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.
If you’re looking to record yourself multiple times to make it sound like a choir here are 5 different ways you can sing it:
Normally (of course)
Deeper (imagine you have the voice of Gaston, Mufasa, or Maui)
Breathier
Flat (think like a robot)
Way too much vibrato (you’re the self-indulgent singer in the choir that overdoes everything)
I genuinely have sung those 5 different ways when recording guide vocals. The goal is for it to sound like 5 different people, not just 5 different recordings of yourself. So sing like someone else.
Pro tip for music stuff: You get better at most things by doing them and trying to do them better.
I know this is a super hot take, but seriously if you never sing or practice singing then there won’t be any progress. You need to do it to get better at it. That’s why I’m so happy for having gone to music school. It’s a ton of work and a ton of projects, but that’s what helps.
Music school is basically a ton of practice for writing and composing and transcribing and performing. So yeah. You get a lot better.
I FIXED MY PRO TOOLS. Here’s a post with the problem and what I did to fix it. So I tried to use VoiceMeeter with Pro Tools to record a video, which didn’t work and then PT crashed. That’s where the problem started.
Then every time I started PT I got this – “unable to initialize audio device” and “please select another audio device” I hit “ok” and got “AAE error -6117” and that was it. The only option was to hit “ok”, which brought me back to the previous screen “unable to initialize”
And it just kept going back and forth. I uninstalled and reinstalled. I restarted my computer. Uninstalled my M-Audio interface’s drivers. I downloaded ASIO4all. Power cycled everything. I updated to the new PT version, then downgraded back to what I had. Nothing.
And some of you might be like “just hold ‘n’ when you see the splash screen”, but that didn’t even work. Normally in PT if you hold ‘n’ as it boots up it’ll immediately bring you to the “select audio device” screen. When I held ‘n’ it just gave me the “AAE error -6117”
Finally I found this article. And I disabled all of my audio devices, opened PT, and IT FINALLY GAVE ME THE “SELECT AUDIO DEVICE” SCREEN. AGGHHHGHG I got it working again. Thank the lord. Thank you for joining me on this journey.
Something I learned while watching the recording engineers at Berklee College of Music (thanks for all the help Scott, Fred, and Jason) was to comp together the best recordings you’ve made.
You don’t need to have one long, perfect take. As long as you have all of the different sections recorded well and they’re somewhat around the same tempo, you’ll be able to edit them together to have one good take.
Here’s a screenshot of the piano track for a version of Joy to the World that I’m putting together with my students.
This is the waveform for that piano track. I recorded three different takes and comped them together. The top one is the finished track. You can see that it’s different colors and it alternates between the colors of the bottom three. That’s how you can see where the edits are.
Most of the edits are quick and just getting rid of a few small mistakes, but put together it sounds much better.
And it’s hardly noticeable when you listen to the finished track.
Most of the time you want to make sure you crossfade the tracks (often fairly quickly) so that you don’t notice any transitions. But the way you want to edit it changes depending on what the specific edit is.
One thing that can help make this easier to manage is playing to a click track. That way all of the different sections will be in the same place every single time. It’ll also make sure that the tempo doesn’t change when you do edits like this.
A click track isn’t required. I’m recording a number of Christmas songs that’ll be up on my YouTube channel soon where I didn’t play to a click. For those recordings, I’ve mostly been making small edits, sometimes as short as one chord, because there are tiny little things that I want to clean up.
This technique is super useful. The main thing is to make sure that everything is timed correctly. You can do this visually as well as auditorially. Listen to the track and make sure it sounds good. Your ears are the best way to check it, but you can also use the waveforms. Do they line up if you compare them? That way everything will sound good when comped together.
My students weren’t the biggest fan of this song, but I actually really like it.
I like the chaotic texture because it’s really interesting to listen to all of the different pieces inside of it.
I also appreciate it from the perspective of a composer because I know that creating such a chaotic texture is difficult with only three instruments. It’s still difficult to make something sound truly chaotic with an orchestra, but you have more ways of doing it. With only three instruments it gets tricky.
You can think of it as being the complete opposite of choosing notes to make something sound pretty. Making something sounds truly beautiful is equally as difficult I think. You really need to think about the note choice. In one case the notes sound please, and in the other they don’t, but you need to choose the exact “wrong” notes. It’s surprisingly difficult. You can’t just write a bunch of notes because often they’ll line up and sound pleasant somewhere.
The same thing goes with the rhythm. Making a piece sound chaotic means the rhythms can’t line up much. That means you really need to think about them so that they don’t line up in just the right ways. Because again if you just write a bunch of rhythms, they’ll probably line up unless you specifically write them with that in mind.
This happened quite a bit with the composition students while I was at Berklee College of Music. We’d try to write a similarly chaotic texture, and it’d kind of just be bad. Like it would be in the middle, and just sound like lukewarm chaos. Because we didn’t think about the specific notes and rhythms as much as we needed to.
It’s kind of like trying to get a 0/100 on a multiple choice test. In order to get every single question wrong you can’t just guess. You need to know all of the correct answers to confidently get a 0/100 because that would allow you to choose the incorrect answers.
That’s what making a chaotic texture like this feels like. You really need to think about the notes you’re using and the effect it creates, because you run the risk of it just sounding weird and like a bunch of random notes. But we don’t want random notes, we want chaos.
Another thing I like about this song is that it’s not always pure chaos. It lines up, then doesn’t and oscillates between those two. It creates a rhythmic dissonance and rhythmic tension and then later resolves this tension by lining up again.
It sounds like you’re running a race against a friend as a kid and you’re really putting all your energy into this race, running as fast as possible. And things start getting in your way like rocks and sticks and you need to jump over them. But you keep going because you want to win that race. You’re running so fast you’re almost falling over with each step.
I’ve been watching a lot of Seth Godin recently and have been enjoying hearing him say to make “work that matters for people who care” because that’s all we’re trying to do as composers and musicians. Make music that matters, for people who care about it. The other stuff isn’t really the goal. Yes, you need to find a way to be able to afford making that music and afford producing and recording and releasing and performing it. BUT. The main goal is to make music that has an impact.
So the first goal is to make music that matters. That’s music that matters to you.
Then the goal is to find people that care. Find the right audience for your music. And remember that not everyone is your audience. My music is definitely not made for everyone to enjoy. It’s glitchy. It’s often electronic. It’s sometimes atonal. Not everyone enjoys that. So then they’re not part of my target audience. I need to find the people that do care about that type of music and want to listen to that type of music.
Same thing with my YouTube videos. They’re not for everyone. If you enjoy learning about science and astronomy, then my videos probably won’t excite you. Go watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. But if you like learning about music, music composition, and music production then my videos are for you.
Figure out who your audience is, or who your audience would be and try to find those people.
Not everyone is your audience and that’s fine. Everyone shouldn’t be your audience.
Try to write music in different ways. I kind of naturally do this because I have different ideas from different things. Sometimes I think of ideas while playing piano or playing guitar. Sometimes I just think of ideas in my head and want to make them into music. Sometimes I come up with ideas while messing around in my DAW (Reason or Pro Tools).
It can help you think of new musical ideas that get you out of making the same sounding songs. The ideas I’ve thought of on piano are different than the ones that I’ve thought of on guitar or in a DAW. Neither is better than the other. They’re different ideas.
So whatever you do to write music. Try to write music outside of that context. Get out of that one habit. Maybe you’ll get some inspiration from a different instrument. Maybe it’s a blank piece of manuscript paper.
Whatever it is you’ll find new ideas in different places.
