Recording Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in the stunning acoustic setting of St John’s Church in central London, Andrew Levine renewed his acquaintance with the ‘Outstanding Music for Outstanding Causes’ event.
Under the leadership of Michael Alexander Young, the Charities Philharmonia gets together twice a year to deliver creative and energetic concerts for charitable causes, leaving Levine – who specialises in high-quality remote recordings – to capture stereo and surround recordings with using a Metric Halo ULN-8 mic-preamplifier and interface with a Metric Halo MIO virtual mixer.
Based in Hamburg, Germany, Levine also operates his own studio and runs Blumlein Records, which releases is classical recordings. ‘I always travel the day before big recordings,’ he says. ‘In this case I arrived in London on Friday afternoon, allowing me to inspect all the gear and configure the MIO-Console in the evening. The set-up began on Saturday at 11:00am, three hours before the rehearsal.’
The MIO-Console is the virtual mixer provided by the Metric Halo ULN-8 interface. Because the musicians’ chairs were not yet in place, Levine focused initially on the principle stereo and surround imaging, which required both stand-mounted mics behind the conductor and flown outriggers. He positioned the outriggers with cleverly-strung fishing line.
The main microphones were an A-B pair of Earthworks QTC-50s with DPA 4060s on outriggers in the tier above the audience for ambience. ‘It turned out that imaging on the 4060s was too direct, possibly because of reflections from the close walls,’ says Levine. ‘During a break, I moved them up above a lateral passage to capture more of the sound of the hall itself.’
To capture the violins and cellos, a pair of Royer Labs SF-1 ribbons flanked the conductor, facing sideways and angled 30° to 40° downward. A United Minorities UM-1 in fig-8 configuration captured the woodwinds, and an Elation KM-201 with an omni-directional capsule provided the lead bass with a small boost.
‘The Metric Halo ULN-8 has been a godsend for my mobile recording operations,’ enthuses Levine. ‘The mic pres and converters sound amazing and deliver the highest-quality live recordings with any mics – including the Royer ribbons, which require a huge amount of quiet gain. Also, having reliable mic pres and converters in one box leaves less to go wrong in what are already very stressful situations.’
The ULN-8 also boasts Metric Halo’s 2d onboard DSP, which provides both processing and mixing via a MIO-Console. ‘The MIO-Console is fast and intuitive to set up,’ says Levine. ‘I track in stereo and surround – and in many cases both simultaneously – and I can configure a new mixer from scratch or modify one of my templates to meet the needs of any live recording situation.’
For Charities Philharmonia, he used sample-accurate delays to bring the spot mics in phase with the main pickups, which significantly tightened up the sound and articulation of the mix. He also used some of the modeled ‘characters’ that are available with the Metric Halo 2d DSP, putting a ‘valve’ sound on the ambient mics and a ‘transformer’ sound on the mixed sum. A final brick-wall limiter prevented any unexpected peaks from distorting. Levine captured the recording in 88.2kHz, 24-bit resolution.
The concert went off with only the sorts of minor glitches that will make any remote recording engineer flash a wry smile. ‘During the Rachmaninov piece, I detected a faint buzz in one of the ambient mics,’ Levine recalled. ‘During a subsequent break, I investigated and found that someone had opened a door where a heating system is housed. I also found a videographer right next to the mic as well. He was accommodating and moved farther away for subsequent takes.’
