Classical/instrumental Audio Production, Classical/Instrumental Audio Production Options

[ftggog]

I just bought an emac and found that there's an audio input jack included. I'm an avid classical pianist and would like to try my hand at audio production with the piano. I would like someone to enlighten me on whether I need to get those huge audio mixers, mics, and whether there's a need to soundproof my room? I would also like to know whether any special software is required and what is the audio input jack used for? Lastly, how do I go about recording music from the piano to the Mac ...
Thank you in advance!

[Johnny Valium]

Hi,

I've never recorded a live piano so I'll just get into some basics:

The most important thing in your case is a good choice of microphones and a good sounding room. If your neighbors aren't having problems with you playing and your room sounds nice you don't need to soundproof it. You'll just have to experiment with the position of the mics (2 mics since you probably want to record in stereo).

Now comes the (huge?) mixer. The input jacks of the emac need to be fed with line level signals. This means for you that the signal your mics give has to be amplified before it can be fed into the input of your mac. Mixing boards have microphone preamps built in. This is why you probably need one. You can record stereo files with for example SparkMe which comes for free.

All the rest is a matter of how much money you want to spend. All the elements in the signal chain play a role in forming the sound that hopefully comes out of the speakers at the end of the day.

The built in input/output of the computer is not really professional sounding so if you have money buy a USB or Firewire audio interface. Try a search on that to find out which one suits your needs. But I have to stress the point that you need good mics and a good sounding room in the first place. No $$$ software or audio interface can make a sadly recorded piano sound good!

If you want to record more tracks than just the two of your piano and edit them independently you need a sequenzer software. There are basic versions of the big sequenzers available at a reasonable or no price at all.

Finally, find someone who can give you advice on how to record piano (and maybe also what mics to use). If you don't find one here (though I'm sure you will) try these forums here. They are also full of great producers/engineers.

Greetings and good luck!
JV