Matt Taylor's Upright Piano Recording
Watch and hear how easy it can be to record a great piano sound for your track using affordable microphones. This short video was recorded by Matt Taylor to show how simple it can be to get an excellent sounding piano for your tracks using this Steinway upright.
Matt likes recording upright pianos from the back using a pair of Calrec CM 654 (but you can substitute for whatever nice mics that you have available) and to 'give the piano bigger elbows' uses a Shure SM57 to add in some hammer noise. We recorded Issac Neilson playing to demonstrate the technique and hope you like the sound.
Matt takes us in to the control room and plays with the different mics so that you can hear the contribution that each mic brings to the overall sound to get the whole piano to 'sing'. Making the decision and 'printing the mix' of piano mics is important to Matt and he really likes using a desk to blend the sounds rather than using plugins.
Matt Taylor recently won Engineer of the Year at the MPG Awards so is a perfect person to guide you to getting a lush and beautiful piano recording.
We shot this video at Matt's studio, ARC Studios in Eynsham, Oxfordshire, UK. Watch out for other videos that we have recorded here.
