Sampled Pianos - Mono or Stereo?

I know it is a lot of extra work, but perhaps sampling both mono and stereo then building two sets of multisamples would be an interesting exercise. Perhaps you could limit the experiment to a smal playable range. I thought your question was interesting but I have no answer for it.

There are many approaches when mic'ing the piano. The most common, mostly used are 'player perspective' and 'audience perspective', and depending on what kind of room/hall is used to record the piano, there're several 'ambient' perspective positions as well, available in different libraries.

The 'player perspective' approach is used in most stereo piano sample libraries. This is intended to provide a real piano *playing* experience, rather than a finished mix. As you can adjust the stereo width and position anytime in your mix, it works most of the times (though it's far from perfect). If you pay attention to some ballads, you'll see that the intro (raw piano) uses a very wide player perspective, which quickly mutates into a centered, narrower piano as soon as the drummer <g> starts playing.

Stereo recordings are tricky though. Unless you use a true-stereo microphone (like a schoeps if you're rich), using two microphones to get a phase and color coherent recording can become a nightmare. Apart from the standard pan effect, there's the phase correlation (read as the time difference between left and right channels) effect, which can create a very unplayable piano if not done properly.

Here's a nice overview on how to position the transdiucers to achieve a good stereo recording:

http://www.schoeps.de/E-2004/overview-stereo-techs.html


If you will finally record in mono, you can use the pan keyboard tracking in Dimension to position the piano in a player perspective anytime. However, the pan position is not the only thing a stereo recording will capture. For comparison, you can test the small mono piano patch in Dimension vs. the small stereo piano patches.

-René

Rene, what about a Random Pan opcode in SFZ, how can this be acomplished???

Do you really mean random pan? That would just be weird on a piano. Some kind of key2pan opcode would be more relevant. But if you have enough regions (e.g. 1 for every minor third), you can probably get away with 1 pan value per region.

ORIGINAL: René
If you will finally record in mono, you can use the pan keyboard tracking in Dimension to position the piano in a player perspective anytime. However, the pan position is not the only thing a stereo recording will capture.

René, if the width opcode is set to zero, does sfz / Dimension store a mono sample in memory? If not, perhaps this could be a future optimisation. Then you could produce 'lite' versions of any stereo sampled piano by setting width=0 and pan appropriately. This would result in a piano that required only half the memory, but would not need the extra disk space of creating mono samples.

ORIGINAL: René

Stereo recordings are tricky though. Unless you use a true-stereo microphone (like a schoeps if you're rich), using two microphones to get a phase and color coherent recording can become a nightmare. Apart from the standard pan effect, there's the phase correlation (read as the time difference between left and right channels) effect, which can create a very unplayable piano if not done properly.

I bought a Rode NT4 several years ago for just that reason -- it's a point-and-shoot stereo microphone with fairly good sound quality (not a schoeps, but pretty nice nonetheless). It's great for live concert recording (mostly high school concerts/musicals; my daughters are very active musically). It's the best solution under $500 I've come across.

My biggest complaint is that the stereo field is somewhat narrower than would be the case with other stereo micing techniques (e.g. the ORTF approach). That's not as apparent over monitors, but the headphone imaging is decidedly middle-of-the-head. However - the fact that it's impossible to screw up phase correlation and have mono cancellation effects kind of makes up for that. Not to mention that it makes setting up for a recording at least 15 minutes shorter than it used to be.....

It's apparently used a lot for recording acoustic guitar. I've used it several times for piano (college audition CDs for teens I know), and it's worked quite well for that, as well. However, I'm not running a pro studio / treated room / highly-maintained studio piano kind of operation..... YMMV.

- Jim