Arlington, VA (April 24, 2014)—Washington D.C. band Beauty Pill recently spent two weeks on display in a museum.
Beauty Pill is the musical brainchild of producer/engineer Chad Clark, who founded the band in 2001. The band recently teamed up with the Arlington, VA-based Artisphere museum to take on a unique artistic, musical and sociological experiment, setting up in a large room inside the museum with a windowed overlook and spending two weeks on display recording an album.
The initial recordings fell flat; it was only after Clark stripped everything down to just his Metric Halo ULN-8 interfaces that the recordings came alive. “We miked everything up with the best mics for each application and ran them to the textbook pro preamps that engineers have been using for decades,” he said. “The initial recordings were okay, but they weren’t fantastic. We all agreed that they fell kind of flat. So we simplified the miking and pulled out all those great preamps, relying entirely on the Metric Halo ULN-8s for preamps and conversion to 24-bit/88.2 kHz.”
He continued, “It was a revelation. The sound came alive. It was vivid and tactile. The ULN-8 preamps are just stellar. That was a convincing test, and now I never wonder about using anything but the ULN-8s now. I think it’s worth pointing out that although Metric Halo’s use of the term ‘archival quality’ is totally appropriate, it shouldn’t give anyone the idea that the ULN-8 is only for purists or documentary recording styles. Beauty Pill’s Artisphere recording is far from documentary. We use all kinds of overdubs and textures and found sounds. The quality of the ULN-8 simply makes that mode of recording more vivid and involving.”
Immersive Ideal ran as an interactive multimedia photography and music exhibit with pictures from the recording sessions paired with a surround sound mix of the final versions. Beauty Pill anticipates releasing it as a stereo recording later this year.
Metric Halo
www.mhlabs.com
