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What mic technique are you currently using?

Hello everybody, I want to make a small survey here to hear what kind of mic technique you are currently using for your upright piano.

I have been recording the last couple of songs with two pistol mics.

Both positioned perpendicular to the strings and at a distance of around 50 cm, so a very conservative spaced set-up.

I really liked that sound but had some issues with phase around the 200 Hz region.

So after talking with a friend he recommended to try a x-y set-up. I tried it but personally didn't like the tone of it.

Therefore I am now experimenting around a bit with different techniques and would be curious to hear what your current set-ups look like and perhaps why you like that set-up. ☺️

14 comments

Comments (14)

Barry Hudson-Taylor

Feb 12

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Best Answer

Hi Maximillian,

It's an interesting proposition - recording a piano that is. With any instrument that you record with multiple mics you're always going to get phase issues of some sort. It's just part of the piano-recording-process.

At the moment, I use two SDCs lined up facing the hammers. Off the top of my head (I'm not at home), my left one is over C2 on the piano, and my right one over C6 (roughly). Then, in the middle of the piano, I have two ribbon microphones in an XY configuration... so it seems I have a blend of what you're currently experimenting with.

The main phase issues I usually encounter are with the XY ribbons, but I usually have that quite low in the mix and place an imager on that track to narrow the image. I also experiment with a multi-band compressor too. When that track is more centred in the mix, a lot of my phase problems usually go away.

You can try maybe increasing the distance between your microphones within a perpendicular set up so that your microphones are recording somewhat different areas of the piano. From my point of view, I like the piano range to be reflected across the recording/playback, so you'll usually hear the higher notes more prominent within the right headphone/speaker, and the bass ones more prominent in the left. Kind of like you're sitting at the piano when listening back. That's just my way of doing it though. It all depends on the sound you're trying to achieve.

I hope this is of some help, but without seeing or hearing the recording capture it's difficult to add any more :)

Maximilian Konrad

Feb 13

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Replying to

Thank you Berry for taking the time to write this answer.

It's a wonderful learning experience to play around with different mic techniques at the moment.

I quickly learned that getting rid of phase cancellation as a whole, is not only an impossible task (due to the exact reasons you outlines) but also pointless in most cases for a stereo signal.

My main intention with this post was to get some inspiration in set-ups, see what other people are using and then trying them out eventually and check if I enjoy that sound in general or for some specific tasks.

So thank you for describing your current set-up it sounds very interesting and I hope I'll have some time to work around with it. I've seen a lot of videos with three mic set-ups (or in your case four mic set-ups) and am really curious how this will sound with my piano :)

Liam Phan

Feb 13

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mostly AB for me, different distances different mics and pattern (cf photos)

One true things is: Felt will always sound different, I need to adjust it and add some tissues on my own to get the soft sound I want, my piano is sometimes a pain and will do something weird the next day on some keys...

I use Neumann KM184, AKG C414 (Silver I think), and have 2 pairs of Oktavia MK012

Liam Phan

Feb 14

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Replying to

and to be honest, already have some audio engineering background, mastering is not that stage to invest in, and he is mostly doing mastering at the prices of mixed music so would definitely go to Martyn

Maximilian Konrad

Feb 14

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Replying to

Thanks for the reply Liam. Do you usually have the mics perpendicular to the strings or angled inwards? > mastering is not that stage to invest in I am curious about you saying that. Do you just mean paying 3 times more money to get the best of the best mastering engineer or just overall invest in hiring a mastering engineer?

Liam Phan

Sep 07

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Replying to

Well, I saw a lot of different artist doing parallel to the floor, so perpendicular to the strings, but also slightly bend frontward (like 20° or 35°), and I would say it really depends on the piece you record. I already tried both of them, and use now both of them since some times my piano do sound better with parallel and sometimes not (felt sound not quite what I like in the particular piece I play)

For the investment question, I need to reformulate better my point of view.

Now that I have my long relationship with my mix engineer for a lot of different project, I had enough time to actually grasp the importance of the mixing stage rather than the mastering stage, I would suggest to invest first in mics, room treatment, then mixing then mastering. There is no clear rules on this, really depends on your own budget and assets, but paying the same price a mastering engineer rather than a mix engineer is for me the wrong way of thinking about postproduction. Mixing is where 90% of the quality will happen. 10% is the polishing and color (homogeneity) you want throughout your whole album in the mastering. If you can pay a lot for mastering engineer (grammy awards one for example), I hope you spent double amount in mixing stage (in terms of hours), to get the 90% correctly done here. Some mastering engineer can do stems mastering and thus improve more than 10% of your tracks (like 30%), but this is also the same price point as a mix sometimes…

Hope it is clear enough now !

Francisco Casarotti

Feb 11

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@Barry Hudson-Taylor to the rescue? 😄