Rachel Jeffries - Christian Piano
Rachel Jeffries
Rachel Jeffries is a church music leader and worship pianist. Her piano album was a straight 70 minute piano improvisation to be used as a background for prayer and mood setting for worship.
This was put into commercial duplication. Art design by Dan Sauer, engineered by Conrad Askland.
Production Notes from Conrad:
For this recording Rachel wanted to play straight through uninterrupted. I knew there was no way to make it a full seventy minutes straight without a single mistake so I recorded the piano outputs analog and at the same time tracked a midi signal from the piano. I used Pro Tools TDM which has a resolution of over 900 parts per quarter note so I didn’t think an accurate midi playback of the performance would be a problem.
After recording I went through the midi playback and edited any errors or timings that weren’t 100% smooth. There’s no magic trick to this, you have to edit each note by hand and by ear. In the process of recording I became very familiar with Rachel’s style and chord patterns so it was much faster for me when it came time to editing. Most of the time I could see immediately which note was off or what timing needed to be nudged.
In the final we ended up going with the midi playback. I used the roland SX piano card, I think patch #4 or #9 with a Real Verb plug in by Kind of Loud Technologies. I did some subtle eq touches, a slight stereo delay panned left and right (barely audible) and Master X 5 band for final mastering.
The end result was a very smooth track - a seventy minute track!