Tracking Piano in at concert Hall

[King Kong]

I'm going to record a grand piano in at a concert hall, I have experience on recording piano at studio and live piano concert. but not a piano album at the concert hall...

the piano track will be then mixed with some tape tracks (contempory music) my client only got an AKG C414 and Neumann 103 ..

have any good sugesstions for me? (besides getting more mics.. ^^ [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[gerax]

Hi

get a couple more... [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] Kidding

I think could set up a MS stereo pair with those two mics, setting the 414 as the "side" mic in the bidirectional pattern and the TLM103 as the M mic. I'd put the setup in front of the open lid (full stick or half stick depending on the sound you're after) anywhere from 5' to 10' depending of how much direct or reverberant sound you want in the track: since you are in a concert hall, maybe you'd want to take advantage of its sound, and thus place the mic a little farther than you normally would, but here the key word is experiment and find the sweet spot.

If you can use three channels of preamp I'd split the S mic in two and record each side on a separate track so that you'll be able to dial in the right amount of stereo spread vs mono mic in mixdown and listen to the decoded signal before printing it; if you can't, try to find a monitoring that will allow you to listen to the decoded MS and choose its proportions.

Hope this is helpful

Good luck

L.G.

[BradLyons]

Honestly, I'd consider renting some high-end gear if you don't have it.... mainly an Apogee Trak2 and a Royer SF12 stereo microphone. Most of my guys recording classical music/piano on a high-end level are doing this....

[DigiGeek]

The Trak2 would be amazing for this.