Mixing grand piano tracks?

[Bigus Dickus]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do with this. What have you guys found to work well?

Reverb - what size room, predelay, etc. has worked for you? What about layering reverb? Delay?

Compression - do you compress the whole track? Limit? Do you attempt to compress the hammer attack differently than the sustain portion? If so, how can you do that?

Pan wide left and right? More centered (classical music here)?

Do you duplicate tracks and use different effects on those tracks? For example, larger reverb on wider panned tracks with the gain pulled back, and smaller room reverb on a more prominent track kept nearer the center? Etc.

Experimenting is certainly helpful, but there are a staggering number of possibilities. What advice can you give someone that has zero previous mixing experience? Knowing what direction to head in could be a tremendous help to me.

I've listened to lots of recordings for reference, but they're all different enough (in piano sound mostly) that it's hard for me to get a lot of direction from that.

 

[James Argo]

Hmmm...

http://www.soundinstitute.com/article_detail.cfm/ID/92

 

[James Argo]

Yo Bigus Dickus, actualy your question has made me curious. I look around everywhere, but couldn't bring me good explanation on this issue. All of this time I did solo grand piano mixing (sometimes along with solo violin...) but don't have any mixing set up rulez... However, if you understand the basic part of how to mix in general, there you go for starting point. Piano has the largest range in frequency octave terms. So if you mix it right, it can occupy wide enough range to make it "full" mix.
Using a compressor is sometime cool.
My fave is Medium Attack (about 30-40 ms), ratio 2:1 or 3:1, Hard Knee, and fast release (below 10ms).
EQ is subjective. But generaly, I will boost gentle about 3dB around 220Hz, Cut 6-9dB around 650 Hz, Boost 1.5dB around 3200Hz, and finally boost about 3dB around 8000Hz.
For brighter sound, the EQ boost everything on 400Hz to 8000Hz by about 2-3dB, and cut 2dB around 220Hz.
I don't use chorus thingie on classical (new age) piano tunes.
Using slightly Reverb would be good.
I select Wide Room, 90ms PreDelay, 1.5 sec Rev Time, Balance 3.0, Distance 5.0, Density 0.85.


That's my usual setup, but once again, it deppends on what you got there. But it could help as starting point...
This link is good for you to check...

http://www.alexandermagazine.com/issues/req0402/startmix.asp

Hope it helps

James

 

[Sennheiser]

For me it depends on the type of music and the mood that you are trying to convey.

If it is solo piano of a moderately paced ballad or slower tune I like a large dark hall with some pre-delay and a medium-short decay. I don't want it sounding like mud. For something a little more up-tempo, a medium bright hall or large room.

On the slower stuff I'll use about a 3:1 soft-knee with about a -8 threshold. That setting will vary with the dynamics written into the individual piece. These settings may or may not work if using a digital based recorder. The signal will probably peak waypast 0db. For rock music, all bets are off and I'll tune the compressor by ear.

I tend to not use any EQ at all on solo piano or solo with accompaniment. Mic placement is your best EQ. Along with good mics for piano.

God I love solo piano music. I think I'll play some right now.

 

[Bigus Dickus]

Thanks for the links and suggestions James, that's at least some good reading regardless, and your settings will be a good starting point for me to listen to.

Thanks also Sennheiser. I have pretty good mics (Oktava MC012's matched) and a "decent" mic pre (might change that one day, but not today), but the piano and room are almost certainly going to limit my ultimate sound quality (Baldwin 6' in smallish acoustically treated room).

I'll try your compressor settings as well and see what I think.

These settings may or may not work if using a digital based recorder. The signal will probably peak waypast 0db.

I'm curious, since I am using digital based recording (probably not ideal for piano, but hey... I'm not a millionare! ). What do you mean by "peak way past 0db," as it applies to digital? I thought compression brought things up to 0db, but not over. Of course, I don't have a clue really about compression yet, and am trying to figure the damn thing out!

For one: what I am hearing in my recordings sounds as good as I expected it would when I started, but my biggest complaint would be that the in the recording the hammer attack seems too harsh, and the sustain seems to drop off too quickly (more precisely, it drops very quickly after the initial attack, but then does sustain at a reasonable level without dropping off further). This happens mostly when playing loud passages, and I don't know if it's an artifact of the piano, room, mic/pre/etc. After trying every mic placement, I think it's either piano, room, or hardware, and not mic placement, as it was always there.

Damn, that got longer than I wanted. My question was going to be if there's a way to judiciously use compression to soften the initial attack without hurting the sustained part of the note, so that the average volume level could be brought up. I'm sure that's possible, but even after reading about what attack, threshold, etc. do it wasn't obvious what settings to use. I'll use you guys as a starting point now obviously.

Here's some sample material if you're just really bored and want more information before trying to answer me: http://www.nowhereradio.com/artists/album.php?aid=2316&alid=-1

God I love solo piano music. I think I'll play some right now.

Yep!

 

[littledog]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do with this. What have you guys found to work well?

Reverb - what size room, predelay, etc. has worked for you? What about layering reverb? Delay?

Compression - do you compress the whole track? Limit? Do you attempt to compress the hammer attack differently than the sustain portion? If so, how can you do that?

Pan wide left and right? More centered (classical music here)?

Do you duplicate tracks and use different effects on those tracks? For example, larger reverb on wider panned tracks with the gain pulled back, and smaller room reverb on a more prominent track kept nearer the center? Etc.

As far as reverb, it all depends on what simulated space you want to place your piano in...

As far as the rest, it really sounds like you're working much too hard. Unless you are going for some sort of deliberately distorted or unnatural piano sound, just record the piano with good mics placed in good positions. Use EQ if necessary in the mix if there are a lot of competing instruments and you need to thin out some frequencies.

But solo piano shouldn't require EQ or compression, or very minimal... or any other complicated mixing techniques, unless you are dealing with an inferior instrument or room.

 

[Sennheiser]

What I mean with the compressor setting that I usually (not always) use is that it still allows the signal to saturate the tape somewhat, up to around +2/+3db on peaks. This is a no-no using digital so you may have to adjust to keep it under 0db.

I don't use it to squash the signal, just to somewhat tame the peaks a bit.

 

[Bigus Dickus]

Re: Re: Mixing grand piano tracks?

As far as the rest, it really sounds like you're working much too hard.

That's comforting. I was afraid that maybe it was as much of a pain to mix a piano as it is to record it. I'm releived to hear some suggest that "less is better," which is what my ears were telling me to begin with.

But solo piano shouldn't require EQ or compression, or very minimal... or any other complicated mixing techniques, unless you are dealing with an inferior instrument or room.

The room is definitely not optimal, nor is the positioning of the piano in that room, and a 6' Baldwin is a looong way from what I would prefer to have sitting in my room.

It doesn't sound like it needs much EQ to my ears, but the hammer attack... well, I'll play with it and see if any compression tricks can help that at all.

 

[Bigus Dickus]

What I mean with the compressor setting that I usually (not always) use is that it still allows the signal to saturate the tape somewhat, up to around +2/+3db on peaks. This is a no-no using digital so you may have to adjust to keep it under 0db.

I don't use it to squash the signal, just to somewhat tame the peaks a bit.

I see. I record at 24 bit, so I don't tend to run the signal too close to 0db on the peaks, since I have some dynamic range there to play with. My A/D is also a dbx Type IV deal, which has a non-linear conversion on the top 4db (I think) to avoid clipping... and I try to avoid that range for the most part. So I guess I'm limiting myself to around 20bits of resolution normally. Still, that 4db is there after A/D conversion in the software for compression and reverb effects to use up, so perhaps I won't have as much of an issue with it.

Again, thanks for the tips guys.