An essential step in Audio production is to add reverberation to recordings of your piano. This blog post is to go with my YouTube video on adding Reverberation to a home audio recording of the piano.
Keep reading – this is easy to do!
I feel it very important to urge you to keep reading … using words like adding Reverberation and some of the words that will follow is probably making you think ‘oops! Too complicated to be bothered’. As you’ll see, this really isn’t complicated at all. I’ve dubbed this ‘Audio Engineering for Idiots’ (and count myself in the ranks of the Idiots here).
What is reverberation?
Reverberation is effectively the effect you get when sound bounces off walls and other hard surfaces. This is what happens in a concert halls or churches for example. It’s a consequence of the acoustics of the space – which were often specifically designed. This is how we are used to listening to pianos in concerts and on recordings.
When we record at home, the room we have almost certainly doesn’t have fantastic acoustics, there will be background noise or too many close by hard surfaces bouncing the sound all over the place. Were we in a proper recording studio, we’d have specially treated walls to prevent any sound reflection and we’ also have a sound engineer on hand to help. To get around these disadvantages, we need to apply some effects to the audio we record on our smartphones by using our computer. Again, keep reading … this is as simple as drag and drop and press a few buttons.
Getting a separate Audio file to use
The first thing we will do differently is to record the Audio and Video separately. This is actually a lot simpler than it sounds if we have two phones. We plug our microphone into one smartphone and position it by the piano, we position another where it gets a good view of us playing, press ‘play’ on each one, sit down and play!
If you only have one smartphone just borrow one from family or friends whilst you record.
In this previous blog post, I went over setting up the Shure MV88 Microphone. We do exactly the same here but, because we’re going to capture the audio separately, we’ll actually use the Motiv App record. If you’re using an iPhone, you could also use Garageband for this easily enough.
Another advantage of capturing the Audio and Video separately is that we can place the Microphone in the best place to pick up our piano’s sound rather than from the best video viewpoint. The ‘Best Place’ will depend on your room, your microphone and your piano of course. Things to think about are getting it as close a possible to the sound board, but not too close to the pedals or action itself as the microphone will pick up bumps and squeaks.
How to mic the piano
Believe it or not, I spent hours watching different videos on how to Mic a piano … it’s an entire subject in itself … but in honesty at this level you don’t need to worry so much and, in any case, we only have the one microphone.
I’m using the Shure MV88 (see below) and if you look closely at it, you’ll see an L on one side and an R on the other. These indicate the left and right stereo channels (left playing through your left ear and right through your right ear when you listen with headphones).
I have a really cheap tripod I use that allows me to position the mic just inside the piano. I have the L pointing to the bass strings and the R to the treble strings. This means when you play it back through headphones it sounds more like it does from the player’s perspective. Your left ear is of course closer to bass (your left hand). Your right ear closer to treble (your right hand). I have a better tripod for the phone I’m using to record the Video just to keep it more stable.
Once you’ve finished your recording, you basically have separate audio and video files that you can download onto your computer.
Processing the audio file
Every recording you hear – no matter what style of music – has had lots done to it to make it sound ‘better than it was’. This is called ‘post processing’. All of this is done with our favourite artists.
If you look at videos of professional pianists, there are microphones all over the place. You will often spot some hanging from the ceiling! They are there to capture effect of the concert hall acoustics on the sound of the piano. As we only have one microphone, we will use software to electronically take the piano from our lounge or practice room and place it in a much nicer sounding space – a concert hall, a church, an arena. To do this we use an effect called ‘Reverberation’ (or Reverb).
I know this might be starting to sound ‘technical’, and, indeed, there are probably libraries written on the subject. However using just a few small tweaks that are easily within reach, you can achieve surprising results when you play around.
There are multiple microphones in any concert hall to record a concert. However, I can promise you that the end recording you hear will have some degree of Reverb electronically applied to it.
Adding reverberation
To add Reverb to our audio file, basically what we need is a ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ – a DAW for short. If you’re not familiar with these, you’re probably again thinking this will be difficult … well, don’t panic. It’s amazingly simple!
I’m a Mac user and so I get Garageband for free. Yes, Garageband is a DAW. If you’re on Windows, there are free ones that you can download that will do the same job in a very similar manner. These free ‘home user’ programs have an incredible range of features that back in the day would only have been available to the professionals. If you want to completely master them, then it would admittedly take a very long time.
However, we don’t need to become experts … we simply need to perform a few basic operations. Most of these will be similar to things you’ll have done with other apps before anyway. Things such as drag and drop or selecting things from a list. The basic look and feel of most DAW software is very similar and for the extremely limited things we’re going to do here, you’ll have no problem working it out if you are using something other than Garageband.
Plugins and Presets keep things simple
We’re going to use two main features to keep our lives simple.
Plugins
A ‘Plug In’ is going to be our starting point. This word is a throwback to the days when manufacturers made actual pieces of hardware to add Reverberation that would be ‘plugged in’ to the other audio equipment. The name has been retained, however, these days there is no need for the equipment itself – it’s all in the computer program.
Presets
The second thing we’ll use is what are called ‘Pre-Sets’. The idea of a pre-set is that an experienced Audio Engineer has done all the hard work and created the right set of values to use in the plugin to get different types of effect.
In the screenshot here you can see that this particular Plug In has presets. These presets have descriptive names such as ‘Big Room’, ‘Church’, ‘Live Club’ and so forth. Effectively you simply select from the list the one you want and the settings are applied to your recording for you. I just keep listening to one after another until I get an effect I like. For my last recording it was ‘Wooden Verb’ but I have used others for different pieces of music. I recommend you watch my YouTube video to see how this is done.
If you have the time, the patience and more importantly the ears, then you can really adjust the Reverb to make it even more pleasing to your ears. Note, no computer skills are mentioned here at all. Again, as you look at the screenshot and you can see there are little sliders to increase or reduce the different values. In my view, there’s no real need to go to those extremes when you’re recording something that people will listen to on their phone through their standard headphones but I have to admit I’ve played around with them from time to time.
We use exactly this same principle to add Equalisation to our recordings too.
Combining audio and video files
We now combine our new Audio file with the Video File we recorded on the other phone. Again, this is remarkably simple to do.
I use iMovie (being a Mac user as its free). For Windows, you can use MovieMaker or any video editing software. I generally do this on my computer rather than my phone. It’s just that bit easier to accomplish in the fuller version.
In short, iMovie allows us to drag both the Audio and Video files into a project, position them on what is called the ‘timeline’ (watch the video for a full explanation) and then simply slide them into position so that they are in synch. As both the Audio and the Video files have a visible ‘Wave Form’ (a sort of picture of the sound), getting them aligned is easy to do as you can do it visually. Once they’re aligned, the same ‘topping and tailing’ applies as we discussed previously in this other post.
Once we’re happy with the end result, we simply export it into a new video file (using the Share menu option) and then we can upload to Facebook or wherever.
For details of all of this and more, I invite you to watch my Record Your Piano YouTube Playlist. You may also download my free eBook series that will take you through everything in step by step detail.
Have a try and let me know how you got on.
