One of our customers sent in the following tip for a slightly unusual piano miking technique. In addition to posting it here we will be adding it to the Piano Miking Summit pages from several years ago. Hey, if you haven’t checked out some of the Summits we’ve done in the past it’s worth the time. There’s lots of good, practical info there from pro and semi-pro users. Kind of like a Forum, but without all the extraneous noise.
I tried an incredible miking technique for grand piano last week – two Neumann TLM170s in figure 8 pattern, set up XY one above the other. Piano lid raised fully. We set them up just outside the innermost point of the curve. The uppermost one was at an angle parallel to the curve (I don’t know how else to describe it – maybe 30 degrees to the player), the lower one perpendicular to that, so one side of the lower one was facing the strings, the other side facing the room.
Incredible sound, very full. I tried making one of them – the lower perpendicular one – an omni rather than a figure 8, wondering if the room side was superfluous. But the resultant sound didn’t blend as well; they were too different from one another. Better results with both as a figure 8.
This was suggested by the engineer, I would never have thought of it in a million years.