Yamaha C2 MVP

10 years ago, I used my children’s budding interest in learning piano as an excuse to buy a new Yamaha C2 Grand that I had secretly wanted for a long time. We’ve all made a lot of great music on that piano. However, now my kids are grown up, moved out and we’re thinking of downsizing and I wanted to sample this piano in case we decide it can’t move with us. These sample instruments are my first try at capturing the Yamaha’s sound.

This was the first time I’ve ever setup microphones or tried to record on anything other than my phone. I used a pair of AKG C414 XL microphones in cardoid configuration about 6 inches above the strings. This went into a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and directly into Logic Pro. I did 4 takes with the MVP template and tried to use my ears to pick the best samples for the final instruments. No further processing was done (other than noise reduction in RX8). Using all the great videos provided by the community, I was able to create pretty basic Sampler, Kontakt and Decent Sampler instruments.

However, the seed is now planted and using everything I learned, I’m already planning a deeper sampled version with perhaps more microphone positions and several patches with effects. Thank you for all the community support in exploring this wonderful experiment.