Established in 1880, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, located in the heart of London, offers training in all aspects of classical music and jazz along with drama and production arts. Driven by a need to capture film soundtracks performed by their newly instituted Alumni Session Orchestra, the school recently added 20 AUDIX A231 large diaphragm condenser microphones and a DP5A 5-piece professional drum microphone kit to their production arsenal.
“I got first exposure to recording at the age of 8 by making tea for the Spice Girls and other UK pop acts at Steelworks studio in Sheffield,” recalled Julian Hepple, former Prince FOH engineer and now Guildhall’s head of recording and AV. “But I got my first real exposure to AUDIX as the front of house engineer for Prince on his Hit n Run tour in 2014, where we used the AUDIX i5,D2, D4 and D6 on the drum kit. Since then, I’ve come to rely on various AUDIX microphones with Anoushka Shankar, Robert Glasper and many others.”
Hepple had a unique opportunity to embrace AUDIX microphones once again. “Our decision to acquire twenty A231 and a DP5A drum microphone kit centered around the launch of school’s Alumni Session Orchestra, who provide full film tracking at proper studio specifications for our film composition students," he added.
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“When we do these sessions, we might have 100 people or more in the room.” commented audio operations manager, Mimi Hemchaoui. “Ordinarily, condenser mics pick up lots of unwanted sound, but if they've got great off-access rejection like the A231, that means that even with 20 mics in the same space, there’s not going to be many phasing issues.”
But the decision to go with AUDIX, also had to do with the microphones’ ease-of-use. “The simplicity of the A231 can’t be overstated,” said Hepple. “Recording five or six performances a day, we wanted a mic that we could put in place and know that we’re good to go.”
One thing that impressed Hepple was the customer service that he received from AUDIX’s UK distributor, SCV Distribution in acquiring the microphones. “I likely couldn't have gotten 20 of anything else here in the same time frame, but I got Ian Young from SCV on the phone and said, ‘We’ve got exactly 20, when do you need them? I can have them on a plane tonight.’ We decided that was a good sign and ordered them straight away,” he said.
After Guildhall received the AUDIX microphones, they quickly found them indispensable for all types of audio capture, from jazz festivals, to opera, to student recitals, and more, but the most exciting application has been the work that they have been doing in their 7.1.4 Atmos mixing studio which was tuned and approved by Dolby and delivers pre-approved masters to Universal Music.
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“We use AUDIX A231 microphones to enable 11-point Atmos recordings of an orchestra using a configuration called an PCMA 3D Array," explained Hemchaoui. "Each captured channel is intended to be played back through a corresponding speaker in a 7.1.4 configuration. We arrange the mics to mirror that setup. Then we position the tree in the room based on where we want the listener to feel that they are. On many recordings, we place the tree in the middle of the orchestra so that the listener feels as though they are in the middle of all the action, but for a more natural effect we can also place it in the audience.”
“We like to be driven by projects, not by what we can do, which is why it's so important that you can open the mic locker, grab the AUDIX mics, plug them in and they just work," Hepple concluded. “And it’s not just ‘record an orchestra in this room and a big band in this room,’ there’s a lot of fun experimental and investigative stuff going on, too”
