Making MIDI triggered piano sound less shit...

[Rhys Llewellyn]

Okay, so I'm obviously not using the Microsoft GM sounds...

I have quite a few options of pro-sampled pianos but have never been able to justify buying a full piano suite since I'm not really a pianist.

I've recorded an instrumental cover of Heart's classic song "Alone".

I can actually play all the piano parts but I always end up quantizing my piano playing perfectly, so I figure there is no difference between me manually playing it than triggering a MIDI track in to a VST, other than velocity... (Plus I learned the piano part from the MIDI track, so no variation on notes!).

As I say, I'm no pro keyboardist and to be honest my controller keyboard feels cheap and nasty (I'd love a semi-weighted one). So I highly doubt my "natural velocities" will really even sound that authentic.

I'm using Cubase 5. I have dabbled with random velocities in the plugins section, but after having a quick look around, couldn't really find anything to humanize the playing. Have I missed something?

So basically, my piano sounds shit, even with nice samples (I guess I'll have to work on that myself).

Is there a quick way to humanize MIDI playing that I have missed?

Any tips?

Thanks.

 

[KillFrenzy]

That's a hard question dude. Normally humanizing drums isn't that hard because most of the times we are looking for a semi-robotic performance anyway, just with some random slight variations in time and velocity.
A piano track has nothing to do with that. You have to give NATURAL expressiveness and no humanizing feature on a DAW can do that. Humanizing timing a bit after quantizing will give you some results to begin with, but the problem will be velocity. You can play or edit it by hand. I don't see any other solution, sorry.

 

[Scott Horner]

Yeah, it's a lot harder to humanize piano and make it sound natural. I'm not super proficient at piano but I can write and arrange for it pretty well. What I usually do is get the song programmed for reference and then learn each part well enough to play it and at least record the velocities with a natural feel and then I can go back and adjust the timing if I need. That's what works best for me.

 

[Plankis]

I would monitor with the samples that I'm going to use. Then record until I nail the perfect take. Sure, it might take forever nailing it but it's at least much more fun recording than editing something to sound natural. Boosts the ego more too.

 

[Rhys Llewellyn]

Thanks for the replies

Yeah, fair dos, I guess looking for that magic "make it sound great" switch is kinda cheating a little, but with DAWs these days everything is tweaked to perfection.

As far as drawing in the velocities... It seems like a very hit and miss affair to me. I tried using the pen tool and drawing a free hand "shakey" line so there is some variation.

I'll try recording the parts myself as mentioned, but I'm gonna be so tempted to time correct unless it's just a touch out here and there and delete the odd bum note. Maybe that's where some of the authenticity comes from? Still makes me wonder why there isn't a tool out there designed for this specific purpose though.

I always write with pianos and strings, but they're nearly always filling out the backing track and not up front so they sound pretty authentic if there's no real transient variables involved.