Recording Classical Music

CHAPTER 11 Solo Piano

A sound source as large as a full-size grand piano presents engineers with numerous alternatives for turning the sonic character of the instrument into a stereo recording, and to capture a balanced sound from a source that has diverse possibilities for microphone positioning, many believe that a homogeneous tonal quality can be found only when the soundwaves have propagated beyond the near field and coalesced into a unified image (for large instruments, this distance is somewhat greater than for smaller sound sources). Other engineers, however, prefer to capture the instrument from a closer perspective and adjust their miking techniques accordingly. But in both approaches, recordists generally strive for a microphone setup ...