Wind Ensemble and Recording a Clavinova Piano

[alirocks]

Hello everyone, I have a yamaha clavinova CLP- 230 piano which I use to pre-record music to play at shows for my wind ensemble. I have been using basic audio cables the ones with the red and white input and plugging them straight to mixcraft on my computer however when I start to play forte the sound becomes distorted. I am wondering if there is another way I can plug my piano directly to my computer and get better recorded quality?

 

[Thomas W. Bethel]

There are usually two inputs on a sound card. One is for line level signals (normally -10 dBV ) and a microphone input (normally -60 dBV) make sure you have the outputs of your piano plugged into the line inputs. If it is still distorted you may be over driving the inputs of the sound card's line inputs. Some keyboards can output some really high levels with the volume control turned up all the way.

Best of luck!

 

[JoeH]

Tom's exactly right.

Not only that, it may be time to invest in a front-end for your computer recording needs. As you're finding out, those sound-card inputs are just for the very basic of tasks. As soon as you try to get serious with them, you'll find limited headroom and potentially some computer-generated noise from the analog circuitry being inside the case.

There's a lot of very good-to-excellent external 2 or 4 channel USB or Firewire A/D boxes out there, from M-Audio to Presonus to Tacsam, Yamaha, and more, none of which will break the bank for you. It may indeed by time for you to look into this to get the kind of recordings you need.

 

[alirocks]

Thank you to both of you for the advice!