Sound surrounds us from every direction, whether it’s a screeching crow flying overhead or a noisy car coming and going.
The same happens with music: The closer you are to a particular musician at a live show, the clearer and more distinctly you hear their instrument, and you can hear different instruments from different angles depending on your seat and proximity to them.
So, what if the recorded sounds of our entertainment – whether that’s an album, TV show, podcast or a movie – could mimic the expansive, wraparound sounds of real life? It can, but it takes a lot of work and the right technology. That’s where Trace Ellington comes in.
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In the heart of the North Side’s Arlington Heights neighborhood, Ellington has been building his Mood Indigo Recordings studio over the last couple of years, and now it’s equipped with a cutting-edge Dolby Atmos mixing system – the only one of its kind in Wisconsin.
The system creates an immersive, spatial sound beyond the horizontal setting of most home setups. It uses a minimum of 12 speakers, including some vertically above you and a couple subwoofers. Think of it like a stereographic projection with you at the center of the sound sphere.
Ellington says the mixing technique, aided by this technology, is possible because the system is built to send many different sound elements along different paths all around the viewer and listener.
That screeching, angry crow? In the Dolby Atmos system, the sound engineer can send that bird from your back left side above your head and across the room. That noisy car? It can come up on you lowly and slowly and then ramble off down a hill.
And for music, it can be mixed in several different ways to let solo sections stand out and layer over each other while different instruments and elements move around the room.
Ellington says to fully understand and appreciate the system’s immersive 3D audio, it helps to know what sound design systems came first.
First, there was the phonograph. “That’s how everyone first listened to their Billie Holiday and Lawrence Welk records – it was a record player with a big horn on top and that horn was it, that was the one and only speaker,” Ellington explains. “Then, around the 1940s and ’50s, Hi-Fi was invented, and that gave us stereo, and that was the standard for decades.”
Then, from the 1970 to ’90s, more advancements were made, and surround sound began to emerge as the best in listening experiences, with albums and movie audio being engineered to use more speakers to create the all-around-you effect. But surround sound was still limited largely to – and built for – the horizontal plane.
And then, in 2012, Dolby Atmos system debuted in movie theaters with Disney-Pixar’s movie Brave. Later, in 2017, the first song mixed with Dolby Atmos was Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”
“When you listen to a song you know and love in Dolby Atmos, it’s like listening to the song for the very first time because you hear things that you have never heard before,” explains Ellington. “It’s like you being the needle, and you get inside the vinyl, and you’re getting all of the transients and all the frequencies of what was allowed when that recording was made.”
Right now, you can find Dolby Atmos listening systems in movie theaters like AMC and higher-end cars like Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz – and maybe at your really rich friend’s house. And many of the major streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV+ are adding Atmos-enabled shows and movies. (While there are headphones that say they’re designed perform with Dolby Atmos, they certainly aren’t cheap, and audiophiles question their full functionality, so, caveat emptor.)
But to get this sound experience engineered into your next project – whether that’s a rock album, a TV commercial or a full-on movie – here in Wisconsin, your only option is Ellington’s Mood Indigo Recordings.
So, why has Ellington – who has worked as an audio engineer and musician for decades, including as a producer for the likes of Tupac, Digital Underground, Jamie Foxx, Aaron Carter, Blues Traveler and many more – sunk so much of his time, energy and resources into this sound system studio?
“Dolby Atmos raises the standards of what sound can be – and it will become the new standard of what sound should be,” he says.
But why bring it to Milwaukee?
“I’m from here and came back when my dad got sick. So, what I did is I took everything in my life that I’ve done musically, and I put it into this house,” Ellington says, adding that he got Mood Indigo Recordings up and running in 2022, got certified as a Dolby Atmos engineer that same year and then began offering his Dolby Atmos services to clients in 2023. Currently, he’s mixing audio for a couple of movies and has more projects in the works.
“Home is where you put your heart. So here I am. Can’t believe I’m here on 15th and Keefe,” he says with a laugh. “But with this system, you create the environment, and we can do that here in Milwaukee.
