I am not altogether satisfied with this but I’ll take it, after 2½ hours spent trying to record this Grieg piece earlier were all messed up.
The piano is plugged into a mixing board which in turn plugs into the field recorder seen here top left. The recorder has a switch you turn to either “mic” or “line”, depending which input you’re using. For this I should have switched it to “line” and I would have bet cash cash money that I did. But no. The recorder didn’t get input from the mixer but from the two external mics, which captured the unlistenable sounds of the thumping noise my hands make when hitting the keys, as well as fire truck sirens, car horns, and all that audio effluvia you do not hear when it’s a 100% digital connection.
Both the mixer and the recorder have to be battery powered, to prevent the line noise that plagues this area’s electrical systems from getting into the recording. It used to be Disney Radio among the ghosts in the machine you’d hear but last time I “tuned in” to the power supply it was Family Radio, which took over the 1560 AM frequency after Disney Radio closed shop.
