Kayleigh Roberts

The scope of this project was to record Kayleigh playing the piano and singing the song 'Over the Rainbow'.

Kayleigh has her own upright piano and therefore for the first two takes we decided to mic the piano using a matched pair of RoDE NT5 set up as a stereo pair and record Kayleighs vocal using a RoDE NT1. The first two takes were recorded live and recorded directly onto the Yamaha DAW. Due to the time contrainsts of the session it was not possible to remove the back panel of the piano and located and record the sound board.

Fig 1 shows Piano and mic placement

For the third take we opted for a grand piano sound set up on a Yamaha keyboard and then the vocals recorded seperatly. The stereo outputs from the keyboard were recorded onto the DAW and then several Vocal takes were over dubbed.

The RoDE NT1 mic was set up for the vocals in front of a duvet wall that was built with a couple of mic stands. The idea of this was to reduce room reverberation and keep the vocal recording dry so that processing could be undertaken later.

Fig 2 shows vocal set up Duvet Wall

6 vocal takes were made and these were then reviewed, best sections selected and then edited together to make a final mix.

The results of all the takes were interesting, the acoustic piano added character whilst the keyboard and edited vocals gave a differnt perspective on the song.

It is intended to see if the final take using the Keyboard can be reworked to include string sections via a MIDI sequencer.