First, a few pictures:
Basically, the mic rundown was like this:
-"Main pair": DPA 4061 omnis, no filters, windscreens on, through Sytek non-Brown Burr preamp. About chest-height. (In the pictures, they're mounted on these weird cheap homemade-by-someone omnis that were going to be my "junk" mics, but they actually sounded too junk-y so I decided to not use them.)
-"Rear pair": Peluso CEMC6 cardioids in NOS (a slightly narrower variation on ORTF, if you aren't familiar with it), through Sytek Brown Burr preamps. Fairly high (6'+).
-"M/S close pair": Crown PCC160 mid, inner-mesh-removed Nady RSM4 side. PCC gaffed to bottom of key area, RSM4 right below it. Best to look at the pictures.
-And finally: CAD C179 in omni, a little behind the DPAs (i.e. farther away from the piano).
The exact preamps for the M/S Close pair and Floor Omni have escaped me - I know that two of them were Rane MS1bs, and one was an LT1358-and-Jensen-transformer-modified Presonus VXP w/all the channel strip's fx bypassed.
All recorded on an HD24.
Take a listen to an excerpt of each of them! 320kbps mp3s.
Main pair - Spaced omni
Rear pair - NOS
M/S close pair
Floor omni
Please note that all these are totally raw: no EQ or anything whatsoever, just normalized to -1dB.
Some things I learned:
1) If you're going to attempt this the way I did it, GET A PIANO TUNER'S TOOL. One of you suggested that I try to keep the harp intact, with all the strings on it. That's totally impossible, unfortunately, at least with this piano: all the string tuning bolts go through the harp and deep into the sound board. So, to take the harp off the soundboard you need to take ALL THOSE OFF. Totally impossible without one of those piano tuner's tools. I was able to take it completely apart with my normal gig toolbox aside from that part.
2) The coolest sounds, in the end, weren't sounds I was trying to make, so I ended up just doing everything really slowly to make sure everything had a nice, natural tail to it (there were a couple things near the beginning that I kicked myself for screwing up by going too fast).
3) I kept a TON of headroom to avoid any clipping, and there was still a tiny bit of clipping on the PCC160 once or twice. A huge, HUGE amount of dynamic range - and this was really a very, very peaceful bit of instrument destruction; it was really more of a dismantling.
I'm sure there's something important I missed, so if you have any questions or comments please feel free to ask.
