New York, NY (Top40 Charts) French artist
Jeanne Added has found the perfect complement for her powerful, harmonic voice - a DPA d:facto Vocal Microphone that allows her to convey emotion without changing the timbre of her singing.
Jeanne, who last year released her debut solo album Be Sensational, was introduced to d:facto™ by her sound engineer, Gilles Olivesi.
"I was looking for a very flat microphone that wouldn't try to enhance anything in her voice," Gilles explains. "French engineer Malik Malki told me about the d:facto™ so we tried it with Jeanne in the studio and compared it to a number of other vocal mics. We all agreed that it was the right one because it keeps her voice sounding natural. It also works for the FOH mix and the monitors - in my opinion vocalists sing better when they can hear themselves clearly without stretching the monitor's EQ."
Born in 1980,
Jeanne Added studied the cello and classical voice at the Regional
National Conservatory in Reims; the Conservatoire
National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse (CNSMD) in Paris and the Royal Academy of
Music in London. After graduating, she gravitated towards French contemporary jazz and played with many notable artists including
Vincent Courtois, Denis Charolles, Riccardo Del Fra and Yves Rousseau. More recently she has reinvented herself and is currently undertaking her first tour as a pop singer under her own name. According to her own publicity, this has allowed her to reveal a 'personality too long corseted into an overly polite demeanour'.
Jeanne's tour is also an interesting departure for Gilles Olivesi because it is the first time he has been Front of House engineer on a pop tour.
"I have been working as a sound engineer since 1997, both in studios and live and generally with the same French jazz artists," he explains. "With Jeanne, we are playing venues with a capacity of 600 to 2,500. The biggest audience we've had to date was at Les Vieilles Charrues Festival where we played in front of 40,000 people."
On stage, Jeanne plays bass and keyboards and is supported by a drummer and two more keyboard players/backing vocalists. They, too, are using d:facto™ Vocal Microphones.
"Alongside d:facto™, I am using d:dicate™ 4011C Cardioid Microphones as overheads, because they are really natural and allow us to maintain a nice, acoustic sound for our drums," Olivesi says. "I'm also using d;dicate™ 2011C mics on the snare and kick because I like the low end. For the snare in particular, they allow me to work very precisely with placement so that I can have more or less of some frequencies that I either want to hear or hide."
Singing in English to provide distance from her French origins, Jeanne says that Be Sensational should be taken as her guiding principle - a way of refusing to surrender and to find courage in herself. The album is released on the Naïve label and her current tour is scheduled to run until the end of this year.
