Quality of piano sound on a keyboard

[DooWahDiddy]

Hi there! I have a question about the quality of keyboard recordings with Audacity. I have a Yamaha MO8 keyboard, and I'm using Audacity 2.0.0, hooked up through a PreSonus AudioBox vsl44. I would love to find a way to make it sound more "full", like a real piano. To me, the keyboard sounds thin and tinny, and I'm wondering if there are any settings I can change to improve that?

Here's an example of how I would like it to sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAlgkvKTOZ0

And here's an example of how it DOES sound (on a different song): http://www.angelfire.com/music2/bsturiale/piano.html

I'm not sure what program he's using; is it just a matter of using something that costs a million dollars, like ProTools or something? I love Audacity and enjoy using it, so if there's any advice anyone can give, I would appreciate it!

[kozikowski]

It sounds like a poor sample. Yamaha sampled a spinet instead of a larger piano. It sounds exactly like the small piano tucked against the wall that a friend of mine used to have.

My Yamaha has a bunch of different pianos and the default (Piano #1) is not my favorite at all. There are piano's way up in the hundreds instrument numbers (134) that have built-in accompaniment like violins. Those are fun, but probably not what you want.

While you can add echo, reverb and maybe a little equalization, I think you're in the boat with all the people who want to "make my voice sound like a different voice." Not usually. It's rough to rearrange overtones and harmonics. If you do force it to work, chances are almost zero you can get it to work for all the notes. You have to do it octave by octave.

There's fake concert hall tricks. little black arrow pulldown on the left > Split Stereo Track. Using the Time shift tool (two sideways black arrows) push the right sound just slightly later than the left, and then Make Stereo Track to put them back together. That plus Effect > GVerb.

Maybe Effect > Equalization, Graphic Eq. There's no formula for this. Change one and play it to see what you did.

I don't remember which piano I used for this clip.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/piano2.wav

But it's clearly a grand because of the oddly mushy bass note.

Can you add instruments to yours? I think I'm supposed to be able to.

Koz

[DooWahDiddy]

Thanks for the response! I got so caught up in trying to adjust the recording quality that I skipped over the fact that it's probably the sample itself. To my knowledge, no, I can't add voices to the MO8. I'll try the concert hall trick, but if that doesn't work I guess I'll have to be happy with what I've got or buy a new keyboard!

[kozikowski]

I have two. A smaller 77-key Yamaha that I enjoyed using, but the samples were just OK. Then I got one of the larger 88-key models and that one's much better. It has tricks I've never used, but the existing samples and tools work just fine.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/organfinale.mp3

Koz