Recording upright acoustic piano, use physics to your recording advantage!!!

Recording upright acoustic piano, use physics to your recording advantage!!!

Although it’s pretty standard not to record an acoustic guitar with the sound hole pressed against the wall, sometimes we overlook this when recording an upright piano.  A great trick taught to me recently by Larry Crane shows a great technique when recording an upright.  It could be summarized into several factors to be considered when tracking the piano:

1    Pull the piano away from the wall.  Let the instrument breath and think of it like an acoustic guitar.

2    Take the front cover off and locate a pair of small diaphragm condenser microphones in there about 6 inches away from the hammers for some dynamic action.  Place them using an X/Y pattern.  Good idea to avoid phase issues!

3    Take another pair of small diaphragm condensers on a stereo bar using an X/Y pattern and place them in front of the pedals after you open up the bottom panel as well.  You may only use these 2 microphones on the bottom if you have a pianist/singer being recorded and want to avoid the voice reflection on the top microphones.  So only use the bottom pair if you need to get rid of some voice reflections.  These should be X/Y as well to avoid phase problems.

4    Finally, to further avoid vocal bleed and get a darker sound, you may just want to record the piano from the back of it.  This will give you a focused “high mid” frequency response without much vocal bleed.  This could give you phase issues since the microphones should NOT be set up in X/Y form.

So what you’ve done is taken acoustic and physical characteristics of an acoustic piano to make the tracking of it more artistic J