Frågade Ingo Petry om mikrofonplaceringen och fick följande uttömmande svar:
I will give you some details of the setup and a brief explanation why we decided to record the complete music for keyboard Solo in Österåker K:A.
I used 5 microphones. 3xNeumann TLM 50 (Omni characteristics) and 2xNeumann KM 143 (wide cardioid characteristics). The TLM 50’s were placed as spaced omnis in front of the piano with open lid, maybe some 2m+ from the piano. Distance between the 3 Omnis about one meter or so. All more or less on the same lining. The KM143’s were maybe 6m from the piano away pointing backwards.
Without getting into too many details this setup was very simple and ‘clean’ and I could do the Stereo as the Sourround mix with the same positioning. In the Surround mix (5.0) I could give every microphone their own speaker. I didn’t use any artificial reverb, neither in the 2:0 nor in the 5:0 mix. The recording was done in 96/24 resolution and then transferred to DSD for the SACD Hybrid (which also contains a 16bit 44,1KHz version if you don’t have a SACD capable player).
The impression people were writing about on your forum are all correct and more or less intended.
To record a historic instrument in an attractive way to transport both the different sound and the musical message/interpretation we decided to go for this old stone church. It has quite a long reverberation time but in a very pleasant way. The decay in the frequency domain as well in the overall density distribution is very smooth and natural. It helps to compensate for the relatively short decay in the higher register of a fortepiano.
I wanted to go for the Omni array because they provide the most coherent bass response and the TLM50 especially are extremely precise (you’ll find more info on the Neumann homepage).
If you record only a single instrument this is possible because there is no leakage from let’s say a cello or a violin etc. in a chamber music setting. Working in a church does mean normally though that you need to get a bit closer to the sound source not to land behind the point where the indirect sound is bigger than the direct signal. Especially with Omni microphones because they catch the sound from all directions more or less equally.
A last point maybe concerning the width of the piano impression, the high frequencies are coming more from the left simply because of the construction of the keyboard/soundboard/string arrangement.
The modern piano is more crossstringed and the lid is reflecting the different frequencies in a more random way where an old piano is much more distinct from where the frequencies are reflected from the soundboard via the lid. A harpsichord is even more tricky, there the notes can almost jump from left to right depending on the model - quite a challenge for a recording
Anyway, there are many more points to this as you can imagine but I don’t wanna bore you and your panel too much with all these details.
Hope you can enjoy Ronald Brautigam recordings further on. I have a long collaboration with him since 25 years or so. We did some 70 CD’s (SACD’s) together.
My very best wishes and hope this little explanations are of some help!
If you have further questions I can try to answer them of course. Always nice to talk to people who are interested to look a bit behind the scenes.
Ingo Petry
Take5 Music Production
Det förklarar ju saken. Skulle också vara kul att höra surroundmixen. Nu ska jag lyssna lite mer på Ronald Brautigam. Det fanns ju en del.
Kanske så drunknar klangen från kyrkan i klangen från mitt vardagsrum?
