We are working on the next Baldwin grand instrument - hear preliminary samples
This piano, an early '90s Baldwin grand, is housed in a chapel on a nearby university campus. The space itself is beautiful, and sounds remarkable. The ambiance plays a big role in the production of this instrument, especially present on the mono and far mic sets.
As in the previous instrument, the 1954 Grand, we used vintage Neumann KM 84 mics for the close perspective, but used Royer ribbons for the mono and mid mics instead of AEA. Again, vintage AKG C414 mics are set out in the chapel, about 20 feet from the piano for a really huge sound.
The room tone of the chapel itself is really quite beautiful on its own, so we will include an additional sample layer of room tone that can be dialed in.
Along with a max of 13 velocity levels for close, mid, mono, and far mic perspectives will be una corda and staccato layers, and convolution reverbs built from the piano body and, of course, the room itself.
In the photo, you can see the striking mechanism we built and used, a fulcrum that uses good old gravity to get key strikes with completely replicable forces from key to key. I used this contraption to get the initial 12 velocity levels, and then I used the good, old-fashioned human hand to get the final fff layer.
