Video: How to Mic a Piano

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When miking a piano, it is best to keep a few microphones as close to the hammers and strings as possible. Get a clean, crisp sound from the high and low ends of a piano with information from an independent recording engineer and producer in this free video on music recording.

- Tips on Vocal Recording
- How to Mic a Piano

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Video Transcript

Hey here we are again in the studio, today we are going to talk about how to record and how to mic a piano. What we have here is a beautiful little Yamaha C7, one of the greatest little pianos ever made here in, for recording wise in the studio. What we are using today is two matched pair of AKGT2's. And they are the black and gold versions of the 414's. Nice little mics tend to have a nice warm bright end on them. Typically on miking a piano stereo wise anyway, we can have them one mic pointed more towards the high end of the harp. One pointed more towards the low end of the harp. Now the closer the microphones are to the hammers the more distinct, the more sharper, brighter sound you are going to get. The farther away the mics are from the hammers you are going to get a more rounder warmer sound. Another technique for recording the grand piano is to have one microphone kind of in the center of the harp more towards the hammers and another mic more toward the back end of the harp. It gets kind of the low end not rumble but more of the low end texture of the piano. Cause the low strings are rather long and high strings are short. So you are getting more of that warmer sound recording it that way. Now you can also have the top with it's top on or top off. Top off is when you would have microphones perhaps suspended above the piano kind of in a facing in a downward direction. And we would typically use cardioid microphone for this condenser cardioid microphones. And then you could shift the microphones front to back, side to side. If the top, if you have the top as it is now, the top on the piano the microphones in these TL2's, the microphone the pickup side is on the gold flat side. You can angle them more towards the hammer side or back towards the harp, more towards the base of the harp side. So those are some ways to how to record a grand piano.

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How to Mic a Piano

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