Music and Drama School Captures Live Atmos Soundtracks

London, UK (July 16, 2024)—Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London recently added 20 Audix microphones to help capture film soundtracks performed by their newly instituted Alumni Session Orchestra, including live Atmos recordings.

“I got first exposure to recording at the age of eight by making tea for the Spice Girls and other UK pop acts at Steelworks studio in Sheffield,” recalls Professor Julian Hepple, Guildhall’s head of recording and AV. “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 use Audix microphones once again at the school. “Our decision to acquire 20 A231 and a DP5A drum microphone kit centered around the launch of the school’s Alumni Session Orchestra, which provides full film tracking at proper studio specifications for our film composition students.”

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“When we do these sessions, we might have 100 people or more in the room,” Mimi Hemchaoui, audio operations manager, comments. “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.”

Hepple adds, “We work differently by capturing orchestras in Atmos, live at the source, rather than fake it afterward. That’s one of the reasons why we bought the Audix mics, to enable us to capture acoustic music in a more spatial environment.”

Hemchaoui elaborates, “We use Audix A231 microphones to enable 11-point Atmos recordings of an orchestra using a configuration called a PCMA 3D array. 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.”