US indie band Beauty Pill recently teamed up with the Artisphere museum in Arlington, Virginia in what is being described an ‘artistic, musical, and sociological experiment’. The project saw band record an album inside the museum, where they could be watched by the public and ‘providing unprecedented access and insight into the creative process of musicians’.
‘Artisphere initially approached me to ask if I could do something “musical” in the museum’s beautiful space,’ explains founder member and producer/engineer Chad Clark. ‘When they showed me a large room with a window that overlooked it – it reminded me of Abbey Road Studio 2.
‘That put the idea in my head to do a recording there. It would be live in the sense that people would be watching us, but my plan was to record exactly as we would in a normal studio… including all of the discussions, overdubs, and the like. I thought it would interesting for the public to see that process – I have some non-musician friends who seem to think an album is made in almost the time it takes to listen to it.’
Although the band began the two-week session in with racks of A-list studio gear, their initial recordings failed to please. It was when Clark stripped everything down to his Metric Halo ULN-8 interfaces that the recordings came alive.
A musician first, Clark fell into engineering and production when other bands approached him because they liked the sound of his earlier band, Smart Went Crazy. Today, he works mainly as a mix engineer: ‘It was working with Beauty Pill that first got me interested in the Metric Halo ULN-8,’ Clark says. ‘It seemed to fit what I needed and what the band needed. Although I have nothing against low-fi recordings, I have no romance for them. I like sound that is vivid and the descriptions of the ULN-8 conveyed that idea. It’s turned out to be completely true – the ULN-8 is a miracle device! It’s incredibly flexible, and everything I record with it sounds amazing.’
With the help of friends at local studios, had Clark assembled a rack of choice analogue preamps and processors for the sessions ‘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 explains. ‘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/88.2kHz.
‘It was a revelation,’ he reports. ‘The sound came alive; it was vivid and tactile. That was a convincing test, and now I never wonder about using anything but the ULN-8s. 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.’
Some of the band’s friends advised them against the experiment, citing YouTube’s ‘comment culture’ as an example of how mean people can be when a band is vulnerable. ‘I suspect that if we had streamed the installation or posted video, things might have gotten ugly, but the people who came to the exhibit were completely supportive,’ Clark reflects. Sure, there were some uncomfortable moments when we were arguing amongst ourselves, but I mainly felt empathy from the window. It was an encouraging experiment.’
The museum subsequently ran Immersive Ideal as an interactive multimedia photography and music exhibition with pictures from the recording sessions paired with a surround-sound mix of the final versions of the songs. Beauty Pill now plan to release a ‘conventional’ stereo format album.
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