Recording a Baby Grand

I'm coming up on a session that I'll have to record overdubs for for 7 or 8 songs using a 5' baby grand. We'll have to get the entire session done in 4 or 5 hours. The player is someone I've done frequent jazz gigs with and I know he can pull it off on his end, but I've never recorded this instrument before (it came with my wife who only plays classical piano). The styles range from bossa nova to funk and pop. There is already rhythm guitar on all of the tracks, but again, I know the player will be able to make his part fit musically.

Given the time restraints, I won't be able to take a ton of time experimenting and will have to get a basic sound that will work with all of the songs on the list.

My room is medium sized (about 25' square), is acoustically treated and has a really nice sound to it. The piano is on a dolly and can be moved freely. Given that this is my wife's piano, removing the lid is not an option. I have an assortment of mid-grade large and small diaphragm condensers - some being matched pairs - and two very high end dual-mono mic pres - one tube and one solid state.

I tend to have an aesthetic that goes for a very natural sound, so my first thought has been to just put a single mic on the room in a good spot, record it in mono, pan it in the mix and run it through a stereo reverb. As I've considered this, it seems like a wider stereo recording might be better, but I'm not sure how to go about that given that I can't remove the lid. It seems that a stereo pair would have to get too close to the strings to sound natural.

Anyway, I know there are other things out here about recording pianos, but I was wondering if anyone could offer some thoughts about how to approach this particular situation. I would also love to hear some ideas on things to avoid doing. Also, are there some things that I should consider for fitting this into a mix that I might overlook if I just go for the most natural sound I can manage?

Thanks for your thoughts,
Seth

You don't have to close mic the harp or remove the lid in order to record stereo.

Mono is not a bad way to go if you are doing far-field miking or using a mic with a wide capture pattern. Getting a stereo spread with piano is grossly over-rated in most cases.

A lot of it depends on the instrument, what kinds of mics you have to work with and the kind of acoustical environment. If bleed is a concern then you pretty much have to use directional close mics. If bleed-through is not a concern and the room is really good then you could do worse then to simply walk around the room listening to the player and drop an omni reference mic like an earthworks wherever it sounds best. If the room is awesome and you really want to go natural, just do the same but with a wide-spread stereo pair and check for phase problems, or set up a M-S arrangement if you have one or whatever.

It doesn't do to overthink when recording a piano, especially when you are recording a bunch of different styles of play. You have to try it and see what works. The fact that you have a strategy in mind to begin with helps. If you want "naturalistic," then close-miking with a pair of 57s under the hood is probably right out.

Hopefully you know your mics pretty well. They type of mix it has to fit into is a very big factor. If you want the piano to plink through a dense rock band, then it's probably going to require a somewhat different approach than a rich, nuanced solo recording.

If you have only 4-5 hours to record, then you need to decide in advance how much time you're going to devote to getting the sound right, and schedule the session. Miking a piano is like miking a drum kit, and can easily take a whole day in a new room with a new instrument, even if you've done it a hundred times before. There's always one more spot to check, so you need to decide up front whether you have 20 minutes, an hour, or three hours, and how much time is going to be required to actually cut the tracks.

My rule of thumb for tracking is usually to multiply the piece length by 20, which allows for 20~30 takes, counting false starts. So if you have three 5-minute songs, my rule doesn't leave any time for setup. If the player is really tight and together and can nail every song in less than one hour, then you could probably get in four songs and leave an hour for mic setup. The point is to set a cutoff where you stop fiddling with the mics and start pressing record. If you are super-crunched for tracking time, then maybe you should just take your best guess and set up mics all over the place and wait until after the session to see what sounds good.

Piano is a tricky instrument to get right. It's hugely dynamic on both a macro and a micro scale, and recordings of it can be hard to assess until you have some time to play with the dynamics, especially if there is not a seperate control room to listen in while an assistant does the placement. It tends to couple with the room quite a bit, but to varying degrees depending on the intensity of the playing. Think about and decide in advance whether articulation and clarity are more or less important than instrument tone and texture, because you may have to make a choice between the two. If it is going to sit in a mix with other instruments, decide what the role and critical range is going to be in advance, so you know what to focus on.

Cheers.

Thanks for chiming in Yep

I think the shotgun strategy Yep suggested is going to be a big part of what I go to. This is especially true considering all the different styles in play. If I record 6 or 7 tracks of piano then I can mix them to taste for each song.

The pianist is a full-time professional player and has played most of these songs repeatedly live. The parts will be mostly comping changes and I realistically expect him to be able to nail each song in two or maybe 3 takes.

I'll do my best to get my wife to play some for me, but she could barely give a hoot about all of this recording nonsense I'm into I'm lucky enough that she's willing to take the kids to her mother's house during sessions! I was able to build the studio because we both use it primarily as a teaching studio for private lessons, although I think our students find it pretty neat to come to their lessons and see all of the mics out in changing configurations for whatever I happen to be working on.

This is where I'll probably start:
Matched pair of Octava MK012s in xy near the piano strings with an MXL lg diapragm on the sound board a la Ed Cherney.
A single Rode NT1 in the room fairly close to the instrument.
Another single NT1 in the room farther away from the instrument.
I aslo have a third MK012 and a sm diapragm Audio Technica that's pretty bright that I can stick somewhere too if it seems like I'm missing something
I'll probably leave the 57s in the closet.

My room is even and had a pretty good reverb for a space it's size, but it's by no means a concert hall, so I don't really see much advantage coming from micing the room in stereo, but it seems that I might really open up some options from having two mono room sounds to choose from when blending with the closer mics.

I'll have to really experiment with the preamps to use. I have an Avalon 2022 that is trasparent, open, and warm and a UA 2-610 that can get downright nasty sounding (I've found that this is sometimes awesome and sometimes unusable depending on the application). Then I'm out of premium preamp channels and will have to go through a small Behringer board for what's leftover - although honestly, I've found that this Behringer stacks up remarkably well against my other stuff and kicks the pants off my Mackie 1202 as far as the preamps go. My guess is that the 2-610 will be good on the close mics to get a little more punch with the Avalon on the room mics to get a fuller spectrum.

Anyway, the session is still a few weeks off. I'll check back in as I get a little time to experiment.

In the meantime any more thoughts would be appreciated. Despite the fact that I have a few weeks till the recording, my schedule with work, kids and other sessions really doesn't leave me much opportunity to fool around with it ahead of time.

Seth