I put those guitars in the side speakers in Atmos, they’ll sound a bit thin. Even though it might sound weird in binaural, I’ll restore those missing low mids to get a better result on speakers. In fact, I still haven't listened to the binaural versions of the Crowded House record.
It’s striking how much separation there is in the Gravity Stairs Atmos mix. There are some passages where it comes close to having a different instrument in each speaker, like a keyboard line exclusively in the heights or rhythm guitars hard-panned 100% into the side surrounds. I know some people don’t care for this approach, but I love it. It really sounds like you’re inside the record.
Absolutely. I was really happy with the stereo mixes, so I didn’t want to deviate too far from them. All the tones and levels are the same, they’re just positioned differently. Like I was saying before, I like to work on the outsides and pinpoint where things should come from.
Most of the album was created from mixed stems, with the exception of “I Can't Keep Up With You.” I wanted that one to be different because it's such a hectic and kooky song.
I noticed that it's the only song that noticeably uses the center channel. The guitar during the intro fade-in is isolated in the center.
That actually might be a mistake! When you have something printed as a stereo pair, then it uses the phantom center. But if it’s still a mono channel and you move it to the front, it comes exclusively from the center speaker unless you turn the ‘center percentage’ dial to zero.
But yes, I definitely wanted to try some out-of-box panning on that track. For example, there’s one spot where a very loud guitar pops up in the front left height speaker.
Oh yeah, it’s right after the lyric “trouble keeping up with the neighbors.” That part is actually quite subdued in the stereo mix, but it really blasts in the Atmos.
It’s so funny to hear you say this because I’ve never met anyone with a 7.1.4 setup at home. When I was working on the Atmos mix, I had no idea who would hear it or how they would listen. It was originally done just for Apple Music, and then BMG started talking about the Super Deluxe Blu-Ray.
I was originally under the impression that it wasn’t going to happen, so I moved to another record. Of course, the label got back in touch months later and said they were doing it. So I had to put together all the assets in three days–not just Atmos, but also hi-res 5.1 and instrumentals.
I assume you used the “re-render” function in the Dolby Atmos Renderer to generate the 5.1’s from the ADMs?
Yep, I re-rendered them using whatever the default settings were. I quickly went through a few songs and thought it sounded fine, but I figured no one would hear in 5.1 anyway.
So whoever the first person was that got their Blu-Ray in the mail and played it all the way through was the first to hear the whole thing in 5.1. I didn't even hear the whole album in 5.1 before it went off for manufacturing.
You may be surprised to know that there is quite a large community of immersive music fans out there, with the proper multichannel speaker systems and home theaters.
Yes, I’ve just discovered that world in these past few weeks. There’s your site, the SDE site, and these Facebook groups full of people listening to Atmos Blu-Rays and 5.1 SACDs. I was so glad to see comments saying the Crowded House album sounded great in 5.1. That was my quality check, because it really was all done at the last minute.
We actually didn’t have masters for the instrumentals, so I mastered those myself using the original sessions. I decided to back off on the bus compression and keep them a bit more open than Bob Ludwig’s masters for the album. I just don’t have that kind of ear.
I think the final stereo master that was released was the 13th iteration, because we were making so many changes. It was so last-minute that at the very beginning of “Magic Piano,” there’s an accidental whisper I forgot to unmute.
Wow, I would’ve thought for sure that was intentional. There’s a bit of chatter like that at the very end of “Night Song” too.
Yeah, that was a homeless guy outside of Neil’s hotel room at 3:00 AM ranting about something. You can hear him in the middle of that song too, he’s talking all the way through it. Whenever something kooky happens like that in a recording, I'll fight to keep it in. It's too easy to clean that kind of stuff up in the digital realm, and those are the kind of little details you often grow to love later on.
The other interesting thing about “Night Song” is that the beginning was originally supposed to be the outro. We ended up shuffling it around, and then I dropped that bit of chatter–when he says “beautiful, I love it”--at the end as a nice way to end the record.
In an interview with Paul Sinclair over at SuperDeluxeEdition.com, I saw Neil mention that he wasn’t opposed to doing Atmos remixes of the older Crowded House records. Is that a project you’d be up for?
Totally. I remember when I first started working with Crowded House up at the Music Farm, I wanted to take Neil down the road to my studio where I had the Atmos rig set up. I wanted him to listen to some tracks, but he was so burnt by that bad experience of hearing “Don’t Dream It’s Over.”
At Roundhead, I played him the Atmos mix of Bob Marley’s Legend and that was what really turned him around on the format. For me, that is still the benchmark of the Atmos world. It’s just phenomenal.
To remix those older Crowded House records would be an interesting challenge, because you’d be working off analog transfers where a lot of the original processing probably wasn’t printed. I imagine it could be difficult to go back and exactly match things like reverb and EQ.
Yeah, it’d be fun and we have the technology now to make that process a lot easier–things like FabFilter’s EQ matching and all of that sort of stuff. But you’re right, they’re such great recordings and great mixes. I certainly wouldn’t envy anyone chasing a Bob Clearmountain or Tchad Blake mix.
Way back in 2002, the first Crowded House album was released on DVD-Audio with a 5.1 remix. Have you or Neil heard it?
I had no idea. Who did it? Was it Bob Clearmountain?
No, it was mixed by Steve Genewick–who I understand was an early pioneer of Atmos music mixing.
Oh wow, he knows what he’s doing. He's like the godfather of all this stuff.
The 5.1 mix has Neil’s voice isolated in the center channel, almost completely dry–which is pretty fascinating to hear in isolation, though I’m not sure what he would think of that.
With Atmos now, I think there have been directives from the record companies not to put the vocal in the center. They’re probably afraid of fans going in and extracting the vocal, but there are a number of stem-separation algorithms now that can do this even with a stereo mix.
Personally, I don't really like using the center speaker. The weak point in every 5.1 system I’ve seen is the center. It’s always smaller than the fronts, so I’m not going to put the most important elements in the weakest speaker. The phantom center has worked for decades with stereo, so I’m not gonna mess with that.
Another interesting aspect of the new record is the treatment of Neil’s vocals. They’re pretty much always double-tracked, layered up, or processed in some way.
Yes. Neil actually recorded most of the vocals for the album by himself. Depending on which studio we were in, he’d sit in another room recording and fly them over to me while I was mixing.
What was tricky for me is that the balances would often change between takes, because Neil doesn’t just mute a channel or disarm the track he’s recording on. He’ll just turn the preamp down to listen back, and then turn it back up for the next take. So there was a lot of close listening with the vocals, to make sure the levels were consistent and the background ambience matched.
I’m guessing there must be a ton of breakpoint volume automation in your session.
Lots of clip gain for sure, and I’d also EQ individual clips now that ARA is supported by Pro Tools.
Aside from Crowded House, are any of the other Atmos mixes you’ve done out on streaming?
Yeah, Run Home Slow by The Teskey Brothers. For that project, I was sent printed stems and also raw multitracks–so I could access more of the individual parts.
They actually came into the studio for the final bounces, so decisions were made based on the speaker mix rather than headphones.
I’ll leave you with one final question. If you could remix any album–old or new–in Atmos, which would you choose?
I would love to do all the Radiohead stuff in Atmos. That would be incredible.
You’re not the first person to tell me that! Unfortunately, I’ve read that Nigel Godrich isn’t interested–which is a real shame.
Fair enough, I can certainly sympathize. If I was trying to safeguard my creative output, I probably wouldn’t want it in Atmos either. The only reason I got into doing Atmos mixes myself is because I was so angry that someone else wanted to charge $2500 USD to do it. So if we're going to do it, I'm going to make it sound the way that I want it to sound.
Read our full review of Gravity Stairs here!
