15-06-2015, 10:51 PM
Hi Lammy,
Thanks for listening and giving such detailed feedback - completely agree with you on the sax, that does need to come up a bit. Re the piano, I think in Mike's original write-up about the multitrack (I think he recorded this one?) he commented that the piano mic placement wasn't great and picked up a whole heap of pedal noise which I tried to remove with a steep hi-pass filter at about 80Hz - there was a whole lot of junk going on below there. There may well be noises from the pedals higher up as well, but if I'd gone any higher with the filter the piano would have sounded far too thin. I did boost a little around 220Hz with a shelf though so I'll back that off and see if that helps.
The only other thing I did with the piano was a gentle boost around 10kHz so that certainly didn't create any resonances around 2-3kHz, though they may well have been there in the recording. Fact is, piano is just such a hard instrument to record well because the soundboard is massive and the frequency range is enormous compared with something like a sax - even with quality mics in an ideal room it can be difficult to get a solo pianist sounding good, let alone someone playing as part of an ensemble. Anyway, that's enough of me blaming the original recording
I quite agree the piano sound isn't perfect by any means, I was just wary of making it worse by trying to get too surgical on it. Glad you enjoyed listening anyway, thanks again for the feedback.
Thanks for listening and giving such detailed feedback - completely agree with you on the sax, that does need to come up a bit. Re the piano, I think in Mike's original write-up about the multitrack (I think he recorded this one?) he commented that the piano mic placement wasn't great and picked up a whole heap of pedal noise which I tried to remove with a steep hi-pass filter at about 80Hz - there was a whole lot of junk going on below there. There may well be noises from the pedals higher up as well, but if I'd gone any higher with the filter the piano would have sounded far too thin. I did boost a little around 220Hz with a shelf though so I'll back that off and see if that helps.
The only other thing I did with the piano was a gentle boost around 10kHz so that certainly didn't create any resonances around 2-3kHz, though they may well have been there in the recording. Fact is, piano is just such a hard instrument to record well because the soundboard is massive and the frequency range is enormous compared with something like a sax - even with quality mics in an ideal room it can be difficult to get a solo pianist sounding good, let alone someone playing as part of an ensemble. Anyway, that's enough of me blaming the original recording
I quite agree the piano sound isn't perfect by any means, I was just wary of making it worse by trying to get too surgical on it. Glad you enjoyed listening anyway, thanks again for the feedback.