Week 12 BLS - Posted on 2014-12-19 by Mitch Darlington

This week is Video week! On thursday Kaj was recording and videotaping 2 songs for a young female artist. The first song is a cover of "Take Me To Church"  by Hozier. For this song Kaj and I brought in the Rhodes keyboard. We checked into it and were pretty sure that it is a 1976 or 1977 Rhodes. We hooked the rhodes up through a Mesa Boogie guitar head and a 4X12 Fender cabinet. This was nice because it brought some more life to the rhodes. We set up 2 mics infront of the amp; a condensor and a ribbon. We then recorded her vocals with a Shure SM7B dynamic mic. Kaj set up his video camera and video taped while another intern and myself ran the pro tools session.  We ran through the track enough times to get a good version. Kaj moved around the room to set up various camera angles and make the video interesting. We did a mix of the track and recorded one more time while the artist sang over top of the recording to get a good full video. Song one finished!

The next song was an original by the girl. This time we set her up on the other side of the room playing the stand up piano. We set up 2 Geffels mics as overhead stereo mics, a condensor mic behind the piano, the Coles for a close room mic and the Newman 69 condensor set up in the middle room with one mic aimed at the piano and one aimed away. All together this made the piano sound great. We again used the SM7B for vocals. Again Kaj videotaped and while we recorded into pro tools. We went through the same system for the second song and another video was completed. Although for this track we also added Midi strings to make the song sound more full. All and all a great day.

On Friday we videotaped another song for the chinese artist Helen that I have worked with a couple of times now. She did a cover of "Skyfall" by Adele. For this track we only needed to record vocals and used an instrumental as the backing track. Kaj set up the camera for a direct video and we recorded it until the artist was satisfied with her take. After Kaj added some effects to the audio. He then uploaded the video to Adobe Premier and synced up the recording and video, added some video effects and it was done!

After this we re-recorded some vocals for another song that Helen had recorded before. She had sent the previous recording to a chinese record company and they had wanted her to make it a softer and prettier, which was difficult for Helen as she has some serious pipes! With some guidance from Kaj they worked out the new vocals and everyone was satisfied. Another great week at Blue Light Studios! See you next week!