Canadian producer and engineer Justin Gray began his audio odyssey as many musicians do: when he discovered he loved recording music as much as performing it. He started with clarinet and piano but soon graduated to bass. Later, he studied music at Toronto’s Humber College, where he’s now a professor who focuses on production. Artists he’s worked with include Olivia Rodrigo, The Tragically Hip, and Snoop Dogg. His record Immersed—a project that was four years in the making—won the 2026 GRAMMYfor Best Immersive Audio Album. He lives and works in Toronto, largely from his studio Immersive Mastering, where his primary concentration now is, as the name suggests, mastering.
As he settled into mastering, his interest in surround and immersive audio deepened. “I adore surround,” he observes. “I’d always wanted to be more involved in that world, so I did some film mixing in 5.1. About a decade ago when we started to hear about Auro-3D and Atmos coming into the music space, I saw another opportunity to get involved, creatively. I expanded my studio to 7.1.4, which is the speaker layout, and immediately started to do work, even if it was remixing records I’d produced. Once the industry caught up, that was the launching point. My studio is now 11.1.6 and I do a lot of spatial remixing.”
When Gray began creating Immersed, immersive sound informed every phase of the process. “My goal from the outset was to write music as a three-dimensional experience,” he recollects. “What this means is considering space at both the compositional and recording levels. We didn’t want to simply pan elements around the listener after the fact. Rather, we embedded it into the creative process; it’s baked into the song itself. As much as space was a component, so was melody, groove, harmony, and form. A lot of those things are what I’d refer to as ‘format-agnostic.’ Once I got the frameworks together, I designed the parts to be somewhere around the listener. The idea was that they were in the middle of an ensemble and everyone was playing towards them.”
Immersed drew upon the talents of 38 performers. With so many moving parts, it comes as little surprise that a piece of that record represents the most formidable challenge Gray’s ever faced. “There’s a song on itcalled‘Tapestry’ that’s a thousand tracks, all at 96k into Atmos,” he explains. “That in itself was a technological challenge that required great care and mastery over Pro Tools. Pairing that with a full film, keeping all of the edits aligned and delivering the master on Blu-ray introduced further complications.”
His current and upcoming projects include production and mastering work with various artists that he’s not yet free to discuss. His favorite monitors are Lipinski L-707s for Atmos and for stereo mastering his go-to is PMC MB2 XBDs. For headphones he turns to Audeze LCD-5s. He established his studio Immersive Mastering with the intention of offering a premier surround/immersive service. Following his GRAMMY win earlier this year, Gray has attracted growing interest from artists and labels eager to explore immersive recording.
