Recording setup

Here’s the setup I’ve been using to record music from 2016 until the present day.

• Casio CDP-120 digital piano. It’s a decent digital piano that I bought for 399€ (plus 80€ for the stand) back in fall 2013, about one year after I moved out of my parents’ place (read: away from their piano). It’s definitely been worth its price just for the private enjoyment of it, and being able to make decent-quality recordings with it is a nice bonus. On the technical side, it has some features (reverb, chorus, MIDI output) that I rarely or never use; I sometimes use different voices when I play for myself (it has grand piano 1 and 2, electric piano, harpsichord, and strings), but for recordings I generally stick to the standard grand piano 1 (except for the Melody in f minor, which I did in grand piano 2).

• Pokket pokketmixer black, a small 2-canal passive mixer that I got for 89€ from Thomann in fall 2014. Takes two channels and mixes them (it includes a lo/mid/hi equalizer for each channel, which I don’t use) and gives you one mixed output channel and one that you can switch between either of the inputs.

  For recordings, I stick the headphones into the mixed output and the connection to the PC into the monitoring output, which lets me add a metronome to the headphones without it appearing in the PC recording. (Spoiler: I did that for the Combination March. I’m not sure if you can tell.) I also leave it plugged in when I’m just playing by myself, partially because it’s just easier not to change the setup all the time, partially because it seems to slightly improve the sound (though I’m not sure why).

  The other thing I can do with the mixer is take sound output from the PC, mix it into the headphones and play along to that. That’s definitely not anything publishable (for starters, that’s nonfree audio I’m using), but with the right pieces it’s a lot of fun to play along.

• Bose QC25 noise cancelling headphones. You’d think I’d use noise cancelling headphones outside in traffic or wherever, but they make the piano sound so ridiculously good that they just stay plugged into it (well, the mixer) all the time. Apart from general sound quality, the noise cancelling kills the sound of the physical keys, which is otherwise quite distracting.

• Korg MA-1 metronome. Just a simple digital metronome with a headphone jack that I can plug into the mixer.

• Generic Personal Computer. Self-assembled from various parts, partially upgraded over the years. The sound chipset is probably something Intel or other, I honestly don’t care. Sound goes from the digital piano via the mixer into the PC’s microphone jack, all via 3.5 mm phone connector cables.

• GNOME Sound settings to select the microphone input and set the level.

• GNOME Sound Recorder to do the actual recording. It’s extremely KISS and works for me. (Recording format is FLAC – I don’t remember if I set it to that or if it’s the default.)

• Audacity to edit the recording. These days it’s just trimming off the beginning and end (the recording process is to start the recording in GNOME Sound Recorder, walk over to the piano, play, walk back to the PC, and stop the recording, so I have to cut that out) and then export it in three different formats. I think I used to use the Noise Reduction effect, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary with this setup if the sound levels are all right. (“Why not do the recording in Audacity directly?” I couldn’t get it to work, and GNOME Sound Recorder works, so I don’t bother trying to make Audacity work.)