My good friend and amazing musician Jonny Diina came home to Buffalo, and he asked if we could shoot a video of him playing some of his tunes on his mom’s Steinway baby grand. We had two shiny new Canon XH-A1 HD video cameras, a Mackie 1202 mixer, Audio-Technica AT2020 condenser mic for vocals, and a pair of condenser mics I borrowed from an audio friend in X-Y configuration over the piano soundboard.

One camera was on tripod, with my cameraman zooming in and out a wee bit too much (forgivable, he was new!) and the other camera was hand-held. I didn’t have time to build a steadycam gizmo, but it still came out ok.

The major technical snafu of the day was this: we had the audio configured to be a mixdown of the piano XY in one channel, and vocals to the other channel going into the main camera. This would have given me the flexibility to balance and eq the mix in post, and given that the target was YouTube, stereo piano from the XY pair wasn’t a priority. Somehow, the camera got set to record only one of the two audio tracks! I don’t know how, but at the time the cameras were new toys and this is one of the first shoots we did, so it got screwed up. Luckily the sound was usable, if not stellar as intended. Shit happens!