A client’s Kontakt piano part in Ableton Live sounded weak even when he turned it up in the mix, and what it needed was wider velocities and a sustain pedal drawn in by hand, so it played more like a real pianist.
He played me a piano part he had written for one of his songs, using the Berlin Grand in Native Instruments Kontakt. He asked me how he could give the piano more guts and presence. He had tried turning it up in the mix and experimenting with plugins, and neither sounded right to him.
My suggestion was to leave the effects alone and go back to how the sound was being created in the first place, meaning the instructions the MIDI part was giving the piano in Kontakt, and make them closer to what a human player would do.
Spreading the velocities
He had included some velocity movement, so the part wasn’t stuck at one value all the way through. It only moved around by about 10%, though, and pretty much at random. To emulate a real player, I suggested putting the downbeats at around velocity 110 and the upbeats of each chord at around 50, which gives a strong dynamic movement between the different parts of the chords.
We experimented with this, and adding that movement increased the dynamic range and gave the part the punch and feeling he was after. If we had pushed every note up to 110 or 127 it might have sounded punchy, but it would have sounded very unnatural, like a keyboard player bashing away at every note as hard as he can. A real player plays hard sometimes and soft sometimes, and what makes great human music is the combination of the two.
Drawing in the sustain pedal
I also showed him another technique a real keyboard player uses to add thickness and richness to the sound, which is the sustain pedal. When holding a chord, the player puts the pedal down and releases it just as the next chord comes in. He could remember that style of playing from when he used to play, but he didn’t have a sustain pedal to record it with.
It wasn’t an impossible problem to solve, because it can be done in the MIDI editing tools. In Ableton Live’s piano roll we went to the envelopes, chose MIDI controller 64, which is the sustain pedal, and drew the sustain in manually. Then we listened to the part with the sustain on and off to hear the difference.
He was delighted. He had the punchy, dynamic sound he was looking for without adding any effects, and the piano now sounded more natural as well as punchier.
Before reaching for plugins on a flat-sounding virtual piano, open the piano roll and look at how much the velocities actually vary.
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