Nathanael_I

Micing grand pianos is a wonderful challenge, and very rewarding when it comes together. I've done many things with my Kawai RX-7. The thing about a piano is that it is a "big" instrument, and as Dave B indicates one has a variety of perspectives to consider when choosing an approach. My current favorite is a pair of AEA N8's configured as a Blumelein pair centered on the keyboard with the bottom of the array about 2' above the keys. Music desk off. I run this into my Sonosax SX-R4+ recorder. This is battery powered (no mains contamination),and offers some of the cleanest preamps in the world directly into dual gain range AD converters that spec out at 135dB dynamic range. It's the best sound recording device I've experienced. This is a M/S capture, and therefore fully phase coherent. I find that even slight movements toward or away from the piano tailor the bass response. By adjusting the width in the DAW, I can get a spacious piano that either "moves left to right" or is stationary and centered, but with great spaciousness. I get a very detailed capture with all the "micro-contrast" of frequency beating and such fully preserved. This is very much what I hear when playing the piano. The N8's "hear" about like human ears and don't have the extended treble of my small diaphragm condensers. But this is a great natural piano sound. Because the SX-R4+ is so quiet, the only noise in the recordings is the microphone's self noise. This is easy to make disappear with modest settings in Isotope's RX-7 software. The noise reduction does slightly impact the "micro-contrast", but leaves me with a perfect "digital black" background. The resulting recordings can be turned WAY up and still have zero grain or noise. If I want a more "bright pop/rock" sound, I have a 1m AEA stereo bar positioned inside the piano, tilted diagonal from high to low strings. I put my two Josephson C617SET omni's as the main "pair" and use my Josephson C550 measurement mic as a "center mic". I find that the piano is big enough that when I get the bass and treble where I want them, the midrange is slightly recessed. So I fill that in with the third omni. The Josephson C617's are the most revealing microphones I own. As drum overheads they are superlative - it's like "8k hi-def TV" for the ears - you feel like you can hear individual atoms vibrating. This is a "close" capture, but captures the piano in extraordinary detail. This method requires a heavy duty Latch Lake boom stand to suspend the array inside the piano. For room micing, there are choices about capturing the bright sound reflected from the lid or taking the more balanced sound that is just off the lid. If I stand parallel to the piano, but just to the keyboard side of the lid, outside it's acoustic "throw", about 10-15' back, the sound is gloriously balanced when someone else is playing the piano. If I move a few feet to the right, or into the "throw" of the lid, then the sound is louder, and brighter, but not as balanced to my ears. I have Schoeps MK22 wide cardioids that I will run on a Jecklin disk, or as a spaced pair on an AEA stereo bar. These microphones can also be explored as an "ORTF pair", and placed to capture the full "width" of the piano from across the room using the Williams curves to set the angle between microphones. I have also used the Josephson's on Jecklin disc and as a spaced pair near the curve of the piano about 3-4' away and further back at 6-8' away. I also have the DPA 4099 piano mic stereo kit. This is a very clever system involving tiny electret omni capsules on a flexible wand. With a magnetic mount that attaches to the piano, these just clamp to the frame magnetically. I generally run a roughly ORTF looking spacing, with one mic pointing to the center of the bass strings, and the other pointed towards the treble. This is also a "close" capture, and one has to mind the bass/treble balance and where "center" is acoustically. But once situated, the lid can be closed. The resulting capture does not sound boxy or closed in and is quite useful in any modern "band" context. This works with other things going on the room in a way that none of my other descriptions do. I also have an optical scan rail - QRS PNOscan III - installed in my piano, so I can capture the MIDI at the same time as the audio. If I am capturing direct into the DAW, and wanting click, etc, then I run whichever of these microphones through the Rupert Neve preamps that front end my DAW. The microphone I wish to obtain for recording piano is the Josephson C700S. I have an audiophile solo piano recording made with that microphone,and it is exceptional. This microphone has three capsules, and can capture a phase coherent surround sound capture in the horizontal plane. It is a sophisticated and highly revealing microphone. I know that paired with my Sonosax, the resulting files would be "as good as it gets". One piano can generate a near infinite variety of piano tones. It lends itself to detailed testing and study, careful listening, and AB testing with commercial releases. A recorded piano sound is a "decision" of sorts, and one really does have to start with the end in mind. What makes a solo piano sound great for complex literature won't be the right sound for a rock ballad, even on the same instrument. Like a drum set, micing pianos is a part of the craft that takes time and effort to get repeatably excellent results.

What it tells me is that you are better, more capable, and more highly thought of than you think of yourself. That probably means that you are indeed making an impact on your work responsibilities and the people around you. Most of us accept the lie that we are insignificant or unimportant to some degree. Experiences like this point out just how wrong that idea is. We all matter and it is good to be reminded that even when a job is hard, or thankless, we are often still making a positive impact. I'm happy for your success!!

This is my experience. This way, you can sequence or play each part, however you like to do it into the DAW. You don't have to use any effects in your keyboard. You can add them all in the DAW. This lets you treat each "instrument" as it's own component of your mix. If you try to get each part sounding as good as possible, and then do the same at the mix stage, then the whole level of the production rises. I find it very useful to separate the stages in my mind and in practice. 1) get the music written/transcribed/whatever. 2) get really good at playing it (or enter it). 3) tweak the sounds so that they sound as absolutely good/right as possible without FX. 4) Record the parts as audio. 5) Make a new session that is audio only. 6) Mix (yes, I know this is a whole other thing) 7) Separate mastering step, best done after a month or so to remove auditory memory. I find that if you are going to "do it all", it helps greatly to only "wear one hat at a time" and give yourself full freedom to only do that thing.

This is the next stage for me. I still have all my synths set up for "easy playability" and haven't resorted to the vertical wall stacking system. But it is in my future I think... But I am with you on the observation that software is growing and is prominent today at all levels of the game. It is at my place too... But I still like playing keys....

Oh, I think there have been many, many comparisons. (old hardware pretty much always wins for character, but many sounds are very, very close). I know that I don't consider software a substitute for my 5 hardware synths. I enjoy my hardware, and there are definitely composers like Hans Zimmer who maintain that only U-He's Zebra can stand up properly on bass patches when using cinema sound systems on the software size. He prefers hardware synths for that purpose. I think for me, the hardware is wonderful, but so is software. Having full recall as soon as I open the session, being able to spawn multiple copies of the same synth... Having audio render at faster than real-time... And space... My room is not as accomplished yet as yours, but it is full of special things. I think what I have tried to do is to have each synth have a unique place in my palette. Since I have good analog hardware, I don't tend to use software to get those sounds, but focus software on explicitly digital sounds (like U-he's Bazille).

I am working so hard to be able to "play right" and here's a guy who is so good he can play "wrong" and still have it be "right". I'm not sure I've got that spirit inside me! Hard to copy that!

What is also interesting about this is to think about how music making has changed over his career. He built those racks to meet a very specific commercial need. I presume he needed to show up to a very expensive session in a very expensive room filled with very expensive people and provide "any sound that was needed". And so, having "one of everything" and "ability to get at any sound immediately" meant building these racks with literally one of everything then available. Today, most of what those racks deliver would be done with software. There might not be any "one room", but a ProTools session file sent around to several people to overdub on. Even knowing synthesis is not confined to a very select few - most composers have to know how to do decent synth work, or they hire sound-designers to make custom presets for their synths just for a single show or gig. I also wonder if there is so much gear available now that it wouldn't even be possible to show up with "one of everything" in that way. I do know that guitarists of that time had the big Bradley switching systems and all the racks for the same reason. I'm not close to the LA session scene but it seems that a lot of those guys now send in tracks from very well-specified home studios with amp rooms and such. So there's probably a really interesting story around how he has seen music production evolve and how that informs what is in the attic vs. other places.

Well, that's certainly a time capsule! Lots of stuff I didn't even know existed. The M1 was one of the first synths I saw in college, so my perspective starts well into his career!

Wow. Very cool. Thank you for sharing. It is always a privilege to be in the place that someone has conformed to their own identity to such a degree that it is literally an extension of them.

I think it is just as simple as whatever you decide you like. I think we care more than any audience. And we mostly care what other people think more than anything. I've asked all my kids about this. No one cares. If the songs are good and the music sounds good, it is good. They can jump around to a DJ pushing play on a laptop, they can enjoy a band playing live, or even a symphony. They would think it was very lame if someone was pretending to play a part, or just standing there not doing anything with tracks playing. But even playing to tracks doesn't faze them a bit. I think it bothers musicians of a certain age who grew up with playing as the only option (not throwing stones - just observing). Nightwish plays to tracks. The live shows are great. If you are offering to cover your own songs, who could argue with you? As my composition teacher says, "Whose name is on the page?..." whenever I ask a non-theoretical question. If you hear lots of great parts and orchestration for the album and then simplify for live, your name is at the top of the page!

Looks like a Clay Christiansen "Innovators Dilemma" kind of product. It has a fraction of the features of ProTools. It is mostly inadequate for industry workflows in any number of specialities. And yet, it does the basic things necessary - records high quality audio, lets you do simple edits, has great effects. Is it enough to make great music? Of course it is! But it is also woefully inadequate for certain tasks. Does it actually threaten ProTools? Only at the margins and for non-sophisticated use. But that is a huge market. A market ProTools also feed off of. This is Christiansen's dilemma - the newcomer eats away at fringe business and gradually takes more and more until it passes the incumbent. Will that happen? Who knows. Avid is due for an HDX refresh in another 18 months or so. Is it needed? Could they answer in kind? Will their near monopoly on audio post for the video industry keep them from seeing what the music industry with its simpler requirements wants? There's lots of history of tech company's "main market" with highly sophisticated users blinding product management to big industry shifts that are larger than the present market. It still seems thet the truest thing is that it is a great time to be a musician, an audio engineer, or a producer - the tools are great, relatively inexpensive by historical norms, easy accessible, and getting better every year. We are way past the point of sufficiency for audio recording and reproduction, so the innovation will come in workflow, easy of use and other things. Summing audio, doing basic EQ, compression, etc are solved. Sooner or later the vintage thing will blow over, or maybe it will come back in waves every 10 years. Who knows.

If you look into audio archiving, the important thing is to separate the audio from ANY computer program or OS. WAV files are NOT tied to any particular computer, program or plugin - that's the point. Sure, software prepared the WAV, and software opens and plays the WAV file. But once it is prepared or recorded, it is no longer dependent on that computer or software to have use or value. There's no long term guarantee that old session files, plugins, will remain openable or run on newer versions of the same software. That's why WAV files work as an archival format. The spec was originally released in 1991 (29 years ago). All those files still play identically, despite the dozens of OS's, and thousands of programs that have gone by the wayside. Photographers export uncompressed BMP and TIFF images for the same reason - Photoshop will come and go, but the finished images will still be openable in something. The samples I make run on my DAW (Windows), my laptop rig (OS X) without any difference. I can take those same samples and put them in a Nord or a Kronos. If UVI (Falcon) goes under or Kontakt, the WAV files will still load into some sampler. It takes literally 10-15 min to tweak the samples into playable shape. Not perfect, but far from a big deal. Composers and producers regularly export final copies of mixes and then mix stems that rendered through all plugins and processing (even external gear). In this way, the mix can be reconstructed without opening any session files. If the stem WAV files are all placed on a timeline and played together, the final mix is the result. This is how masters are being archived. Cubase/Nuendo just got a new export utility that makes it trivial to render out the stems properly. ProTools has had this for a while. Of course, the session files are saved too, but they are not as permanent. And, as always with digital data, 3 copies is minimum. Cloud storage is wonderful for this.

I've got the basses and guitars, sweet amps, and a piano too. I get it. But, there's nothing permanent. Everything takes maintenance to persist. It is interesting how quickly towns or roads vanish if they are left to the wild. Technology is certainly that way. BTW, there's no deficit in a WAV file. It is the canonical audio format. Its pretty literally the output of the converters with a small header. FLAC doesn't sound better or worse. Its a smaller file size due to compression. WAV is a very, very simple wrapper. If it goes away, there will not be any loss in moving it to something else - I have the canonical audio. A new wrapper for whatever is the next uncompressed audio format will be easy to transition to without any quality loss. Header change won't change the payload. And, for better or worse - its the best that can be done right now. What is certain is that synths don't seem to age all that well compared to the instruments you mentionedl. But what is true is that sonic standards and tastes evolve. Will I really want the exact same synth patch 30 years from now? Who knows. I might be just as happy making new things then as I am now. The fact is that we are all creators. And creators create. So the instrument is much less important than the player/composer. I don't wish my studio to burn down. But if it did, I'd get other instruments, and keep going. So, I'm somewhat pragmatic about it at this point. Do what can be done, but know that in the long run, it will be fine, however it turns out.

At first, I wanted a One because of the surface attributes: beautiful, well-made, a poly-Moog, etc. But, my Solaris covers all that ground and then more. No, it isn't exact. But it covers that territory and lots more. And I decided that I already have dream analog synths. My interest is in digital things like the Quantum, the Osmose, etc at this point. I have thought about getting one as a long term investment, but I've never really done that. I've expected instruments to be played.

Falcon or Kontakt are so superior anything in any keyboard, that I can't imagine anyone will ever do that again. I get the nostalgia, but honestly, even the Kronos is completely annoying compared to working in Falcon on a 27" display. It is so much slower and less responsive, less capable, etc. It is self-contained, sure. But in terms of working with samples and doing sound-design? I'll take Falcon any day.

Sampling is the answer to this. Sounds that I find valuable are sampled. Doesn't matter if they are on a hardware synth or a soft-synth. I am building a library that is in straight WAV files. Ultimately, I can and will sell hardware synths. Software will go out of date. WAV files aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I have them in a particular piece of software today (UVI's Falcon), but the raw material can easily be mapped in other software. I even have software to do this mapping (Chicken Systems Translator) that has been around 20 years. Obsolescence is real. Even professional grade wind instruments wear out. Guitar fretboards wear out. Pianos wear out. Hardware synths have less life expectancy than my grand piano by at least half. So even hardware isn't a lifetime purchase. I'm much happier thinking of my hardware synths as temporary generators, but thinking of my personal sample library as my investment. It has a much better chance of weathering the years than the hardware. Some of the hardware is "because I can" - like the Minimoog Model D re-issue. There are great software and hardware alternatives that are less money. It's a pretty limited synth. But it is cool. It is history. It is fun to play. It isn't going anywhere. It doesn't have patch memory. But my sampler fixes that. Now my Minimoog can have presets.

Everyone who comes to music as an adult has to wrestle with one thing - a misplaced expectation of excellence. We have spent a lifetime listening to professional musicians, watching YouTubes, etc. Our brain has unquestioningly taken it all in and declared that "this is what is means to play music". The problem is that you CANNOT meet that expectation. No one can play as well as all the inputs you have had. And more specifically, none of us can play at any level quickly or soon. Playing keyboard instruments is a complex task. It involves significant neuromuscular training. The odds that any of us are going to get great dabbling at it without a teacher are negligible. That's not how anyone learns. Think about learning golf. You have to take lessons and play 3x a week or more to really improve. If you want to improve you should: 1) cut yourself some slack. it is OK to suck. It is OK to suck for a long time. That's how it works. Its normal. 2) Get a teacher and do what they say. It will work. It will take longer than you want. But you WILL see progress. 3) Practice 5-6 hours a week the way the teacher says to. If you practice less than 3 hours, you may not see any progress at all. Music is a threshold activity. You have to get above the threshold for progress and stay there long enough for it to work. It is better to work some every day than to binge and practice 4 hours on one day and then skip 3 days. Expectation management is the hardest thing adults coming to music have to deal with. Many kids learned gradually enough that they never knew they were terrible. But they were. As adults we are going to know we are terrible. Embrace it. Getting good is on the other side of sucking. I made no progress until I made peace with that, decided I would suck until I improved, and then sought instruction to suck for as little time as possible. There is a way to learn keyboards.

At this point, I don't even consider multi-timbrality. Most of my hardware synths don't offer it, and I never think about it. Playing out? Yes, then I notice and think about things like patch remain, etc. I decided that the laptop was my answer. I've tried Kronos - they are wonderful. But the laptop is even better. Way better. So, GigPerformer is my multimbral solution. Any of my hardware synths that I want access to (but don't want to carry) are sampled deeply and put into Falcon, which has an amazing set of sound design tools. It is so much more modern than Kontakt. I can build multis in Falcon, or in GigPerformer as needed. But in the DAW? It just doesn't matter.

Sorry for the delay, Sam! By "cleanup", I mean cleanup from my playing, not ghost notes or something. When I improvise, there are more tempo variations than if I'm locked to a click. I find that if the display quantize is set to 16th triplets or something fairly precise, I'll bet a lot of really odd note values. That isn't the fault of the rail. That the nature of human timing vs 960ppq in the sequencer! Of course, sometimes I turn the click on and improv to the click - that of course means less work. But there is always a process to get to nice looking sheet music unless you are a monster player with supernatural timing. What I like is that the guts are all there. It is very easy to quantize, adjust note durations, etc once the raw data is in to make it into something useful.

This is what I did. Works great. I've also hauled video equipment, PA... all manner of things. Well worth it.

Yes, I've owned the QRS PnoScan optical rail for several years. I have installed it in two different grand pianos. Both times by myself. It is an afternoon of work if you know how to pull the action correctly. Or you can pay a tech a few hundred dollars. But you shouldn't shy away from it because it needs to be installed. This is the system you are looking for. It is purely optical and doesn't touch the keys or interfere in any way with their motion. It captures MIDI notes, velocity, and the pedals. I only have the sustain pedal hooked up. I use it to capture improv sessions where I might want notes later. The files need cleanup, but the notes/harmonies are all there. I often record audio via mic's and MIDI in these cases. With a MIDI interface kit, you can even record the MIDI to a phone or tablet. I've done both, but generally, it is permanently connected to my main DAW. The only real alternative is to use an 88 note controller and get the MIDI that way. I love improvising at a real piano, and then having MIDI from it - I get what I want sonically, and touch-wise, AND I get it into a computer in a way that can be edited. Pretty cool.

It is annoying to try to read it landscape mode. I agree. There just isn't enough vertical room on a phone.

That is awesome! I'd buy the house for the organ, get the organ out and sell the house on. What a neat instrument. I have no room in the studio for this...

Experiment with your phone. You can get a tripod adapter on Amazon for $15 or so. You can certainly buy GoPro style action cams under $400, but give your phone a try and figure out what angles work, and how many you think you need. Ideally you would record the audio some other way and then sync it to the camera audio in your video editing software. The camera recording will be poor, especially on a noisy stage. There's no such thing as a in-camera mic that is going to make your voice sound "ok". You have to record the audio well on its own and then combine them if you want it to be credible. If you want it "right". You'll record everything, do a full audio mix, export that, then sync that mixed audio to the raw video and then edit the multiple video takes into a cohesive whole. It is a lot of work, but can be rewarding.

Acoustic pianos have always been an upper-middle class or more proposition when purchased new. They used to be the province of royalty and wealthy merchants only. Today, they are not hard to find used in magnificent condition since so many are purchased for decoration, or for children who barely use them and loose interest. I can say that when people at work ask about a piano for their kids, they only mean digital. An acoustic is not even considered. I tell them to rent an acoustic upright and see how it goes, then they are not out for a purchase and can give the child a chance to bond with the real instrument. I'm pretty sure they just read online reviews and buy something as cheap as they think they can out of the home digital piano lines. Of course, these are often way better than any of the old uprights that are $200 on Craigslist, so there is that. I suspect with a good Kawai CA98 or equivalent Yamaha that someone could get to the place of doing university prep on one. Just like people use student horns and then get a nice one right before college, and a nicer one when they graduate...