The piano is one of the most challenging yet rewarding instruments to mic and mix in your worship services. Few instruments span such a diverse and wide frequency spectrum or have such incredible dynamics. For these reasons, the piano can be a real struggle to place in your mix, especially if the mix is dense with other instrumentation. When you get the piano just right, however, it is one of the most gratifying parts of mixing music.
Physically Placing the Piano
If you’re lucky enough to have input with regard to where the piano is placed, there are a few things to consider that will make your life as the audio mixer a lot easier. First, anyone in your worship band or choir rely solely on the acoustic sound coming off of the piano? So if the choir doesn’t use monitors to fold the piano back to them, they’ll need it located in close proximity, likely with the open lid facing the choir loft. Maybe you’ve got vocal soloists who rely solely on hearing sound directly from the piano. They’ll need to be near the piano so they can stay in time and on pitch. But most importantly, look at the piano’s surroundings and think about external bleed into the piano mics. If there’s a drum kit around, for example, you’ll want to keep the piano as far away as possible. Other common and problematic instruments that bleed into our piano are handbells, timpani and mallet instruments such as xylophones and marimbas. Careful placement in a traditional or contemporary worship environment can go a long way toward achieving a successful piano sound in your mix.
Miking the Piano
There are so many different ways to capture a piano, most of which have been written about ad nauseam in audio and music publications. Rather than running through a litany of different options, I’m going to focus on what has worked best for me. After experimenting with an assortment of different mics and techniques, I keep coming back to a few approaches.
When miking a piano with the lid fully open, I prefer a pair of large diaphragm cardioid condenser mics (such as AKG414’s), one over the lower strings and one between the mid and high strings. The mics typically sit between six to eight inches above the strings, which provides a nice bright characteristic to the sound, while maintaining the piano’s natural tone and character. However, this approach might not be ideal if the piano is situated near other, louder instruments. In that case, a closed lid might be a better solution, but how do you effectively mic a piano with the lid closed? Fortunately there are an array of options for discrete microphones and low-profile mounting solutions. One option for closed-lid miking is a lavalier-type omnidirectional microphone. Several manufacturers offer clever mounts that attach magnetically to the piano’s frame. This allows for a variety of placements to get the sound you’re looking for, while being extremely low profile for a closed lid application.
Certain studio techniques — such as placing a pair or a single mic farther outside the piano’s open lid — aren’t well suited for live sound. This lends itself to capturing too much external bleed and ambient sound, and also introduces gain-before-feedback issues. If you’re doing some piano recording for your church, these are worth trying out, but don’t be fooled into thinking these are good for live sound reinforcement.
Piano in the Mix
Once your piano is strategically placed and miked, it’s time to get it dialed into the mix. Don’t get too fancy right away with a bunch of processing and plug-ins that are going to kill your piano sound. I always start with the basics, such as gain structure and a high-pass filter to rolloff some low-end. Second, if I’m using a pair of mics, which is most often the case, I’ll pan those left and right to separate them and reduce the potential for them to phase with one another. With two mics this close together, there’s a lot of potential for them to capture the same sounds at slightly different arrival times. Panning them out a bit — even if it’s not hard panning — decouples the mics from one another somewhat and prevents this from happening. Next, I’ll simply balance the level of the two mics relative to one another, and make sure I’ve got great gain structure on both channels. Finally, I put the finishing touches on them with some EQ and light compression. Never over-compress the piano; you want to maintain the beautiful dynamics of the instrument. The amount of compression and how aggressive I get with it depends on the style of music I’m mixing. If it’s loud rock ‘n’ roll and I need the piano to sit hot in the mix, I’ll compress it a bit more and boost up the output gain so quieter passages aren’t completely lost. If it’s more traditional worship music, I tend to lay off the compression and let the piano breathe.
As for the monitor mix, piano can be tricky for the live engineer. If you’re working with a band that’s on IEM’s, it’s no problem, but when you’ve got wedges or sidefills to deal with, piano can become a lot more difficult to manage. If you’re mixing monitors from a dedicated monitor console, you can high-pass and EQ the piano to sound great in the wedges or sidefills, but also deal with the inevitable feedback that may occur. However, if you are mixing monitors from FOH, this becomes trickier. One option is to duplicate your piano channels where one set feeds the house mix and the other set feeds monitors. This gives you the ability to EQ the two separately, making it easier to manage your monitor mixes and give your musicians what they want to hear.
As with anything related to live sound, there is no right or wrong way to do something. There are so many possible ways to mic and mix piano that the only way to find what works for you is to experiment. Practice really does make perfect in this case, so continue to hone your craft and never stop learning new techniques.
Vince Lepore is the director of event technical operations at Full Sail University.
