PERFECT PIANO PRODUCTION

All pianos are the same, right? Wrong. There's a ton of variety in brands and models, and knowing your pianistic onions starts with the right instrument

Choosing your instrument 

Whether you’re working in the sample and plugin domain, or lucky enough to have an acoustic instrument to use, your perfect piano type is largely determined by your chosen genre of music or production. Here’s how to pick a piano…

Grand or upright?

Modern acoustic pianos largely fall into one of two categories; grand or upright. Without wishing to state the obvious, upright pianos are the ones that you might see against a wall, in an upright position, while grand pianos are the larger instruments, which take up a greater amount of floor space.

Apart from the form factor, there are other important differences between the two. Upright pianos tend to have smaller frames, which means that the strings are not as long. This translates to the lower pitched strings being shorter, meaning that uprights don’t sound so dominant at the lower end. Being smaller in size, uprights can sound more intimate, or less resonant, but it does depend on the piano itself. Most piano manufacturers will make uprights in different sizes, so it’s not entirely surprising that the larger the piano case, the bigger the frame, the fuller the sound of the instrument.

There have been some famous examples of tracks being recorded with more modest uprights, one of the most famous being a Challen upright piano, which was used by The Beatles. Originally located at Abbey Road in Studio 3, this smaller version of an upright provided an intimate sound, being considerably smaller than the often cited ‘Mrs Mills’ upright piano, also used by The Beatles, which remains at Abbey Road.