Making your electric piano sound more realistic

I’ve been recording myself playing piano for a bunch of Christmas songs like Angels We Have Heard on High, Away in a Manger, The Christmas Waltz, and Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire and the first thing I thought was ‘how can I make my Yamaha electric piano sound realistic?’

It’s not super complicated, but it’s much more involved than just recording the piano with my camera microphone. Camera audio often doesn’t sound great, and there are definitely better ways to record music. The camera was just used to record video.

I recorded my keyboard directly into my computer, into Pro Tools. There I did a little editing to make it more full and more professional sounding. I added some reverb, EQ, and compression.

Reverb

Using two reverbs can really add a lot to your sound because you can be incredibly specific about how it sounds. I wanted it to sound like I’m playing piano at a concert hall, so that’s how I chose my reverbs. One is normally a convolution reverb, using an impulse response. This is meant to model a specific room. The second one is an algorithmic reverb, which is meant to add a “reverb tail” to the sound. This one just makes it bigger and fuller and expands that room a little bit. With both of these added it really starts to sound like an actual piano being played in a concert hall.

EQ

Next I add some equalization or EQ. I like to roll off some frequencies in the high end and add some fullness to the low end, and then roll the rest off. Basically I get rid of the really low frequencies that would muddy up the sound, and keep the frequencies in the low mids. For solo piano, people often use a bright sound, which can be achieved by boosting the high frequencies.

Compression

Next is compression. I add two compressors. One to the instrument, and then one to the whole mix, including reverb. This way I can get more control over the sound. The first compression is meant to tame the direct sound and even it out a little bit. Because it’s an electronic piano I don’t have as much control over the velocity with my touch as a normal piano, so I like to tame everything afterwards. The next compressor is boosting the volume mainly and taming it just a tiny bit more.

There you have it. How to make your electric piano sound more realistic.

It definitely won’t sound exactly like a real piano, but anything you play and record this way will definitely sound closer to a real piano than if you simply recorded your piano straight in.

ISJ