Hi!
I'm new here, well...
Just thought I'd share my experience of the eternally difficult piano-recording. I'm lucky to have a decent Steinway in a decent church. I spent about two frustrating years before it started sounding good! First out was 2 ADK SC1 + cheap Berhinger mixer. Nothing really worked until A-B using the "wing" that the open lid creates, you know, the folded part. Roughly 60cm between mics, facing the floor at an angle, and positioned in such a way that the capsules were just above the "line" that the open lid creates. Some 40-50 cm away from the piano.
Well, what lacked now was bass reproduction! I scrapped the Behringer and bought an Audio Buddy, and got rid of an ugly "nasal" quality in the sound. But still no bass. Then I tried Behringer ECM8000. Voila! There it was, thundering bass!
Strangely, though, I had stereo problems. One channel kept wanting to dominate no matter what. Not until recently did I stumble upon a possible answer; the Audio Buddy won't deliver 48V when both channels are used! Read that in Neumann's forum. That's really severe I think, so beware! That also explains why the blue lights didn't shine when I tried a pair of Samson C03! There was sound, though.
So, next was attempting large diaphragm mics. Has anyone else tried the Samsons? To me, they seem to be really inferior to the other Chinese LD, no similarity what so ever! ADK TL proved abolutely wonderful, but I still haven't tried any other. Once I learned M/S stereo, I had solved all problems of recording duets, e.g. flute&piano, song&piano etc. This was the trick: have the other artist facing the piano so that each instrument is on one side each of the M/S pair, (using omni or fig8 for mid), and just carefully balance the distance. That was the only way, since a church is so rich in reverberation, this one not being overly so, but still...
I got such different sounds using different polar patterns and stereo techniques! When recording piano solo, I got sort of Deutsche Grammophon:ish Emil Gilels and Michelangeli impressions using M/S omni-mid; while A-B cardiods sounded more like Alicia de Larrocha (80's-90's RCA) or Claudio Arrau (80'-90's Phillips). I also did some M/S with ribbons, the ones that were supposed to come from ADK. No obvious comparisons, but absolutely wonderful for Bach 2-part inventions and Chopin Mazurkas. Not much else though!
Worked very nicely also for Saint-Saents duo flute&piano.
I changed the audio buddy for a focusrite green, couldn't have used the ribbons otherwise; the audio buddy produced way too much noise, while the green was absolutely silent! I also got rid of previous stereo-issues.
I short, maybe top-of-the-line mics and pres would have given better results, but in my experience, as long as the mics I use are condensers and reasonably flat across a wide freq. range, and the pre I use is delivering 48V, quiet and not unpleasantly coulored, I'm sure I'll be fine! Very very careful mic placement is THE issue when it comes to recording classical piano!
I'd be happy to post some bits here if anyone wants to hear, if I can figure out how?
Regards, D
Author
Topic: class. piano/audio buddy, ADK, etc (long story!) (Read 1717 times)