Andy Taylor asked about recording a piano with a camcorder.  First you
might want to 'soften' the room a bit.  Get a large piece of scrap
carpet and toss it behind the piano.  Just tape or tack it on the wall.
If it's a bit larger than the piano, that's fine.  Put some more on the
floor and if you want, try a piece 3 foot square behind the mic.  That
should make it less harsh and cut down on reflections that can muddy up
the sound.  But that won't really fix your problem.

Usually the real problem is caused by the automatic volume/level
control (AVC) in the audio circuit of your camcorder.  This works fine
in most cases for voice recording and simple music.  That's because
they are not very dynamic and the levels change relatively slowly.
But, when you try to record something like a piano, the AVC wants to
adjust all the sound to the same loudness - exactly what you _don't_
want in an expression piano.

If you think a piano sounds bad, try using AVC to record a music box.
The generally low level sound of the music box causes the AVC circuit
to turn up the volume and the individual notes overload it.  In a band
organ you can get the opposite effect - the loud music and percussion
drives the level low and you can't hear the rest of the music.

If you can't kill the AVC, try this.  Use a separate microphone and
some sort of mixer to change the audio output to LINE level (~1 volt).
Then feed the signal into the line level input of the camcorder (not
the aux mic input).  The line input usually doesn't have an AVC
circuit.  You might check the mic inputs and line outputs on your
component audio recorder in your stereo system -- that's what I have
used.  You'll have the same problem with most any inexpensive cassette
recorder.

I wanted to make an audio recording of a Hicks barrel piano/organ/bell
machine a few years ago to send to Arthur Ord-Hume and I had the same
problem.  So I made the recording on my Ampex real-to-real machine and
then dubbed it onto the line inputs of a cassette recorder - it sounded
great.  (Okay, not great, but at least it sounded exactly like the
instrument.)

If you decide to rent something, I think most any audio mixer that has
a line output will fix your problem.  You can probably just borrow one.

Good luck,
Craig Smith