Full Sail Stories

Recently, Full Sail’s Audio Temple and Mix Palace were filled with the melody of the latest release from Dove, Stellar, and Grammy Award-winning Full Sail grad Dominique Jones, aka DOE. The Music Business and Creative Writing graduate is currently signed to gospel label RCA Inspiration, and she brought her song “Black Boy” – which features Jon Batiste on piano – back to campus for stereo and immersive mixing.

“I wrote “Black Boy” in 2022, [and that year] was opening a wound for a lot of Black Americans. And so for me, there was a lot of healing that came,” DOE shares. “For our culture, there isn't a song for Black men, empowering Black men to be vulnerable. I felt a deep sense of protection and admiration for the Black men in my life, so I wrote the song with that in mind.”

The song’s stereo version was co-mixed with Full Sail faculty members and Jon Batiste’s team, while the immersive Atmos version was mixed entirely by the Full Sail team. Darren Schneider – a Grammy-nominated Producer, Mix Engineer, and Course Director in Full Sail’s Recording Arts program – worked on the mixes with Jason Strawley, Full Sail’s Dub Stage Assistant Manager.

“[On “Black Boy”], we got to push the envelope on the immersive side for us, and we just opened new Dolby Atmos mixing rooms in the Mix Palace. Basically, when I finished mixing it, it went to a mastering guy, then came back to us, we mixed the immersive version, and then Jason had to match the master of the stereo version to the immersive version,” Darren explains.

“We try to do a lot of these projects because we’ve got all of this technology on campus and if we can get all the pieces to line up and have everybody happy, we can bring that to the students and say, ‘Hey, this is how we got from point A to point B,’ and now we can do mix breakdowns with students because of that process,” he continues.

Jarrett Dyson, a Recording Arts Program Director who previously worked for RCA Inspiration and helped bring DOE’s song to campus, says that projects like this are beneficial to the university as a whole.

“I’m all about relevance, and I want not only our students but our instructors and our staff to always be able to be a part of relevant projects [like DOE’s song],” Jarrett says. “We have grads that are doing relevant projects right now, so I think it’s very important that not only my team but everybody at Full Sail gets an opportunity to be on relevant projects.”

For DOE, bringing her song back to Full Sail made “Black Boy” even more significant.

“I just think it's a full circle moment because I didn't know that there were those connections [between Full Sail and RCA Inspiration]. I'm finding this out, and it's so special to me; it connects this song to me even more because I got two degrees from Full Sail University. I didn't try to connect those dots. I think that God connected those dots, if I can just say that. And I think that's really cool.”