Daughter is in the musical Oliver, help!

[Frankm666]

Okay I need some help. I’m a drums, bass, guitar vocal guy and my daughter is in the musical Oliver. I offered to record her and the other kids along with the teacher putting on the show- who is the piano player. Make a cast album (how old am I) CD. They sing a lot in a group. There are about ten of them. How should I record them. I’ve never recorded a group like that. One mike? Two in stereo? Two in stereo and one on a soloist? Two in stereo, one on a soloist and one room mic? I want to be safe and not get into a lot of phase problems. But I’ll keep every mic on different tracks so I’m really just concerned with getting a good stereo or mono recording. I’ve got a nice room to track them in. I use room mics on everything because the room sounds so nice. These are my microphones:
CAD VSM 1 tube
C1
Rode NT1
2 octava’s 012s
Sure sm94
Two 57s
Audix d6
ATM 31
Now the second part. The teacher is going to lay down the piano on our old console (luckily it was just tuned and fixed up) How do you mic a console piano? Open the top and mic from there? On most of the songs she is going to lay down the piano the night before and the kids will be recorded the next day with headphones and she will conduct them. On two of the songs she needs to follow one of the girls (It’s all girls and one boy) So she will do that on my controller and we will use the piano plugins in logic. Any thoughts and help would be much appreciated because I really want this to be descent for the kids.
Frank Military

 

[Massive Master]

Frank - You've got a big heart to take that on -

First thing - The kids aren't going to have high expectations, so don't sweat the small stuff - You'll drive yourself nuts (I might have a bit or a real, real, real lot of experience with this type of stuff - Simple is better).

Get the piano the simple way - Put a mic or two behind it by the soundboard. Move it around - You'll find a nice spot for it easily. If it's one of those 1970's Yamaha's, you'll have a hard time finding a bad spot for it.

If you want a little something to play with, open the top up and put a condenser over it and record it to a separate track to mix in later.

A stereo pair (Oktava's?) for the chorus.

On the leads (don't laugh) I'd use the 57's with windscreens. Even the "58" type screens from RadShack will do. This will let them get up onto the mic a little and give it a fairly thick but uncluttered sound. You might compress the snot out of them later (or better, send them to an aux and compress the snot out of the aux in parallel with the original).

Make sure she puts in four counts where needed!!! A 57 with a screen that she can tap on (to another track, of course) while playing will be a big help - Oliver has a lot of stops that are easy live, but even the pianist might have a problem without an audible cue.

Good luck...