Imagine this scenario:
You're in a recording studio to record a beautiful solo piano work and the engineer asks you to warm up a bit before you perform.
You play play a quick run through the piece you have been diligently working on and practicing for weeks. You NAIL it! First run through, and it’s amazing. You are ready to rock!
Excitement is in the air because the recording session begins and the engineer works with you to set up microphones. You spend some time in the control room listening to some example tests to get as close to the sound that you want. Everything is ready to record and you sit down at the piano with everyone staring at you and… crap, nothing.
You're looking up at microphones and cables and you're afraid to move because you might make a sound that would be part of the recording. Your tummy grumbles out of nervousness - now the engineer is laughing. All this time the clock is running, and you just ate up half of your session.
“What was I thinking…”
One of the beautiful things about the Yamaha Disklavier is the fact that you can separate the performance from the recording. My choice of a piano for the studio took this idea into consideration - I recognized the value of being able to do the entire recording process after the fact.
To demonstrate my testing with this process - I took one of my solo piano pieces and played it back several times.
Each time I changed the microphones, positions, or configurations. I then recorded each pass as a 192 kHz 24 bit PCM digital audio file.
I created a page with all of these recordings, reduced to mp3 format - so you can hear the different versions of the same performance.
The original files can be downloaded for comparison if desired.
Here is the link to the project page. Enjoy!