Guide to Making a Digital Piano Sound Acoustic

One of the most beloved sounds in recording history is the sound of a grand, baby grand, or upright piano. For the do it yourself musician though, any of these are rarely available. What is usually available, however, are those standard digital pianos. Usually they come with many sound presets, but their basic tones are almost always pianos. They strive to come as close as they can to those aforementioned giant acoustic pianos. However, they can't even really touch the real thing and there's little we can do to change that. However, there are a few things you can do to alter the tone in the post production process to make it a bit closer to a true acoustic piano. Let's begin.

First, reverb hides everything. In many amateur recordings, they're usually caked with reverb. The reason is because reverb is great at hiding anything that sounds bad. Out of tune? Reverb. Horrible performance? Reverb. Out of time? Reverb. Want to play off a bad song as ''artistic''? Reverb. Now, none of that may apply to you but you can still use reverb to hide the ''sterile'' tone of a digital piano. This actually works very well and you may have even heard this trick on professional recordings done by big time engineers. Definitely something to try if you absolutely need a piano on your recording.

Second, boost the mids and low mids of the piano. If you increase ''muddiness'' of the piano, the crisp, sterile tone that makes it sound so fake will become indistinguishable. Be sure not to many it too muddy though, or else it will just sound horrible. You'll be surprised at how much you can push the envelope here, but don't go overboard. If it sounds right to you, give it a break for a few minutes and then listen again. You may change your mind. The ideal area to boost is 100hz to 300hz. Maybe just a bit above 300hz if you want. A few decibels should really do the trick, don't go overboard.

And now, for our final trick. Bury it in the mix. A piano can have good presence even if it's not in the foreground of a mix. There are plenty of things you can do to bury the piano in the mix. You can try turning down the treble by a lot, lowering the volume, or panning it very far left or right in conjunction with the other two. All three together is almost sure to make your piano audible but not too audible. A very nice way of fattening up your mixes without importing a grand piano into your bathroom. Very cool. Good luck!