While most of the Nashville press talks about the city’s countless singers and songwriters, one area that’s often overlooked is the people working on the technical side of recording in Music City. Practically anyone can record themselves in their bedrooms these days, but a technically-inclined person wanting to work with the highest caliber of artists and writers, and the best people and equipment, needs to be in a music capital like Nashville. One of the city’s most advanced and respected members of that community is engineer and producer Bobby Holland.
Holland, a Nashville native, has engineered and mixed thousands of songs, and is at the forefront of the latest advances in recording technologies, like Spatial Audio, and immersive audio, essentially a 3-dimensional sound field. Working primarily out of a suite of studios in Berry Hill called Pentavarit, Holland is on the cutting edge of using proprietary software to emulate the 3D environment, primarily with the Dolby Atmos format, which has become a new industry standard.
“This is one of my favorite things to talk about right now,” Holland said, “because with the growth of immersive playback, we are in a little bit of a Wild West still. It’s growing really quickly but it’s very misunderstood. My slogan right now is Dolby Atmos is not surround, but Dolby Atmos can be surround. Immersive playback is a smart playback format. So the beautiful thing about it, the reason why it seems like this is going to stick around, is because it doesn’t require the consumer to do anything (special). In prior surround formats you had to buy specific playback system receivers and you’d have to buy the album on a DVD, with a totally separate mix, which required the listener to care too much, to be too technical. So it never stuck around because most listeners didn’t care or didn’t have the energy or the money to take that dive.”
Holland’s engineering and mixing skills have helped produce the work of artists like Kesha, Will Hoge, Alice Cooper, and many others. His participation on Maggie Rose’s 2024 album No One Gets Out Alive was instrumental in the album’s being nominated for a Grammy.
“I was the recording engineer and I mixed the record,” he said. “It was a really beautiful experience, the producer was Ben Tanner (Rodney Crowell, John Paul White) and he is a wonderfullly amazing talent, and it was pure joy to work with Ben on that record. We kinda just floated in and out of the entire creative process from start to finish. Ben was great because there were no ideas that were off limits either direction, from engineering through producing, and the players were all welcome to offer any idea that they wanted.”
An engineer’s work obviously involves having great ears, and Holland may have developed some of the best ones in town organically, as he is nearly sightless, having lost most of his eyesight to a degenerative retina condition called retinitis pigmentosa.
“I am what I describe as very nearly blind,” he said. “I have probably 5% of my vision at this point. I used to make most of my living doing graphic design and web development, which obviously is not ideal for a nearly blind guy. I pretty much never look at what’s happening (in the studio), I can’t, you know, look at somebody and see what notes they’re playing. It’s interesting to try and quantify that. My tracking space does not have a window in the front of the control room, it has a big bookcase, and I have a camera in the live room with a large TV in the control room. I have actually come to enjoy not having a window, because then the artists have more privacy, they’re not feeling like they’re in a fish tank. They can be seen on camera but I can turn it off, or they can turn the lights down as low as they want. No one has to see them, and a lot of times I put them in a booth where no one can see them anyway, and they can exist as freely as they like. So being seen kind of works both ways.”
You can follow what Holland’s up to at bobbyholland.net and pentavaritstudios.com.
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