Every year in October, the Bridge School Benefit Concert draws music fans to the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, near San Francisco, to enjoy musicians organized by Neil Young and his wife Pegi.
Proceeds benefit The Bridge School, which educates children with severe speech and physical impairments and often relies on expensive assistive communication technology.
The 23rd annual concert was held this past October and included performances by No Doubt, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Sheryl Crow, Fleet Foxes, Wolfmother, Gavin Rossdale, Monsters of Folk, Jimmy Buffett, Adam Sandler, and Pegi and Neil Young. Young’s FOH and recording engineer, Dave Lohr, recorded the two-day event using ten Metric Halo ULN-8 mic-pre/converters.
The setup for teh concert was quite extensive. with Lohr executing a 56-track, 96kHz, 24-bit wave file recording straight to a FireWire drive using the Metric Halo record panel.
The Metric Halo AES outputs simultaneously fed a Pro Tools rig synched for 96k/24-bit resolution that recorded the same tracks redundantly. Lohr also used the analog outputs of the seven Metric Halo ULN-8s to provide inputs to a console for rough mixes and a CD reference.
The shortest act this year was twenty minutes and the longest was thirty-five minutes, with fifteen minute set changes between the ten acts and a finale. Using Metric Halo’s monitoring technology, Lohr was able to check the outputs at all three record systems to quickly find solutions for any problems that emerged.
“The principle reason I rely on Metric Halo technology is its sound quality,” said Lohr, who has used his ULN-8s for several live and studio recordings. “I’ve done a lot of tests with the ULN-8’s mic pres up against the some of the very best analog pres in existence – Neve, API, and Amex – and I still use those preamps some of the time, but I usually prefer to go with the open, clean sound of the Metric Halo preamps.”
“They have a depth of image that is unclouded. I can hear things like reflections off back walls, which are the sorts of details that other preamps blur over. If I want a particular ‘sound’ after the fact, I turn to Metric Halo’s character feature, which imprints the sonic flavor of particular mic pres on the existing file.”
