How To Turn A Piano Into A Drum Set: Part II

Er, let's see, step four! Check out the ridiculously expensive Earthworks mics from the Equipment Room. Seriously, I have no idea why we have these - there's two pairs of SR-77s, which are around $2000 a pair, and a pair of AKG 414s, which run about the same. I feel pretty stupid running such nice mics through the noisy preamps in my Mbox, but whatever. No $2000 mic pres in our inventory...

Upon receiving no response from the "person in charge" I e-mailed about piano use, I decided to just go for it and use whatever piano I wanted. In this case, the piano in question is the grand that's in a glass room in the Union, chosen both for the entertainment of putting nuts and bolts into it with people watching and possibly getting kicked out, and because a grand is more accessible than an upright for what I want to do. However, when I gave the room the once-over, the A/C was pretty loud, and - the final straw - no outlets in the room to plug my laptop into. So, I headed over to the practice rooms in West Hall.

Campus is DEAD on the weekends! At least on the west side, anyway. Didn't see a soul as I was walking.

What is it about colleges and Kawai upright pianos? SCC had 'em, and RPI has 'em. I picked the one in the big room, which apparently is the only one that's actually decently in tune. ::evil laugh::

I spent about two hours in there, doing the following:
Take off the cover, expose the strings and hammers inside. Stick bolts, plastic, sticks, washers, and a fork in between certain strings. Set up laptop and Mbox, realize that there's a mic stand in the room (the only thing I wasn't able to check out from the equipment room!), rejoice, set up the Earthworks. I used the handle of a guitar amp for a mic stand behind the piano, and put the other mic pointing at the hammers from the front. Sounds good...

It took quite a while to figure out which notes to fuck with, as well as precisely where to stick the foreign objects along the length of the strings. I played a little bit; couldn't really come up with too much on the spot as far as composition goes, but here's some clips: jango | slow/jumpy. I was mainly there to sample, anyway.

I recorded about a half-hour total into Pro Tools, and I just spent like three hours cutting it all up and loading it into a sampler in Reason. Ugh. It sounds good, though! I learned a bunch about the NN-XT sampler, too - it's pretty dope! I made sure to record samples of each note at different volumes, so now I can crossfade between them depending on how hard I strike the keys on my MIDI keyboard (which I'm gonna get from the ER on Monday). Sounds much more natural that way. Also, there's a RAD feature where you can switch between a few samples on repeated hits of one key - so it's not just the same sample playing over and over again, which sounds really fake.

Frickin' cool! Weird textures, crazy bell sounds. I discovered that the middle pedal on the piano, which is basically a sustain for the bass strings only, functions as a wild natural reverb if you hold it down while playing a high note. All the bass strings resonate in sympathy with the note played, but it's all harmonics, and it sounds FANTASTIC. I recorded one for every note, so what I'ma do is instead of using a simulated reverb in Reason or Pro Tools, I can just put my recorded piano 'verb on a separate sampler in Reason and bring it up on another fader.

Erm, I'm not sure if this is remotely interesting or comprehensible to those of you who AREN'T total audio nerds like me, but at least it sounds cool, right? Right?

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Dig:

Aphex Twin - drukqs (incidentally, there are several tracks on here that are played on a prepared piano - hence the album art)