Recording piano in garage from bedroom?

[curtiswyant]

Hi y'all,
I'm looking to get a "free" piano locally. However, it would be impossible to get it up in my studio (bedroom) and I might be moving soon, so I thought I would just stick it out in the garage or something since it won't be a valuable instrument. I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow run a 150ft+ XLR cable to a mic in the garage from my bedroom and still have a good signal. I don't care about sound quality...from my concrete garage

 

[DonF]

150 feet is a long cable run. At that length you might notice a difference between cheap cable and the good stuff. But, assuming your mic preamp's input is balanced, it shouldn't cause any noticeable signal degradation. The low impedance, balanced system was designed for long runs, after all.

 

[mixsit]

Better yet, maybe put the preamp at the piano, run line level to the recorder.
(I don't know that it's too long for mic level though. Some pa snakes are getting up there.)

 

[Massive Master]

Definitely go for decent cable, but I do 200+ foot runs all the time with no problems for the most part.

If you crank up the pre-gain and you're not picking up traffic & weather, it should be fine.

 

[Ed Dixon]

Be aware that the temps in the average garage vary considerable from day to day and during the night. Large temperature variations will generally not do good things to pianos.

Ed

 

[Han]

Hi y'all,
I don't care about sound quality...from my concrete garage

Save yourself a lot of trouble and use a decent digital piano.

 

[starch]

curtiswyant, if you don't care about the sound quality from the garage, I think a little noise from a long cable run will be the least of your concerns. You shouldn't have any probs doing 150'. Ed Dixon was right. You may have a pretty tough time keeping that thing in tune.

Good luck.