Some tasks you feel should be straightforward are more complex than you think. Recently I composed a collection of six pieces for piano. When I went to submit them for distribution, the distributor suggested an audio track accompany them. This task should have been easy enough because I composed the score from the MIDI tracks played into the DAW. So after listening to the various tracks, I bounced them down to audio and previewed them on different devices. The result was less than desirable. So what was the issue, the piano, the sound, most likely me making a mess of things?
I originally played the tracks on my professional-grade Yamaha Clavinova, fed the midi into the DAW, played back the MIDI and recorded the audio. This audio recording should have ended it, but it wasn’t. The sound was tinny and harsh. After listening to the recording, I realized the setting on the piano, the fact I was listening through headphones when recording, and the length of the session, contributed to me playing with too much force. This combination of circumstances mentioned above led me to my first realization. When recording the piano turn the headphones up so you’re not playing loudly to hear the sound; it will improve the instrument’s dynamic range. You won’t be pounding on the piano to make it louder but playing more softly because you’ll hear the dynamics more clearly. So we discovered my playing led to that harsh and less desirable sound. So I installed a piano plug-in instead.
So I replaced the Clavinova sound with the Grandure from the Native Instruments product website. I loaded up my reference track and Sonarworks Reference ID for headphones plug-in and went to town on the piano plug-in settings. No matter what I did, the track sounded terrific in the headphones but horrible everywhere I played it. I kept working on the sound for days, and that harsh tonality was still there. After watching some YouTube videos on mixing classical solo piano music, the suggestion was not to use too much or any compression. So off went the compressors, and the sound improved again.
With my reference track in hand and loaded into the DAW, things still didn’t sound how I wanted them. After many more days of playing around with settings, I finally found that if I turned up the resonance, the piano sounded much more realistic.
The final step I took was to load up a Match EQ plug-in within Logic X and match the EQ of the reference track with the track I recorded. While the sound still is not perfect, it’s a long way from where it started, and I’m happy with my first recorded piano tracks and learned a lot while recording. This means the next time I record my piano tracks, I have a slight chance, but still, a chance of being closer to that sound I’m trying to achieve. Here’s hoping for better results next time.
