McDowell Mountain Music Festival

CRAS students do it outside! CRAS gave a hand at the McDowell Mountain Music Festival.  Last month there was a 3 day long music festival, and while the musical content was provided by local and national bands such as Mergence, Dry River Yacht Club,  Umphrey’s McGee, The Roots, The Shins, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Les Claypool, the engineering side of things definitely needed a hand.

Thankfully CRAS instructor Paul Richards had a connection and was able to round up some current CRAS students to go and get some real experience! James Berish, Dan Beattie, Michael Benjamin, Cameron Crowson, Tom Chapman, Porter McComas, Nat Boyer, DJ Grace, Josh Aune, Jesse Paremski, Mo Obenauf, Max Bylin, Dylan Gette-King, Owen Koslawy, and Travis Durgan all volunteered to help set up and run the shows.

Between the major acts, local acts were allowed to get some stage time, and all their sound was controlled by CRAS grad Brian Stubblefield. CRAS instructor Jason Robey also assisted in running and recording the “after hours” show that Orgone put on at the Crescent Ballroom.

Aside from just the music production aspect of it, they wanted to have audio and visual recordings, resulting in 774 GB of video, and 400 GB of audio, not to mention thousands of pictures. There were roughly 5,000 people in attendance for each day of the festival.

Signals were split as part of a 3-way stage splitter that fed a recording snake underneath the stage. That was then run to the recording rig in a tent behind and to the side of the stage. Recording was done to four Alesis HD24’s multi-track hard disk recorders, set up as two 48-track systems for redundancy. Front end preamps included API, Neve, Millennia, and True Systems.

Learn more about our remote recording and live sound classes here.