Is Amateur Piano Recording This Hard?

[wsmith]

I have been watching a lot of short piano videos. With almost no exception, they sound so distorted and poor to me. I assume some are recorded using iPhones and such. Others appear to have pro videographers yet the sound is just awful. Are they just doing a poor job or is it this difficult? I mostly hear the distortion from the bass notes. Some examples:

This one seems under water:

Every one of her videos sound bad in a different way!

Another under water:

This one screwed up the image too:

Another one with good image but so bad of a recording:

Professional recordings sound infinitely better no matter which album I listen to. Any ideas?

Hello all,

I've recorded many piano recitals at an audiophile level as well as orchestra and eneamble performances. I use Earthworks omnis (QTC50s) connected to a Sound Devices 788 recorder.

Here's the secret you need to understand: you need to think in terms of recording the room as much as you record the instrument. For a piano recital, I won't promise good results unless the room is good acoustically. When I record an orchestra, it's in a hall desiged for better sound and hopefully it is. I've recorded Beethoven's 9th with full chorale at Arsht Center in Miami by recording the room and making it sound like you are in that room.

For a piano recital, always start with one mic over the strings and then one or more some distance away to get more room than piano. You are recording each mic individually and deciding how much of that to mix in, in post production. It's easy to move mics around to listen for better placement.

I understand that some of those less expensive recorders from Zoom, Tascam etc have decent preamps nowadays but they must supply a full 10 milliamps of phantom power to power an Earthworks omni. Are their sampling clocks good enough? I don't know. Earthwork's less expensive omnis, below the QTC50, are probably sufficient for the audiophile recordings I've done. Even cheaper omnis by other companies will often be preferrable to any directional mics if you aim to record the room and the piano, and the room is decent.

You'll never allow the listener of a recording to feel like they're in the room unless you record the room as well as you record the instrument/s. In my pro opinion, the only mics to use for that are omnis.

 

[Keith_W]

Fantastic insight @wsmith, thank you. Do you have links to some recordings you have done, preferably on Tidal? I would love to have a listen to them.

 

[wsmith]

Sorry Keith W., I don't do Tidal yet. I'm old school.That's why I'm hangin here to get some idea on my dream listenging system. I know how to output a Red Book CD though...

 

[droid2000]

Very bizarre to me that an industry over 100 years old and generating over $25B per year has such a difficult time recording sound from a piano in a room.

If the computer industry progressed as fast as the music industry, we'd still be punching holes in paper cards to run computer programs.

 

[Tim Link]

I'm up here at the Pacific Audiofest. There was a piano hidden in the lobby that I hadn't seen. Somebody started playing it and the difference of that real piano from anything I heard playing through any of the speakers at the show was immediately unmistakable but I was startled because I didn't know where somebody had hidden the piano! As far as I can tell no one has gotten very close at all to reproducing a piano by recording and playback.

 

[wsmith]

I might not necessarily agree with that.

The full audible spectrum should not be missing on a recording. I once knew a guy in Austria who developed a loudspeaker for Bösendorfer. From him I got a CD with reference recordings of various concert grands. The frequency and dynamic range of these recordings is very large and also goes down very low.

I'm up here at the Pacific Audiofest. There was a piano hidden in the lobby that I hadn't seen. Somebody started playing it and the difference of that real piano from anything I heard playing through any of the speakers at the show was immediately unmistakable but I was startled because I didn't know where somebody had hidden the piano! As far as I can tell no one has gotten very close at all to reproducing a piano by recording and playback.

Hi Tim Link,

As I said in my recent post here, I have been producing audiophile recordings for years. See my post above regarding my approach. Many live recording engineers have been able to capture the piano in classical recitals and concertos, where I've operated, in superb audiophile quality. For me that has been capturing a Steinway D in all its glory.

I can say this: It is far easier technically and far less costly to record at high audiophile level than it is to reproduce that same recording in the living room.

FWIW, I personally dismiss the misbegotten notion that audiophile recording has anything to do with recording at higher than 44.1kHz sampling rate. 24 bit depth is good due to the increased dynamic range. That is particularly beneficial due to the wide dynamic range inherent in many classical performances.

Pianos are rather easy compared to ferocious solo drumming, for example. You need a mic diaphragm that will not crap-out and become muddy under the rapid-fire intensity of the drummer's thunder. The capsule/diaphragm in the Earthworks omni is the same design they use in their drum mics. I've only recorded jazz drumming and can attest to their ability to keep up with a beat. It is that same fast reaction and settle time of the diaphragm that makes them great for drums and which also makes them great for piano since muddyness prevents audiophile recording of pianos too.

Again, playback of audiophile recordings in your living room with that kind of sonic excellence is the hard part.

 

[Tim Link]

Yeah playback of almost anything is hard to make sound like the real thing sounds, as in completely convincing. Fortunately at least for me I find that it doesn't have to be that good. I've heard a lot of really good piano recordings that sounded really nice and highly enjoyable played back on my system and others. It just doesn't sound like that real piano sounded. Or even my piano in my room. The piano disperses sound different than my speakers do and I think that's the main piece of it. Electric pianos never sound right either even if they're using really good samples. They do sound good though.

 

[concorde1]

I don't particularly like faking musical instruments but I cannot currently afford a grand piano and array of microphones. Undoubtedly a lot of people here are familiar with Pianoteq.

Some may have seen this man's videos. He shows just how good Pianoteq is at pretending to be a piano. Check out his other videos too. He is very talented and deserves infinitely more viewers.

 

[teashea]

Recording a piano is extremity difficult. For that reason in my music production (TES Productions) I never record a piano. I have the musician record using a good (almost all are bad) midi keyboard and then use sampled instrument plugins. There are a few companies who spend a lot of money and effort, along with great skill, to make some fine piano instrument plugins.

I should note that this would not work for situations where the piano is used for classical music. Midi is not quite good enough for that application.

 

[dfuller]

Recording a piano is extremity difficult. For that reason in my music production (TES Productions) I never record a piano. I have the musician record using a good (almost all are bad) midi keyboard and then use sampled instrument plugins. There are a few companies who spend a lot of money and effort, along with great skill, to make some fine piano instrument plugins.

I should note that this would not work for situations where the piano is used for classical music. Midi is not quite good enough for that application.

I don't think I'd call it "extremely difficult" - you can get good to great results with a pair of small condensers in ORTF, vary distance to taste - but they're certainly not the easiest instruments to mic.

 

[teashea]

I don't think I'd call it "extremely difficult" - you can get good to great results with a pair of small condensers in ORTF, vary distance to taste - but they're certainly not the easiest instruments to mic.

It depends on the quality of the recording that one wants to achieve. The highest quality sample instruments like Fabric, Kontakt and EZ Keys II use 12 microphones, $200,000 pianos etc to achieve the best sound..... and they achieve fabulous results.

However, recording drums is even more difficult and complicated.

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

Piano is only tough if you're going for that super clean grand sound. For stuff outside of that it's better to lean more into what you're getting and build on what's there. Same for drums. Got a bad space? Dampen the hell out of the drums and go for a dry 70's style sound.

 

[teashea]

Piano is only tough if you're going for that super clean grand sound. For stuff outside of that it's better to lean more into what you're getting and build on what's there. Same for drums. Got a bad space? Dampen the hell out of the drums and go for a dry 70's style sound.

Yeah - It depends on the standard of quality that one wants to achieve.

 

[dfuller]

It depends on the quality of the recording that one wants to achieve. The highest quality sample instruments like Fabric, Kontakt and EZ Keys II use 12 microphones, $200,000 pianos etc to achieve the best sound..... and they achieve fabulous results.

However, recording drums is even more difficult and complicated.

Drums also aren't particularly difficult if you pay attention to what you're doing.

 

[Waxx]

Piano must be recored in the room, not to close. And you need to keep a lot of headroom as it's a very dynamic instrument. That and drums are the hardest to do right, and a piano is the easiest to do wrong. And certainly with a cellphone microphone, with limited dynamic range, it's almost impossible for an amateur (or even an expert).

The recordings i assisted at were mostly done with Schoeps or Gefell sdc's from a distance (ORTF or X/Y mostly, depending on the room), sometimes also with a pair of mics close pointed close to the hammer, but not at it., But those close mics were mainly used to fill in the sound. Some use fairly neutral LDC's or large ribbons also. Preamps should be the most neutral in the facility and no processing on the recording, certainly no dymaic processing. Processing is for mixing. And again, keep massive headroom. That how i learned it.

 

[Nonick]

The easiest way to distuingish "difficulty" of piano recording is to compare amateur/semi professional recordings with professional.
As a piano based artist Tori Amos has excellent piano recordings (on studio and live albums).
When you compare her live and studio recording of Sugar with amateur recordings - its easy to conclude - its all about recording gear and knowledge.
As stated - they use Neumann U87s on the piano, AKG C414s.
For Tori's vocals they used a Focusrite Red 2 EQ, and a TubeTech LCA2‑B valve compressor.
source: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/mark-hawley-recording-tori-amos?amp
Comparison studio/live

 

[Waxx]

The easiest way to distuingish "difficulty" of piano recording is to compare amateur/semi professional recordings with professional.
As a piano based artist Tori Amos has excellent piano recordings (on studio and live albums).
When you compare her live and studio recording of Sugar with amateur recordings - its easy to conclude - its all about recording gear and knowledge.
As stated - they use Neumann U87s on the piano, AKG C414s.
For Tori's vocals they used a Focusrite Red 2 EQ, and a TubeTech LCA2‑B valve compressor.
source: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/mark-hawley-recording-tori-amos?amp
Comparison studio/live

I don't think you can compare it like that as the recording space is very different, and so are the circumstances. In live pop stage circumstances you can never got the clean sound of a studio as background noise is high.

 

[Scytales]

The best 2 channels stereo piano recordings I have ever heard were recorded as such :



From my point of view, the very best of the best are multichannel recordings based on the same principles (each 1 microphone mirroring 1 loudspeaker).

 

[GXAlan]

But with the Kawai (C701) piano now taking a good chunk of space in the living room and my wife's encouragements, I don't seemingly have a choice!

Oooh. Can you test the noise of the headphone jack?

There’s a line in, so you can test the speakers at the seated position and in-room measurement.

It will also take 16/44 WAV files to run sweeps!

 

[TLEDDY]

My last piano recording was a guy playing a Steinway in Miller Hall on campus here. I used crossed ribbons back about 3 or 4 meters on the side of the piano where the lid was open. I added a 1/2" omni condenser mike over the soundboard and pointed at the lid, mixed in at a very low level just as a slight hint of spice. I was pretty pleased with it.

This is what I have used! It just works!!