The ‘rock solid’ performance of the DPA d:facto™ Vocal Microphone has helped the award-winning singer transition his studio sound to the live stage.
Integrating electronic music and sampling with soul-inflected vocals has become something of a trademark for James Blake. It is a style that has earned him numerous accolades, including a Mercury Music Prize for his 2013 album Overgrown and an Ivor Novello Award for his single Retrograde.
The tight polar pattern of DPA’s d:facto™ Vocal Microphone is helping British singer-songwriter James Blake deliver crystal clear vocals in a live setting, with minimal interferences from extraneous ambient noise. Front of House engineer Jamie Harley suggested trying a d:facto™ because he needed a microphone that could truly focus the sound of Blake’s vocals within the space of his instrumentation.
“We needed a great live mic that could clearly deliver James’ sound without too much unwanted ambience, especially as he does a lot of vocal looping on the fly,” Harley says. “The d:facto™ is solid as a rock with a tight polar pattern for on stage vocals, which allows our monitor engineer to achieve a fantastic, clean vocal sound for James and a superb sound all round. It is the perfect microphone for this kind of music, which has a lot of space around it for the vocal to sit in. It is also very solid and you really notice the difference between d:facto™ and some of the old faithfuls that we used to use.”
Both James Harley and James Blake have been delighted with the switch to d:facto™ and the microphone is now a key part of the current tour, which runs through to the New Year and takes in venues on both sides of the Atlantic.
“James is very happy with the situation - I think things only affect his performance when he’s not happy with what he’s hearing,” Harley says. “He’s an accomplished studio engineer/producer and knows exactly what he wants and how to achieve it. For my point of view, I’m very happy with the results and it makes my life much easier because I don’t have to worry about the performance of his mic.”
