… and as a result have only about five or six more tracks to put down before I finish the recording phase of the project. As I’ve intimated in previous posts, it has been much harder this time around since I’ve been much more critical of what I am playing, and I hope this is reflected in the final result. As I write this, I’m listening to the tracks as mixed and I’m feeling quite relaxed about the whole thing, which is a very positive sign.
One of my major conundrums has been dealing with background noise in the raw recordings. Initially I was doing a full 100% noise reduction and that seemed to give good results until I noticed that where there was a lot of sustain, the end part of the sustain was being identified as noise and being chopped off. If I only did a 50% noise reduction, this got rid of most of the background (it is there, but inaudible unless you turn the volume up full, and then only right at the very end of the piece, which is insignificant in real terms.
The other major modification was a result of my son borrowing the Rode shotgun microphone I use to pick up room ambience. During its absence I decided to run with just the two microphones inside the piano and basically found that the sound was identical to the four microphone set up. So now I’ve gone back over all of the tracks and remixed accordingly and there is no doubt that the sound is better.
It is surprising to me that making such a small change (in terms of the noise reduction) had such a significant effect on the sound quality, particularly when viewed (as it were) through a good set of earphones. The full noise reduction tended to make the sound very watery, and reducing the noise reduction made the sound much more integral over the whole frequency range.
I also found, as I expected, that the Stuart piano’s dynamic range is greater than that of the recording and CD playback. I am beginning to understand why many commercial recordings use limiters to ‘squash’ the dynamic range, but I’ve been determined not to do that. I’ve yet to fully sort that out, but it is entirely possible that in order to fit in the ‘loud’ bits, the ‘soft’ bits may well be very soft coming out of the speakers. There isn’t really that much I can do about it (the piano is just too good!) and it will simply mean that people will just have to listen more carefully to fully appreciate the extremes of the piano, both volume-wise and tonally.