I've done the piano recording - and my friend's Yamaha is in his house, and it's a totally normal room - no acoustic treatment at all, so a difficult space - so a great experiment. I thought I'd use a typical distant technique, that works in lovely spaces - a pair of 414's in fig-8 mode, crossed at right angles - so a Blumlein stereo technique, that is usually lacking in smaller, parallel walled spaces. I used this as the 'comparison' and then put two SDCs in closer on boom stands. In a previous video I compared C451s against cheaper Samson C02 mics - opposite ends of the price spectrum - so I used them again.
In my head, I was thinking about that typical grand piano sound we often hear when people put up recordings of singers in concerts being accompanied by a grand piano - the voice usually works, but the piano often comes a distinct second in sound quality. I've always used a closer mic technique and blended them afterwards, but for this video I thought I'd experiment.
I got Grant to play the same piece multiple times - and swapped out the 451 mics for the C01's in the same physical location. Through the headphones it seemed clear they'd not be chalk and cheese - but closer, so more subtle differences. I also got him to play the piece on a master keyboard and I've included the sound of Pianoteq 6 - a VSTi, played via Cubase.
The result is a comparison on sound between 414, 451, C02 and a simulation - all recorded dry, no added reverb, dynamic processing or fiddling.
I also at the end got him to do one final version where I hand-held a Neumann TLM103 and moved it around while he played - including some unusual places.
Common internet wisdom is that for a grand piano, you must do X, but never do Y - so I've tried to let you hear the differences between these so called good and bad mic positions. The point I think is that conventional mic placement is to do with the strings, and where you put the mic, but also the effect of the soundboard. Clearly, with a grand piano - one pedal shifts 88 sets of hammers and keys to one side. This makes a noise. Another pedal lifts and drops 88 felt dampers onto the strings. The mic positions enhance or reduce these effects, along with the direct sound from the hammers hitting the strings, it's a balance between every little thing. the sound of the hammer on string, the thump of the dampers, the clunk of the keys moving sideways AND the overall component the soundboard adds. I let you hear what it sounds like underneath - and Yamaha grands do sound better underneath than others. It occurred to me that maybe a mic underneath, for the big sounds, blended with a mic or two closer to the hammers for definition might be a good (and new?) technique.
Don't forget that in this video, the lid is on full stick - so angles the sound toward the position where the 414's are. If you remove the lid, it sort of turns into an omni instrument, but is sort of a cardioid with full stick. Half-stick beams the output in an even narrower 'beam' height wise, and of course with the lid shut - the tiny subtle stuff gets reduced quite a bit - you make it a very darker sound compared to the lid being up.
In the section with the moving mic, note that there is not a huge variation in volume - most people assume that closer to the hammers is louder, when closer just means a little more percussive components are collected. In fact, the volume level not changing meant I had to restart the recording - I noticed the volume wasn't changing much, so to make sure, I pulled all the mic cables out bar the 103 - just to make sure it wasn't accidentally recording the wrong one!
Anyway - what do you think? Which sound do you like? For convenience, the Pianoteq simulation, with some reverb is very usable - but the sound of the two cheaper mics is actually not at all bad.
If you have any questions - just ask away.
