Rewind to January of this year. I had most of the music for Encounters of the Beautiful Kind written, and I had purchased a gorgeous Yamaha C7 just the prior August.  Now we just had to capture the beautiful sound the piano was making. No big deal, right?

Heh. Audio engineering is a legitimate, demanding career, and recording solo piano is legendarily difficult. But my partner David and I love ourselves a good challenge, and you can’t argue against the convenience of being able to record in your living room, so…away we went.

It started at a meet-and-greet with my Performing Rights Organization, APRA. I had recorded my first album Wandering Soul at a well-known Auckland recording studio, but I knew I wanted to try something a little different with my second album. In the US, there are recording studios that *specialize* in recording solo piano, but no such luck in New Zealand.

Determined to find the resources I needed, I approached a lovely gentleman named Mike Bloemendal of Imaginex Studios who had just given a talk at this meet-n-greet – he seemed to really know his stuff, and I asked him if he knew of any studios here in Auckland that recorded a lot of solo piano. He didn’t, but he had only to ask a few follow-up questions to be intrigued by the possibility of helping me set up a home studio that would rock the solo piano sound. So we set up a time for him to bring some equipment and see what we could do…

It’s important to take a moment here and emphasize that this is a subjective process. There are many different ways to record a piano, and many different pieces of equipment you can use to do it. So much depends on the piano itself, the room, and even the style of music. So keep that in mind as I tell you what we did.

 

 

 

We recorded a test version of my song Kingfisher, Mike did a quick mastering of it (more on mastering in another post), and compared it to my released recording. It was…amazing. I was absolutely floored by how great it sounded.

 

We knew it could be done. David and I now needed to acquire this equipment, learn how to set up the microphones ourselves, learn how to use the very complicated recording software, and figure out a process that would give us the same high-quality sound Mike was able to get with a few flicks of his wrist.

About a month later, we’d acquired the equipment (I’ll skip detailing the hijinx involved there) and were ready to start recording. But….we couldn’t quite remember how Mike had set up the microphones. So rather than bug him again, we thought we’d figure it out ourselves by trial-and-error.

That was a mistake. It was certainly a learning process as we went into recording sessions again and again to only come out the other side with sub-par-sounding music. I took some pictures along the way of our various experiments to document in case we found the magic setup. For your comedic enjoyment:

It was a process that took weeks. And learning how to deal with the equipment and mic placement was only a small part of the whole puzzle. We finally ended up getting in touch with Mike again, who is an absolute dear and helped us in so many many ways. It turns out we were doing a whole host of things wrong, but he helped us figure it all out until…victory!

There is more to this story: learning the recording software, figuring out an effective process for recording, post-production critical listening, the amazing process of mastering. This is part one of a several part story, so stay tuned for the rest <3

In the meantime, Encounters of the Beautiful Kind releases this Friday, June 1. You can pre-order below, or keep an eye out because it’ll be available everywhere on Friday!