Ken Caillat Under Marshmellow Skies

by Robin Flans
MIX - The Recording Industry Magazine
February 2025

Even before Ken Caillat's new Dolby Atmos studio Marshmellow Skies was officially open, he and his chief engineer, Claus Trelby, had used the facility to remix Joni Mitchell at Newport Live, which won the 2024 Grammy for Best Folk Album.

It was the last of five Joni Mitchell records that Warner Music had commissioned the team to remix in Atmos, which also included her first four albums on Asylum, known as The Asylum Albums: Court and Spark, Miles of Aisles, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and For The Roses, released by Rhino Records in September 2022.

Caillat and Trelby had already fulfilled their work on the other four Mitchell albums at Mikal Blue's Revolver Studios in Thousand Oaks, where they had set up shop with their own gear. A year into that arrangement, Blue informed them that Lil Wayne wanted to take over the entire studio and they would have to leave,

So, as Caillat Says, "I decided to make lemonade... and build this place."

But why? Why on Earth at this stage of the Fleetwood Mac producer's life would he want to undertake such a huge project? Why build a studio when he can work anywhere he wants?

"Nobody told me I couldn't," Caillat says with a laugh. And then came the real answer: "I love it. What else am I going to do? I heard making music creates endorphins; it makes you feel better. I didn't know that. I just felt better."

In January Caillat and his team found a multipurpose space in Westlake Village, Los Angeles, that has an area for live performance, a conference room and a screening room where Steven Spielberg allegedly watched Close Encounters for the first time. It also houses Artist Max, the artist development service headed by Caillat and Nitanee Paris, who is also a managing partner in Marshmellow Skies.

There, with the help of famed acoustician/studio designer George Augspurger, they built a custom 9.I.6 immersive music mix studio, equipped with state-of-the-art KRK studio monitors, that supports Dolby Atmos, DTS:X Pro, and Sony RA360, as well as all traditional audio formats. By June 2023, the studio was functional ("Not pretty, but calibrated," according to Trelby) and they started remixing the fifth Joni Mitchell record. The official opening took place in May 2024.

Caillat's journey into immersive music began with a call from mix engineer Joe Zook. who wanted to do an Atmos version of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," asking if Caillat could help him get the master files. Caillat brought them over and fell in love with the format. Soon after, when asked to undertake the Mitchell projects, Caillat listened to a tape of the songstress playing all the parts - strings, horns, everything - to Court and Sparks' "Down to You" on a grand piano.

"I remember when we took all the 16 tracks of music and spread it around the room," he says. "All the nooks and corners of the room had this beautiful sound resonating and it sounded like some sort of angelic creation."

The team feel that the format better serves music and offers the opportunity for more expression. The studio has worked on several projects, including the remixing of Christmas in the and Sun and Coco by his daughter, Colbie Caillat, and both Bad and Dangerous by Michael Jackson. They also recorded David Becker's Gravitationally Bound both traditionally and with Atmos in mind.

"We do a lot of vocals, piano and guitars here," Trelby notes. We also do commercial audio recordings for ADR and pickups. Tulsa King and American Dad have done some of their post audio recording here as well. It's a versatile room."

Did Caillat ever imagine anything like the immersive format during the early years of recording? Actually, yes, he says, during the making of Mirage, and in particular the beginning of Stevie Nicks' track "Gypsy." Lindsay Buckingham opened the song with guitar flutters that Caillat says he heard as sparkling fireflies, the sound of which he wanted to capture all around the listener.

"I was at George Massenburg's studio, The Complex and there was scaffolding available, so I had speakers put on the scaffolding," Caillat recalls. "I had guys moving the speakers around the room. It seemed like that music should be around me. I actually had a binaural head and put it among the speakers, but it turned out that the binaural head didn't have the articulation to precisely track the sounds and reproduce them."

While e idea couldn't be used back then, did he envision that one day there would be a platform that would allow the music to literally immerse him? "In about twenty-something years," he muses, then laughs.