It’s arguable that the only instrument that challenges guitars (and organs) in terms of ubiquity in worship music is the piano. The “pianoforte” was the first keyboard instrument that facilitated both playing softly — “piano” and loudly — “forte.” It has emerged as a key instrument across all genres of music, both religious and secular, and it’s almost certainly featured in the mix at your house of worship, in one way or another. As with guitars, there is a wide range of tonality and flavor available to us when using pianos, and there are also numerous ways to capture the sound of the piano and present it to the congregation (even including sampling the sound and presenting it via MIDI controllers) The way we do it and the way we present it to the congregation varies, but we all love the sound. Let’s take a look at how to make a joyful noise with the piano.
First, the Basics…
Let’s start out with the fundamentals of getting a good piano sound. As with all musical instruments that produce actual sound (as opposed to electric guitars or synthesizers and such), pianos must be properly cared for, tuned, and deployed in such a way as to deliver the highest quality sound. Large churches with large budgets probably have large pianos and the financial wherewithal to retain an expert who can care for the instrument and keep it in tune. Considering that a high-quality grand piano can be a six-figure expenditure, it makes sense as to why you might bring in an expert. But at the same time, if the price of your piano is only in the five- (or even four-) figure domain, you’ll still need to have it tuned on occasion. In fact, cheaper pianos almost invariably need to be tuned more often than expensive pianos. There’s maintenance to consider as well — felt wears out, as do mechanical linkages and other stuff. You may also want to have a humidifier in your piano under certain circumstances. These are all important considerations, but far and away, tuning is the most important among these. There are no processors or plug-ins that can resolve a piano that’s out of tune — so let’s get that right from the outset.
The simplest scenario we’ll consider is a very small church that meets in a very small space… so small that sound reinforcement isn’t even used. In a case like this, you may even be using an upright piano — as even baby grand pianos take up quite a bit of floor space. If you’re not using sound reinforcement, no miking will be happening at all, but you will want to be mindful of the placement of the piano. Placing the piano out in the open is as close to “free air” as you’ll get (without suspending the thing up in the air!) If you put it against a wall, you’re now in a half space, and it will be louder. If you put it in a corner, you’ll now be in a quarter space, and your piano will be even louder. This acoustical phenomenon can be leveraged to balance the instrument against vocals and other acoustical instruments. If you open the lid (or even the lower panel — the one above the pedals and below the keys), your piano will be louder (and also brighter). All of these things can be leveraged to make even an unmiked piano work in your paradigm.
Bring on The Mics!
Let’s move on to scenarios in which we will be miking our piano. We’ll examine both upright and grand pianos, but first let’s talk about the things that apply to both. First — will we mic with a single microphone or multiples? We need to know whether we want to present the instrument in mono or stereo. We may still want multiple microphones even if we’re presenting in mono, but it’s more likely that the piano will appear in our mix in stereo if we deploy more than one mic. In my travels, I’ve encountered some engineers who prefer to designate a pair of mics in a piano as “low” and “high,” and other engineers who refer to a pair as left and right stereo. Either designation is legitimate — whether they’re presented in mono or stereo won’t be determined until the signal emanates from the mixer. I generally ask myself one simple question any time we have an instrument that could be potentially presented in stereo: Is the mix going to feature a large or small number of elements? For example, if I’m mixing a single acoustic guitar and acoustic vocalist, I will almost always present the guitar in stereo and park the vocal in the middle of the image.
On the other hand, if the mix is complex, with multiple guitars, keys, vocals and other elements, I’m more likely to present some elements in mono and panned to a specific location in the stereo image. I try to avoid the scenario in which everything in the mix is in stereo, and a “hole” in the middle of the mix develops as a result. This is even worse if all these stereo elements are hard-panned. Even if center-of-the-mix elements like kick, bass, snare and vocals are panned dead center, there can be a lack of appropriate “spatial density” in the mix. You may present your entire mix in mono, in which case this is not an issue, but if you are mixing in stereo, you’ll need to consider it.
It’s definitely plausible to capture a piano nicely with a single mic. You’ll want a really wide cardioid pattern or even omnidirectional — pianos are physically wide compared to almost all other instruments, so in order to capture the entire span of notes, a tighter pattern just won’t do. Additionally, the mic will need to be pulled back a bit. Even an omni pattern will slightly over-represent the part of the piano’s range to which it is placed most closely. An omni or wide cardioid pulled back a couple of feet (or more) can deliver a nice signal. Of course, we need to consider spill, so cardioid may be the better option of the two if that’s an issue. One nice feature of grand pianos is that the lid not only gives us a nice reflection of the output of the strings, but can also serve as an acoustical shield, attenuating any noises happening behind it. Opening the top of an upright has the same effect, albeit to a lesser degree.
We may choose to move up to a two-mic configuration even if we’re not mixing the piano in stereo. This facilitates us getting mics closer but still presenting the entire range of the instrument. Closer provides a brighter tone and captures less room ambience, which may be desirable, particularly if we want to have greater control over the sound at the mixer. De-reverberation isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, and it’s similarly difficult to invent upper harmonics that weren’t captured by our mics, so it can be better to get up close and apply additional artificial ambience and reduce brightness if necessary. Any number of two-mic scenarios are in play… we can take a reflection from the open lid with a spaced pair or an XY pair or even mid-side or Blumlein. We can get a bit closer with mic booms suspending mics well above the strings to capture an even tighter, brighter sound.
What if we have a grand piano, and those who oversee the visual aspects of our worship services have made it clear that they want the lid closed? No problem. We put our mics right down above the strings, either on a specialized mount intended to span horizontally across the piano, or mounted any way we can make it work. I have seen mics laid atop tea towels and strapped into position with gaff tape. It’s ugly, but very functional, and the whole point of doing it this way is so we can close the piano’s lid, which then conceals the less-than-optimal aesthetics of our mic-mounting scheme. We can also bring a mic or two in underneath the piano — frequently a dynamic intended to capture some “body” from the piano to complement the direct, bright sound captured by condensers directly above the strings. As with snare top and snare bottom miking, the polarity of our preamplifiers should be considered if we do this.
Once we have the signal from the mics, we must decide whether we’ll present a mono or stereo piano. Invariably, we’ll want to apply a bit of compression and EQ to taste. Opto compression is popular — the slow attack allows the piano’s transients to pass, and the smooth gain control helps to even out the dynamics of the instrument nicely. That said, compression should not be overdone — we do want some dynamics from this instrument — it is known as the “pianoforte,” after all!
Having delved into all this technique for capturing the sound of our piano with mics and presenting it in the mix, it’s worth noting that a very large proportion of the pianos in the worship domain are digital, requiring no miking of any kind. There is a range of quality among digital pianos, and some churches even choose to use a MIDI controller keyboard and a high-quality sampled piano from a computer. As the quality of samples continues to inexorably get closer to indistinguishability from the genuine article, this is a legitimate option.
John McJunkin is an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University.
