Adam Hawkins on mixing Avril Lavigne's Bite Me in Dolby Atmos

Multiple Grammy award-winning mix and recording engineer Adam Hawkins has been engineering and mixing since 1997, racking up credits with artists as diverse as Limp Bizkit, Nelly Furtado, 50 Cent, Rod Stewart, P!nk, Alanis Morissette, Maroon 5, Eminem, Twenty One Pilots, Muse, Yungblud and Britney Spears along the way. Most recently he’s been working with L.A’s punk rock cool clique, Travis Barker, Mod Sun, Avril Lavigne and Machine Gun Kelly. The self confessed “dorky guy in the basement” explains how he tackled the stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes of Lavigne’s recent single, Bite Me.

“My life is basically sitting in my basement studio for 12 hours a day,” Hawkins admits with a grin, speaking to Headliner over Zoom from his home studio, located just south of Nashville in the small town of Franklin, where he’s busy working on a new album for Machine Gun Kelly and various Atmos mixes for the Sk8er Boi singer.

Despite his experience and success with producing high profile artists and bands, it transpires that Hawkins no longer works on production, favouring mixing – even if it was a decision mainly driven by seeking a healthier work-life-balance.

“I made that decision because I wanted to get a little bit more control of my life. I failed at that,” he laughs, noting that the uptake of Dolby Atmos music mixes means he now has more work than ever.

“I thought that if I was mixing-only, I would be able to set my schedule more and have more time to spend with the family, but in all honesty, I'm still working every waking hour, basically. Every mix I do now, I have to do twice [because of Atmos]. So it just doubled my workload!”

One of the most recent Atmos mixes Hawkins has been kept busy with is Lavigne’s single, Bite Me, taken from her brand new seventh studio album, Love Sux.

The immersive project landed in his lap after working with Blink 182 drummer, Barker for a few years, who tends to send Hawkins any projects he thinks would be a good fit.

“He's sending so much to me; it's great, and I'm really thankful for that. When they sent that song to me, they had already had a couple of other people mix it and they said, ‘Just make it as exciting as possible’. So I did my best attempt at that while still keeping the vocals the focus and out front, with a more pop treatment than the rock side of it. 

"Knowing that it's already been through other mixers and then I'm competing makes it very stressful,” he shares. “Especially when somebody tells me, ‘So-and-so mixed this already,’ and I know that they are amazing, like – there's no way I'm going to win this job!”

But win it he did, impressing the team with his stereo and Atmos mixes of the track.

“What I do is I print stems after I've done the stereo mix,” he explains on his approach to the immersive take on Bite Me. 

“I'll print the drums and sometimes some additional elements of the drums that I envision being placed in different spaces, and then bass, guitar, keyboards, vocals and background vocals. So far my approach on Atmos is I'm just doing what I think is fun and what feels right. 

"I'm typically just making it surround you. Some guitars are behind you or beside you, or keyboards or a synth pad could be above and behind you. It's kind of all over the place.

“Initially, I thought, ‘Okay, I just have to make it sound more like a live performance, and some of the ambience is behind you’. But that got boring pretty quickly. I thought about how I love the old Beatles stuff – when The Beatles got stereo, it went crazy. Like, why are the drums and the bass on the left? They probably were because they were bounced down to a single track, and that's just what happened when they did a stereo mix – they were together, but I love that about those old records. 

"So I said, ‘Well, why not have the background vocals suddenly show up behind you?’ Or, if there are multiple guitar parts, why not have them surrounding you instead of just being in front of you? So, forget what it would be like live, and make it a whole new thing. So that's kind of what I've been doing – wrong or right. It's been fun.”

Hawkins shares that these days, Atmos is no longer an afterthought or a task that mixers need to go back and upmix later – it’s now planned into each release in the early production stages.

“For most projects, now we just negotiate at the beginning,” he nods. “We'll do the stereo mix and then do the Atmos mix once that's approved.”

In order to do these Atmos mixes justice, Hawkins invested in a full Genelec system for his studio room, which is now home to 8351Bs for left and right, a 8341A for the centre channel, 8330As positioned at the rear, sides and on the ceiling, and a pair of 7360A subs.

“Everything I've done for the past two and a half years, I've done on these Genelecs solely; I don't even check other sources anymore,” he says.

“I'm treating it as if someone is sitting in the sweet spot when they listen so that they can hear all of the stuff I've got flying around them. I can't imagine doing it with any other system because of how simple it is to calibrate Genelecs and set it up with their GLM software. 

"I set a mic down, hit calibrate and it does its thing. I don't have to think about levels or timing or any of that – it does it all for me. I did get to hear Atmos mixes at Blackbird Studio here in Nashville, and I think my room sounds better. The Genelec system just does a better job – it just sounds more right to me.”

We wrap up the interview, as Hawkins needs to get back to working on some material for Machine Gun Kelly’s upcoming sixth studio album, Mainstream Sellout – due out in March 2022.

“I'm not certain that I'm doing the entire album, but I've been working on several songs and I’m nearing the end of that phase. I should be finishing it up pretty shortly. It's a very cool project and its approach is very different from the last one.

"They finished the production and I cleaned it up a little bit and made it sound a little bit more polished. In some cases I made it sound a little bit more – not messed up – but a little bit more wild and out of control at times, and sent it back to them. 

"We just go back and forth with phone calls, FaceTime or text until it's done. It’s pretty cool. If only they knew how not cool I was! I’m just the dorky guy in the basement,” he laughs.

Avril Lavigne photo credits: Ryan McFadden