Grand El Campanil Piano

Introducing The Grand El Campanil Piano — an extraordinarily rich and lush-sounding full-sized vintage Baldwin Grand Piano, dating back to the 1930s. We recorded it at its home in the historic El Campanil Theatre, a spacious and resplendent vaudevillian theater hall built in the late 1920s, harkening back to the golden era of cinema and stage. With a sonorous low end, dynamic responsiveness and nuanced character, it is the ideal piano for classical songwriting and cinematic scoring. At the soft end of its dynamic range, it has a warm, hazy quality reminiscent of our classic Emotional Piano. At its loudest, it has a bombastic flair that punches through.

The El Campanil theater has glorious acoustics, with distinct reflective zones at the midstage, front of house and back of house that each offer a very distinct sonic picture ideally suited for different mixes and musical arrangements. To capture everything this Baldwin had to offer, we recorded it from a variety of distances and microphone configurations.

The close “Hammer” position features a pair of large-diaphragm Neumann TLM 107 studio microphones to capture exquisite detail and robust presence. The overhead position positioned 8 feet away utilizes a pair of Neumann KM 183 SDC omni microphones that present a surprisingly intimate close room sound, delivering a broad stereo field and just a hint of reverberation returning from the outer hall. The Hall position offers a well-rounded audience perspective, recorded with a pair of Neumann TLM103 studio microphones placed about 60 feet from the piano in a wide AB stereo array, at approximately the midpoint of the theater hall. Finally, we’ve included a stylized sound-designed mix called “Ghosts” utilizing another far more distant pair of TLM103 mics at the very back of the house, nearly 120 feet away. It’s perfect for long, slow melancholic passages.