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Greetings forum.

Just this week, I've started working in my first job and henceforth should have my own money to spend. Naturally, I want to fulfil several of my ambitions; one of which being to get some decent equipment for recording my piano. Now, I'm a bit of a noob at this, and although I've messed around a fair bit with various digital platforms, recording is one with which I have to come and ask for help. I know there are probably webpages I could find with a quick probe of Google, but I'd like to hear some more personal opinions too.

I have a 50" Yamaha U2 upright piano, and it is in a room with good, relatively thick carpet and plastered walls. I'm looking for a complete setup, including microphones and leads and whatever else is needed. I'm willing to experiment with microphone placements and stuff, but it's the hardware itself with which I need help. I'll probably build up a small computer next to the piano dedicated to the job of recording and managing my music. I've set a loose budget of around $500, but it could exceed that if need be - I want as good quality as possible.

What do you have? What can you recommend? What about software?

Help?

Hey !
I also have a Yamaha upright, I simply open up the lid, place a thick beach towel over the wood and put my Zoom Q3 inside. The price of the Zoom Q3 keeps on plummeting in Australia.
Then I transfer the generated WAV file into Audacity (free downloadable software) to normalise.

Do you have a laptop ?

Jolteon,

This topic has been discussed several times in pianoworld forums. A search about microphones/recording should give you a lot of useful posts.
Also both the Member Recordings forum and the ABF have sticky topics that provide some links to related threads or to external links.

regards,