Equipment

Recording the piano sound isn't very easy. You can easily use the output of a digital piano and route it in your PC, I did that also, but to get the true sound and feeling you need a real piano and real studio-microphones.

You can spend a lot of money just with the mics, but I have a relative cheap configuration that gives me satisfying results. I use a matched pair of Studio Projects C4. They cost together around 300€ and I think they perform quite good compared to their price.

I searched a long time for a reference recording with these mics and found none... but if you plan buying, you can hear a bit into my songs to get an impression.

I found two mics in a similar price-category: The Okatava MK-012 and the Rhodes Nt5. You should read some reviews about these condenser microphones if you plan to setup your own piano recording equipment with a small budget.

In addition I use a Tascam US-122L in order to get the sound clean into my Intel MacBook. It's great hardware but the driver for Mac OS X sucks. This is a well known problem with Leopard (the newest Mac OS X Version) and Tascam doesn't supply new drivers since months. (Edit:) Ok, the drivers were updated in april 2008, a half year after the release of Leopard.

For recording I use the freeware (and open source) audacity, which I can really recommend for single input recording. For my sheet music needs I use lilypond. It's a music program without a GUI - but once you've learned how to write your own .ly files with a texteditor you have the best music typesetting program on this planet under your fingertips. And it's also free! The output looks really professional (and it's better than the output of all the commercial programs I've seen)