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Mathew Cook has for many years been a favorite at the Eureka Inn's (Eureka, California) piano lounge; producing one locally well received cassette album with the help of the previous Inn owners who footed the expense and logistical processes. However, times changed with the new owners not being so musically supporting as the past management, allowing Mathew no financial aid in producing his next recording project and reduced hours!
Mathew was motivated to record his own sessions using a minimal investment in a Sony TCD-D7/MOD-2 DAT deck, Sonic Studios DSM-6S/H microphone, and was loaned the DSM-GUY (an HRTF mic mount baffle) for starters.
The recording was done on a rather new Yamaha baby grand in the lounge during the quieter hours with dining and employee activity in the area. However, even with these challenges, and the fact that he never had done a recording before, these two representative samples of his work are excellent in my opinion. The piano sound is very rich, uncommonly natural sounding, and his musicianship is conveys interpretive expression. The surrounding sounds of the ambient is softly noticeable, blending in well with the natural atmosphere of the lounge style of music for this setting.
VISIT Mathew Cook's excellent website for backstory on his life and musical offerings
SPECIAL NOTE: While I've heard and personally recorded many other DSM recorded piano sounds of uncommon quality, these two selections have significant merit as an example, renewing the hope that many more musicians/composers seriously consider recording their own stuff using natural acoustic mic methods such as the DSM method used here. Mathew's selection is special in that he was using very modest costing equipment with no previous do-it-yourself recording experience, but was able to easily record his piano (one of the most difficult of acoustic instruments to successfully record) with a quality that would stand up to that produced by any costly studio engineered session on his very first attempt at recording! Future sessions, with a little more recording experience in mic placement within a quieter working ambient condition, would certainly produce even better results; easily exceeding anything available from conventional mic/studio methods of acoustic recording.
File Transfer Production Notes: Both selections were sampled directly from the 48K sampled DAT working copy using a Za2 digital I/O card and a .mp3 192kbps encoding process. This is a pure digital recording with translation to .mp3 of highest quality. The two selections were edited to about 50% original length to ease the download file size. No Pre or Post processing was used. This is a completely natural 3-D Ambient Stereo production done solely by a very novice recordist and professional musician.
NOTE: One area of future recording session improvement suggested to Mathew was to try working in a quieter less busy environment, moving his chosen mic placement (he placed the GUY/mic a bit on the hinges side at the very piano end, directly opposite the keyboard (!!!) of the fully opened piano to avoid blocking foot traffic on an adjacent aisle) to the 'open side' of the piano at a few foot distance for enhanced upper register recorded detail and fuller ambient piano sound. Even with this understandable and novice mic positioning, the recorded sound is still quite excellent. You really have to be one of the 'very, very unlucky' to make a poor sounding recording with the DSM method, but I'll let you be the judge!
DOWNLOAD "Bring in the Clowns" .... (clowns2.mp3) ......3.59 MEG ........ 2:33 MIN
DOWNLOAD "My Funny Valentine" .... (myfunny2.mp3) ..... 4.17 MEG ......... 2:58 MIN
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What's
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