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In Reply to: I have a question: why is it so difficult to record piano? posted by Joel_Waterman on March 10, 2007 at 16:06:34:
....In general the piano is tough because it has one of the widest tonal ranges of any instrument and is highly percussive in nature in addition to its sonority. Nonetheless, most classical recordings get the piano approximately correct. Those that don't do so for several basic reasons...most often, the piano is recorded in a bad sounding acoustic environment. For classical music, it is almost essential that some "room sound" be included, and if that "room sound" is bad, the piano sounds bad. And sometimes (most notably at DG) the engineers use a misguided attempt at multimiking rather than the tried an true "purist" approaches used for decades (XY, ORTF, spaced omnis)....When it comes to jazz and pop, the problems are usually different. The piano is treated like any other instrument, and the engineer wants to record it on a separate "track" or "tracks". In the case of jazz this is usually in conjunction with some overall ensemble pick up wich provides a stereo spread and some "room sound". In the case of pop, the engineer usually wants no "room sound" at all and only wants a direct, non-ambient feed of the piano into the mixing console for further manipulation (eq, compression, reverb, etc) before feeding the modified piano sound into a "mix" with other instruments, the whole than often treated to more manipulation when mastered.
So, with the type of recording, there is plenty of room for bad sound to creep in, starting with mic placement. Most jazz-pop engineers want to put mics in or attached onto the piano to get a "bright, articulate" sound. This by itself can lead to overload if they are not careful, and can easily lead to a disjointed sound with no imaging, with disproportionately bright high end and weak and sometimes muddy bass. Then, of course, to the degree that the resultant sound is subject to all kinds of post-tracking manipulation, the chance for poor human judgement is rife. And then when the final mix is "mastered", increasingly the sound is manipulated still further with even more chance for the piano sound to be botched up. Because most other instruments range is not as wide, it is often easier to overlook the effects of this manipulation on their sound...but not so the piano.
Hope this helps a bit. Frankly, for the person interested in great piano sound, they could spend half a lifetime just perfecting their art, and some classical and jazz engineers have done just that. Would they were the rule, not the exception.
Harry
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Follow Ups
- Depends on whether you are talking about Classical or Pop or Jazz... - theaudiohiffle 18:21:49 03/10/07 (0)
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