Grammy Award-winning mix engineer James Auwarter, the owner of Coda Room Audio in London and Chicago who has recorded, mixed and mastered with artists such as Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Rihanna and many more, utilizes NUGEN Audio plugins in his work, including Halo Upmix and Paragon.
Auwarter was introduced to NUGEN Audio by his friend and IMSTA FESTA founder Ray Williams. He has also called on the brand’s ISL True Peak limiter, SEQ-S sonic sculpting tool, SigMod custom signal architecture platform; and LM-Correct loudness compliance plugin for a variety of studio applications.
“The first thing I noticed about NUGEN plug-ins is the uniformity of the user interfaces. Once you understand one of them, it’s pretty easy to navigate the others, which is not the case with a lot of other manufacturers,” says Auwarter. “All NUGEN plug-ins are no nonsense, in that they don’t have a lot of fluff features that just make minimal differences and aren’t necessary. The features that NUGEN tools provide are very powerful.”
In particular, he cites Halo Upmix, which he used recently when creating Dolby Atmos mixes with producer Donald Lawrence for gospel singer Twinkie Clark’s new album. “One of the tracks that I was sent for this project was a vocal stem that was already married in with a big stereo reverb, as opposed to being separate,” he explains. “Putting all of that into the traditional left/right front stereo speakers often sounds boring in the Atmos realm and definitely doesn’t fully utilize the format’s potential. Instead, with Halo Upmix, I can easily turn the stems into quad, 5.1 or 7.1.2, among others. Halo Upmix is very smart with how it detects what element I want to keep center, and it can be manipulated to be very precise in what to spread out amongst other speakers.
“Halo Upmix is also quick, easy and intuitive,” he continues. “When it scales back down to binaural, it doesn’t cause any phase issues at all, which is what I was always worried about. Having used a few different upmixers, especially early on in Atmos, I often hear phasing issues. With NUGEN Audio Halo Upmix, it sounds exactly the same once it’s downmixed back to stereo.”
For the Twinkie Clark project, Auwarter also worked with Paragon, about which he says, “Paragon is awesome because I can use it both in stereo and with Atmos,” he says. “It doesn’t tie your hands like a lot of the other convolution reverbs. The presets are great, they get me 85 to 90 percent of the way there, and then I usually just mess with the pre-delay and maybe the depth a little bit. Being a convolution reverb, it just sounds really good and realistic. Another cool thing I like about Paragon, which I haven’t seen in other reverbs, is that it has a tempo button that automatically syncs to your DAW. It knows what your quarter-note, or eighth-note pre-delays should be.”
