Sarah Dean is a singer songwriter based just north of York who has her own style of atmospheric songs sung with the beautiful nylon strung Stoney End Harp. Sarah sings with York based four piece vocal group Soundsphere and they have recorded extensively www.myspace However, for the last two years Sarah has been writing and performing her own songs and this session at Fairview was the start of recording her debut solo album. The session highlighted a new challenge of how best to record her own material and For optimum performance it meant recording both harp and vocal separately. No easy task for long pieces that often change tempo and have a 'fluid' style. The other requirement was to do justice to the natural resonance of the harp, to create as live a sound as possible.

The session
Sarah's Gaelic harp is smaller than an orchestral harp, having only 29 nylon strings but nevertheless creates a wonderful sound in Sarah's capable hands. I've only recorded a solo harp once before and that was some years ago as part of a workshop on mic placement and performance technique so here, because of time restrictions, I had to make some educated choices on which mics I would use.
First off I asked Sarah to position the harp in the centre of the main room at Fairview so that I had the maximum free space all around it and then, because it takes a while to acclimatise and tune I had plenty of time to wander all around it and listen out for possible mic positions.
I wanted to get some kind of stereo image into the recording but this clearly wasn't possible from standing directly in front of the player because of the nature of the instrument and player position. I then sat at one side of the harp and decided that this was probably the only area where there could be some spatial content to be had. Looking at the harp from the side, with the shorter, higher pitched strings to the left and the longer, lower pitched strings to the right it seemed to lend itself to various stereo pairs.
Given that Sarah had already decided to record the harp first and overdub her vocal parts later I didn’t have to consider the problems involved with simultaneous voice and instrument recording and I could afford to be extravagant with the harp mics. So this is what I ended up with (after some experimentation)!
A pair of Rode NT5s in more or less ORTF formation, about 3 feet away from one side of the harp and looking about halfway up the height of the instrument...compressed with a Focusrite Red 3 stereo compressor.
Just above these were two Neumann U87s in a coincident (90 degree) pair....both set flat...compressed with two Audio development units.
The lower portion of the harp contains the sound box and I placed a GoldenAge R1 Ribbon mic at either side of this...about two feet away....also compressed with two Audio development units.
A pair of Hebden HS3010 omnis above the instrument looking down....not compressed at the recording.

I recorded all four pairs to separate tracks on the Radar system but I have to say that for me the NT5s were definitely the stars of the show. Plenty of detail and pleasantly bright with no hint of peakiness anywhere across the sound. I've commented elsewhere on this site about the NT5s being flattering but in an exposed recording like this that's exactly what was needed. Don't get me wrong...there was nothing horrible about any of the mic sounds and if all I'd had was the Golden Age Ribbons then I could happily have used these.
If you download and play with these files then take care....only the NT5s and the U87s were looking at the same image. The Hebdens were left and right looking at the front and the GA Ribbons were left and right low down by the sound box. If you mix varying amounts of these different stereo images you will hear some wacky phase anomalies!

Sarah did one full take of the harp part and then some individual sections which were edited into the arrangement. This wasn't because of performance imperfections but because she was still finalising the song structure even as we added the vocals. She then did 3 or 4 takes of the vocal using an AEA R84 Ribbon mic. Different parts of these takes were then compiled to make a Master vocal track.
At the mix I used only the NT5 harp tracks and added a little Lexicon reverb to the voice and the harp. We also added some sound effects of thunder and rain towards the end of the song.
This track will form part of an album which Sarah will complete in the new year and is also to be featured in a TV program about clouds which will be transmitted in spring next year.