Recording with your phone
More and more people are enjoying recording themselves playing Piano and sharing on social media. This is either for advice from other pianists or just for the sheer hell of it. An external Microphone has proved to me to be a cool investment. Today I’d like to do a deep dive into how you can get the most from using one when recording your piano.
I’ve written about the microphone I chose previously. It’s the Shure MV88 and is good option if you want a nice and simple recording set up using just your Smartphone.
Without getting too technical, the Shure MV88 is what’s known as a Condenser Microphone. Condenser microphones are very common in recording studios as they are very sensitive to sound. This particular model was created especially for iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). Since then, Shure released the MV88+ which, whilst slightly more expensive, comes as a ‘video making’ kit including small tripod and is compatible with Android phones as well as iOS.
I actually now have both the MV88 and MV88+ (my new iPad USB-C was not compatible with the lightening connector on the MV88). If you’re interested to learn how they sound side by side, you can watch the shoot-out video on my YouTube channel.
Usable ‘Plug and Play’
As with many things, these microphones are largely plug and play. You get a dramatic improvement without really doing much more. However, there are many other features that may prove extremely useful when you use the microphone in conjunction with the free Motiv App.
The Shure MV88 comes with a carry case, a wind shield and a monitoring cable. The carry case is solid enough to allow you to safely carry the microphone with you. The Wind Shield is simply a means to help dissipate the effect of wind when trying to record outside. The monitoring cable allows you to plug headphones into your phone at the same time as the microphone. This is so you can ‘monitor’ the sound.
Monitoring is a large topic. Basically, it allows you to listen to the sound that is picked up by the microphone rather than the actual sound as you hear it in the room. However, when recording your piano at home, it would be difficult to do properly – even with noise cancelling headphones – so this feature is probably not that helpful to us. However, if you are plugging your standard headphones into your phone at the same time as the microphone, then use this cable as it will automatically disable the built in microphone on the headphones.
Main features
In addition to these accessories, the basic physical of the Microphone are:
- You can twist the microphone through 90 degrees for highly flexible positioning
- It’s MFi certified for use with Apple devices with Lightning Connector including being able to plug it in in either direction
- The Left and Right sides are Indicated to help when positioning
What you can’t see or control from the outside is that it also has:
- 5 preloaded settings to quickly get the best results in different situations
- You can then make fine adjustments to any of these settings by using the dedicated iOS ShurePlus MOTIV app
Stereo recording
The first thing to note is that this is a Stereo microphone (the one on your smartphone is ‘mono’). You can watch videos by Paul Barton and Josh Wright about their own recording set up. They each use two microphones with an Audio Interface plugged into their computer to create a proper Stereo recording. Stereo is where you have the sound distributed from the left, through the centre and then over to the right. You’ll notice this specifically with headphones when certain sounds seem louder towards the left, others louder towards the right and others appearing to come from directly in front of you. With good quality speakers well placed at home you can also hear this effect.
To make this possible, the microphone has the capability to pick up sound from three different places – the centre, the left and then the right. This is why we have the L and the R on the microphone casing. This comes in handy when recording your piano for Social media as most people will listen to your recordings using headphones – and so a nice stereo sound is what they’ll be subconsciously expecting.
Effectively, you can set it to pick up sound mainly from in front of the microphone, and then also supplement it with sound from the left and the right. The Microphone then converts this into two Stereo channels automatically.
To see this, try opening the App without plugging in the MV88 Microphone. When you look towards the top of the screen, you’ll see a single line on the input monitor (used to see if the sound source is too quiet or too loud).
If you open it again with the microphone plugged in, there are now two lines (one for left and another for right).
5 different presets
Let’s now dive into the Motiv App itself and how we can use this to control the microphone.
Earlier I mentioned we had some predefined settings (known as presets). I’ve written about presets before when explaining how to set Reverb and EQ when you’re using Garageband. As a reminder, a pre-set is a set of values that are pre-configured for you by expert engineers. These are intended to get the best results in any given situation. They might not always be ideal as of course every recording situation is different. However, they will almost always represent a great starting point that you can fine tune afterwards if you need to.
The presets are:
- speech
- singing
- acoustic instrument
- loud
- flat (minimal settings)
The clue is, as they say, in the title as to how you might use each of these presets.
Basically, they modify
- The Stereo Width
- Equalisation; and
- Compression
- Limiter
Let’s take each these in turn
Stereo Width
Stereo Width basically defines how wide an area directly in front of the microphone from which it will pick up sound.
A wide setting would look like this for example:
A narrow setting would look more like this:
So, if we use the ‘Speech’ preset, it has a ‘narrow’ stereo width as it assumes you are only trying to only pick up sound directly in front of the microphone. This way the microphone will try to ‘reject’ any sound coming from the left, right or behind. If on the other hand we use the Loud setting (ideal for live bands for example), then it will use a wide stereo width to capture sounds coming from a wider area in front of the microphone. Of course, in this setting we usually have instruments to the left, right and centre.
Equalisation
The second main setting is the Equalisation. I explained this at some length in my post about the easy way to add EQ to a recording using Garageband.
As a quick reminder, you can use Equalisation to either boost or lower certain frequencies depending on the type of sound you are recording. You are able to modify this directly within the Shure Motiv App.
Compression
The final setting is Compression. This is a topic I haven’t covered before and it’s actually both extremely simple and extremely complex at the same time if that makes any sense at all !!
Basically, what compression tries to do is compensate for big changes in volume within the same recording. So, for example, if you have somebody who is both whispering and shouting in the same recording, you might want to make the whispered sections ever so slightly louder so that they can be heard better whilst at the same time making the shouted sections ever so slightly quieter so as not to hurt someone’s ears when they’re listening back. For we enthusiastic amateurs, as always I recommend using pre-sets here so we don’t need to necessarily understand all of the technical detail behind what is going on.
Polar Pattern
The App also allows you to change the Polar Pattern. For recording your piano, you only really need the ‘Stereo’ polar pattern (which means the microphone will pick up from in front and from the sides. You can set it to pick up a Mono signal (so it switches off the sides) or a Bidirectional signal (so it switches off the front). These might come in handy if you want to use it for something other than just recording piano or wanted the piano to sound more vintage.
Limiter
Finally, the microphone has a Limiter. The Limiter works a little like the Compression setting except that the Limiter simply Limits the volume of louder sounds without making quieter ones louder. However, don’t try to use this setting as a way of not correctly setting the gain (see below).
Recording piano
When recording, I have tended to use the Acoustic Instrument setting. However, this is more intended for ‘quieter’ instruments such as a guitar (hence it has a guitar icon in the app I suppose). A Piano, however, whilst definitely ‘acoustic’, can also produce extremely loud sounds. This wide range can cause real problems for any microphone.
Microphone Gain
To help with this, we need to set what is known as the ‘Mic Gain’. The Gain is in a way the opposite to Volume. If you are recording a very loud sound, then you will need to set the gain quite low, whereas to record a very quiet sound, you will need to set the gain quite high. The challenge with the piano of course is that you can have everything from delicate pianissimo to thundering triple forte.
You’ll likely need to ‘phone a friend’ to help you set the gain. It’s not difficult to do, however, you can’t do it easily alone. The microphone (and, therefore, your phone) will be positioned somewhere other than where you are sitting to play.
You’ll need your friend to watch the Input Monitors as you play a variety of different volumes. Your friend can then adjust the Gain on the screen either upwards or downwards. As a general rule, you want to be as far into the yellow as you can go when you have the loudest sounds (never red). At the same time, you have to ensure that the monitors register something at the quietest volumes.
As you can see, that’s an awful lot of sophistication for a small, portable microphone that can plug directly into your smartphone. If you haven’t yet bought an external microphone, then don’t forget to check this one out on Amazon.
For other ideas on how to get the most from your microphone when recording your piano, don’t forget to look at my YouTube Playlist. You can also download my free eBook series for step by step, detailed instructions of both Audio and Video editing.
