Conversations with Amol Kitwadkar

Today we’d like to introduce you to Amol Kitwadkar.

Hi Amol, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Growing up Music was the first and only thing I found myself dedicating hours and hours to, willingly, and it felt like something I really valued and wanted to do more of. So I started taking singing lessons for North Indian Classical music. I studied North Indian Classical music for about 8 years growing up. But even before I started learning classical music, I fell in love with Sonu Nigam and wanted to sing like him ,talk like him and to be him. Sonu Nigam is one of the best playback singers that India is blessed with. Playback singing is singing the songs that we hear in Bollywood films. The actors are simply lip-sinking and there is a different singer that goes to the studio and records the songs for the actor in the movie. I wanted to go the whole Indian Idol route and use that platform to further my music career. But coming from a lower middle class family in India, that wasn’t necessarily an encouraged career option. So I became an engineer like the rest of my family. Throughout college I participated in every single singing event possible so music never quite really left my life. After much financial struggle and pinching every penny we had, I came to the US to do my masters in Environmental Engineering in 2011. I kept singing at different events organised by Indian Students’ Association at Colorado State University throughout grad school. While I was in grad school, I started taking guitar lessons to bridge the gap between Indian Music Theory, which is very much based on Raga Scales and Western Music theory. I also started my band Unified Diversity while in my last year of grad school.
I graduated in 2014 and started working full time at GE Energy. I kept Unified Diversity alive even after that and we kept performing at one or two events every year. I got laid off from GE in January 2016 and it was really difficult to find a job and apply for a visa transfer within 30 days. But I managed to do it and continued working. The flurry of layoffs kept happening for a few years after that and I kept working hard and managed to stay in the US by finding a new job every time I got laid off. This whole experience taught me a lot about networking and clever ways to reach out to people because I was so desperate to find a job to not lose my immigration status. Almost a decade later, I am now realising it has become one of my biggest strengths. In 2018 at one of the companies I worked for named Peak Reliability, which no longer exists, we used to manage the electricity grid for the entire western half of the US, I met my current business partner Godfrey. More on that later.
Fast forward a few years to 2019, I went to Tomorrowland in Belgium, the biggest EDM festival in the world. I also got to reunite with a few friends who were exchange students at CSU on that trip. One of my friends, Felix, had left his job and started his own business. He said to me, “If you like music so much, why don’t you give it a serious try. Try your hardest and see what happens in 5 years. If it doesn’t go anywhere, you still have 30 more years to turn your life back around before you retire!” That thought never left me and also being at Tomorrowland surrounded by music for three entire days shifted my perspective and I decided I wanted to give music a serious try once again. Godfrey was also a part of this trip and we also got reconnect after Peak Reliability shut down at the end of 2018.
After Tomorrowland, I came back re-energised and re-built Unified Diversity with serious musicians and invested a lot in high quality gear to take our live shows to whole another level. We got to play at NewWestFest 2019 as a 10 piece band. 2020 was supposed to be a super busy year for us with a bunch of shows already lined up but they all got cancelled because of COVID lockdowns. During lockdowns Unified Diversity was our pod and those were the only people I hung out with. During this time, we wrote a lot of new music and also completely revamped how we performed live with state of the art in ear monitoring system and a whole bunch of patch automation for keyboards and guitars through an audio software called Ableton.
As the world started opening back up around fall of 2021, the members of the band slowly started dropping out after a bunch of shows were already booked. It was super stressful for the four core members of Unified Diversity to keep finding new musicians and to get them up to speed in those months. So we all made a mutual decision to take a break from the band.
Rewinding back almost a year, during the pandemic, A R Rahman, one of the best music composers from India used to do a YouTube podcast with musicians from India and all around the world. During one of the episodes I watched in September 2020, he talked about the film, 99 Songs, which he wrote himself. He also mentioned that he composed the music for this film specifically for Dolby Atmos and there is nothing like it when you hear it in a full system. That caught my attention and I started researching more about Dolby Atmos. I read every single article on the internet written about Dolby Atmos over the next couple of months. For a number of years, I had been searching for a way to distinguish myself from the noise of about 50,000 songs that get released on streaming platforms every single day. Along with being a touring musician, I always wanted to score films as well. There weren’t very many studios that did this kind of work. So I thought having an access to a technology like Dolby Atmos would set me apart from a lot of artists.
From there on, after a lot of emails and phone calls to different places and flailing my way through finding all the info I can about the Blackbird studio in Nashville I got connected to Tim Gulsrud, who is a great acoustician and the principal at Soundpost Acoustics. He connected me to Anthony Catalano, CEO of pro audio company MediaVine Productions in Denver. After a few months worth of meetings and all of us reaching out to more people in our network, we decided to take a trip to LA in June 2021, meet with Dolby, visit a few speaker manufacturers for demos and other studios in LA who were already setup for Dolby Atmos. It was all of our first time experiencing Atmos for the first time in a studio setting. For few years leading up to 2021 I had been getting ready and saving up money to buy a house. So this trip to LA was basically about whether I wanted to put my life savings into building this studio. I came back from LA knowing the technology is here and now and I needed to move fast if I wanted to be an early adopter. Myself or anyone else in my family or my circle had never ran a business, so I could reach out to someone to mentor me. I had no idea where to even get started. So I did an 8 week long MBA crash course with the CSU Institute of Entrepreneurship. It’s called Venture Jumpstart. We basically went from how to validate your business idea, all the way to go to market strategies and everything in between like business structure, funding, pitching, financial projections, marketing… literally everything you can think of in order to start a new business. It was completely overwhelming at times because I didn’t know how to apply some of these concepts to my business which was in very early stages. But as I started to work through everything and worked to put some pricing together to get started, this idea seemed utterly impossible to even get started. Even if I wanted to do a bare minimum setup but do it well, it seemed out of reach. There is always a way to hack things but I didn’t want to do that as I was completely new to the audio business and I wanted to make sure that whatever work that leaves the studio has to be of highest quality and should translate well in other listening environments. And the only way to achieve that was to do it right and stick to recommendations from Dolby and the findings from our trip to LA.
Just a few weeks before our trip to LA, one weekend Godfrey and I decided to catchup over a phone call and see how we were doing now that we all had our vaccines and how we were feeling about going back out into the world. We reminisced about our trip to Europe and all the fun times at Tomorrowland. Obviously I told him about the cool business idea I was working on. He asked me about it more and where I wanted to go with it, why I thought this was a good idea etc. etc. I did not realize that I was talking to a potential investor. I did not really make much of it at the time. About a week later I get this text from Godfrey that he is interested in investing in my business. I was a little surprised to hear that from him but I still did not think it was serious. Probably about a week after my trip to LA, I got a call from him telling me that the money was ready. He said, “let’s talk more in person sometime but I am ready to be a part of your cool immersive audio studio idea.” That’s when it dawned on me that he was serious and I needed to work through some of the equity calculations I had learnt during my course with CSU Institute of Entrepreneurship. A couple of weeks after that Godfrey visited me in CO. I invited Tim and Anthony who I had gone on the trip to LA with for dinner at our house in Fort Collins while Godfrey was in town and we all spoke to him about our experience while we were in LA and what we learnt from our own perspective. That got him even more excited about the idea of being part of this adventure with me. In the months following, we worked through different financial projections and equity calculations models and settled on what our partnership would look like. It involved a lot of calls with local SBDC consultants and the law firm we work with. Obviously it was all very stressful!
While I was working through all this, I found out that my employer at the time had withdrew my employment based green card application a couple of months prior without my knowledge and had put me on a course correction plan. At which point I realized that it was all a typical corporate plot to get me out of the company. But I managed to find a new job back at GE Energy (now GE Vernova) with stellar recommendations from both of my previous managers while I worked there in 2014 and 2015. But I have to admit, this added a whole another level of stress for the few months I was working through all of this as I did not even know if I could stay in the US and maintain my immigration status. I will never forget that one evening after I found out about my green card being withdrawn that I spent at Fuzzy’s with my then girlfriend, now wife, drinking a fishbowl and crying my eyes out for more than an hour! This whole saga could be another 10 page story but I will leave it out for now.
It’s November 2021. We found a space for our studio and we signed a lease. We have worked through what all equipment we are going to buy at the studio, our LLC membership agreements have been signed and I also had started my new job at GE and have also got married! A lot happened between March and November 2021. We placed the order for the speakers just before Thanksgiving 2021 and were promised a delivery in February 2022. In the meantime, we got our studio space cleaned up. Tim designed the acoustic treatment and we got it built by an amazing local woodworker Ron Wood. Building the acoustic treatment wasn’t easy either. Tim had designed these panels specifically for our studio and were first of their kind. Ron and I problem solved through a lot of technical woodworking aspects to make these panels function and look like Tim’s designs. At this point I am so excited for the speakers to arrive and a bomb was dropped on us again. We were told we may not receive speakers for another couple of months because of all the post COVID supply chain issues. Even after it gets shipped there was no guarantee that the speakers will get to us right after as the ports everywhere were backed up. We had persevered through so much at this point, that setbacks like this really affected my mental health although in the grand scheme of things they were minor setbacks. My anxiety levels were so high that I had to start seeing a therapist just to function normally through day to day activities. From a business standpoint, we used this time to work on some marketing strategies, I personally also used this time to do some online audio engineering courses to get my chops up.
We finally received our speakers at the end of June 2022 and the most exciting phase of this business began. We had worked through so many ideas and so many speculations that we were ready to see some tangible things for the first time in almost two years. Anthony and his team did an incredible job installing the system. The speaker placement is accurate to a quarter of an inch and the angles of the speakers are accurate to the closest 3rd degree of the spec that Dolby provided. I still cannot forget the first time we made sound… It was white noise! But hey it was finally starting to look and sound like a music studio. Over the next couple of months we put in a lot of work into transforming this warehouse space which used to be a boxing gym prior to us into the music and film studio that it is today. Attaching muslin on a frame 13ft high to hanging lights… we could see the space slowly come together.
We had Dolby engineer, Jonathan Lessner visit and tune the space in October 2022. Dolby enforces strict standards in terms of speaker placement, equalisation on the speakers, loudness and overall sound profile of the room. The Dolby engineer spent about 10 hours working through specs and finally approved our studio to be a Dolby Certified mixing stage.
Now that we had this very accurate, high fidelity and state of the art audio system – a toy every audio engineer dreams of – we had no idea where to even get started. Of course there was some basic documentation available on Dolby’s website but other than that there wasn’t much information available anywhere else on the internet. Since it was so new for audio engineering community, the folks who also started working in this format and had more information available were not ready to share any of it. More on that later where I talk about my struggles. A lot of local artists were also hesitant to give us an opportunity to mix their music in this new Immerisve format as they didn’t really know much about it either. The very first opportunity we got was to mix this masterpiece of an album by our friends at Vivian, named “Pressure Makes Diamonds.” We cannot be thankful enough for their willingness and the support they have shown over the years. The first year after we got started in fall 2022 was brutal in all the areas of life and getting adjusted to having two full time jobs!
Since then it’s been a whirlwind of all kinds of emotions, constantly working through a lot of rejections, keeping our heads up through that and constantly learning, experimenting and pushing the boundaries of this new format. We have been averaging at 1.5 artist demos per week. It is honestly one of my favourite things to do; hang out with artists, get to know them better, their musical influences and listen to the music they listen to and get inspiration from and of course seeing their reactions the fist time they experience the iconic songs from The Beetles and Elton John in Dolby Atmos … it is truly magical! I have also been going to a lot of conferences out of state and every possible music and film networking event happening in Colorado. After persevering through two years of constant grind we finally started doing some work for a couple of music labels based out LA and we also have a couple of feature films that we will do post production audio work for lined up, one of them coming from out of the country. I cannot thank Godfrey enough for all his support and all the work he does for our social media and a huge thanks to three of our engineers, Russick Smith, Ian Kelsall and Maximos Hunter. Could not have been where we are today without them!

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It hasn’t been a smooth road at all… one of the biggest struggles we have been having is to get local artists to believe in the fact that this technology is not only for big artists signed by major labels but it’s easily accessible for their projects as well. We make sure that the price for working in Dolby Atmos format is comparable to the price for working in the traditional Stereo format. A lot of artists come to our studio for a demo, feel completely overwhelmed by this new way of consuming music, the speakers all around you and assume that this must be out of their price range and we never hear back from them. One of the things that happened with the emergence of Dolby Atmos for music is that it proved to be a major revolution in music production and consumption in over 60 years. We went from Mono to Stereo in the 60s and didn’t really evolve further. Of course there were other multi-channel formats after that like quad and 5.1, but they never took off because the ecosystem for wider adoption wasn’t there. This is the first time in decades where all the stars have aligned for a multi channel format to take off. What I mean by that is you can experience Dolby Atmos on headphones without having to have a fancy system at home and no one has to re-purchase their music again. Because of this it felt like gold rush for audio engineers. Very few audio engineers are able to afford to install a full system at their studio because of the massive costs of multiple speakers and the required audio gear. So in the first year of this format being adopted by music streaming services, no one knew anything and a year later it felt like the audio engineers who were able to get into this format knew everything and were not willing to share anything about building a studio or working in this format with someone new in the business like us. Now that I understand the complexities of building a studio for this format and also what it takes to create a good Dolby Atmos mix of a song, I understand where they were coming from. I tried reaching out to so many experienced audio engineers on LinkedIn and also over email and hardly anyone responded back and whoever did were very reluctant to get into any details. I also started reaching out to audio engineers locally, so we can explore Dolby Atmos together and most of them either didn’t think this format was ever going to take off or they did not want to spend any time dealing with an idiot newbie like me who invested in a very expensive studio without having any prior experience in the field what so ever! I felt lost for almost the whole first year. Again I cannot be more thankful to Russick, Ian and Maximos for sticking it out with me through this whole time without hardly getting paid anything and Godfrey for continuously encouraging me to keep going although we were nowhere close to hitting the financial projections we had predicted.
I would like to mention the very few people that helped us out to get to where we are today.
Karma Auger and Erich Gobel of Studio1LA, Los Angeles.
Brian Lucey of Magic Garden Mastering, Los Angeles.
Jonathan Luginbill of The Blasting Room, Fort Collins.
Ceri Thomas of Apple Spatial Audio, formerly Dolby.
Emma Brooks, Jonathan Lessner, Greg Chin and Erin Venables of Dolby.
Shawn Deeley of Sweetwater Studios, Fort Wayne.
Jonathan Garcia, Cincinatti.
Stefan Bock of MSM Studios, Germany.
Steven Ghouti of Yellow Cab Studios, France.
Matt Boudreau of Working Class Audio, San Francisco.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
At Blue Marble, we strive to bring clarity, strength and the true emotion out, that artists envision for of their music. We specialize in Dolby Atmos and Stereo mixing & mastering where sound moves and breathes around you and above you. With a combined expertise of over 30 years, we are known for our hands-on approach, working closely with each artist to make their unique vision a reality.
What makes me proud is knowing that we provide a safe space where every artist, no matter their style, feels empowered to voice their opinions so that together, we can take their art to the next level and create something that’s timeless and sounds competitive in this modern era of music that is cutthroat than ever to make a living out of!

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
One thing I have learnt is that if you want to be successful, there is no alternative to hard work and striving to do better every day. But you have to define what success means to you and let no-one tell you that you cannot achieve that. There will be some moments where you will feel so lonely because you are different from everything that is happening around you. Those are the exact moments you have to trust your instincts and decide to keep going anyways. There are always some short term pleasures you have to give up on for what you have envisioned for yourself. Talk to as many people as you can, be kind and take genuine interest in those people. You never know where a conversation is going to take you.

Pricing:

• For an artist that will work with us for the very first time: 1. Mixing & Mastering in Stereo and Dolby Atmos: $350 All we ask is that the artists work with us on a small social media campaign about the music that we worked on together. Happy to chat over a call if artists need inspiration to re-imagine or conceptualise their music for Spatial/Immersive Audio.
• For someone who has been able to take advantage of our first timer rates, it is always a sliding scale from $350 and onwards Every song is different and requires different approach and varying amount of time. The pricing is based on where the music stands today and what your sonic goals are. Give me a call or text me at (773) 383-5677 and let’s chat more.
• For filmmakers that are working with us for the first time: 1. Dialogue editing, foley, scoring, re-recording mixing or any other miscellaneous film post audio services: $600/day including engineer’s time upon finalisation of scope of work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bluemarblesound.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theatmosstudio/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086455568387
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blue-marble-sound/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@theatmosstudio

Image Credits
ShutterJay Photo