Piano Solo?
Piano can sometimes be a lonely hobby … do you ever want to play with your own band, ensemble or even orchestra? Well, these days you can quite easily create your own if you’re willing to spend the time. Keep reading to learn how.
We pianists spend hour upon hour alone practicing. For most of us, opportunities to play with other musicians are few and far between. Even then, when we do get the chance, it’s not often we’re the soloist. The piano is more generally playing the accompanying part except of course in things like Piano Concerti (which are still a lot beyond my reach).
Buy off the shelf?
There are commercially available things such as ‘Music Minus One’. Here, an orchestral piece is taken and the solo instrument removed. You can then play along with the recording. If you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own backing tracks, these might be options for you.
Or create your own?
However, if you have a laptop and some time, you can quite easily create your own band, ensemble or even orchestra to play along with you. Using the famous C Major Prelude from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 as the basis, I’ll give you some ideas to get you started.
Don’t forget, you can download an MP3 file with which you can play along at home on your piano.
Why Bach’s C Major Prelude?
The first reason why I’ve chosen this particular piece is that it’s nice and accessible …. you don’t need to be an advanced pianist to play it and there’s even a reasonable chance you’ll already have learned to play it. If not, even the relatively inexperienced pianist can soon learn it.
Secondly, it was used by Gounod as the basis for his Ave Maria. The piano part is almost unaltered except for one additional figuration. Thanks to Gounod, we also have a ready made melody to use.
It’s possible to download many different versions to help you. I downloaded the version by Arthur Seybold which also has a violin part.
The basic idea
I’m going to quickly (re)introduce you to a couple of very important concepts. The first is a ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ (I did talk about this in my videos on recording yourself) and the second is ‘Virtual Instruments’ – something I’ve not mentioned before.
As always, don’t be put off as you’ll be surprised at hoe simple this is to do when you follow these few tips.
I have written about these these concepts before. If you want to read up further, click on the links in the following paragraphs.
In a nutshell, a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is basically a Recording Studio on your computer. Using a DAW, we can record directly into our computer. Alternatively, we can take things we’ve recorded elsewhere and drag and drop them into it. The set of videos I have already made on recording your piano give you all the details of how to do this. I use Garageband (free with Mac computers) as my Digital Audio Workstation. Download Audacity if you don’t use Mac – this is free and offers mostly the same features.
In terms of Virtual Instruments, these are basically ‘virtual copies’ of real instruments (things like violins, flutes, pianos, drums … pretty much anything). You are able to play them ‘through your computer’ using either your computer keyboard or a plug in piano-like keyboard. The result is recorded in something called MIDI. Interestingly, whether you have heard of MIDI or not before, you’ll be more familiar with it than you think. The old ‘piano rolls’ that they used to have to make pianos play themselves, are generally the way ‘MIDI’ is shown graphically on your computer.
Garageband provides a set of Virtual Instruments that you can use.
Record the piano first
What we’ll do first is to record the piano part. You can either do this by recording your acoustic piano or by plugging your digital piano into your computer (if you have a digital piano at home). I have both. If you’re going to record your acoustic piano, then I recommend as always that a you get a decent microphone – the one I use is the Shure MV88 which I plug directly into my iPhone.
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If you are going to use your Digital piano, then we simply connect it to our computer (you’d need to check your Piano’s manual to see what type of connector to use.
When we plug the piano in like this, what we’re actually going to do is to use a ‘virtual piano’ on our computer that will produce the piano sound when played back. Garageband provides a Steinway Grand Virtual Piano.
We simply start with a new track, select the ‘Steinway Grand Piano’, press record and start playing.
If we’re using a recording of an acoustic piano, then we’ll simply drag and drop the file into Garageband as I’ve shown you before.
Then add the other instruments
Once we have recorded the piano part, we then need to add the remaining parts. We’ll do this by adding new tracks – a different track for each different instrument.
In the MP3 you can download, I basically added the melody, a Double Bass to echo the left hand notes and then a String Section by simply converting the right hand notes into blocked chords. Each separate track is recorded individually. I simply selected the instrument to use, pressed ‘Record’ and then played that part through my Digital Piano’s keyboard.
We might decide that we want the melody to be played by an Oboe or a Flute – or a combination of both. We can easily do this by just telling Garageband that we want to use a different ‘virtual instrument’.
Export the results and enjoy playing along
Once we have recorded everything we want, we can then ‘switch off’ the piano track in Garageband. Next we export the remaining tracks as an MP3 file (or similar). Finally, we can play the piano part ‘live’ afterwards.
We can save our recording to our computer, load it into iTunes, play it back through speakers – whatever we want.
I hope this has whetted your appetite to have a try at this. What I’ve given you here is the very basics to get you started. Of course, this isn’t limited to classical music – pick any song by your favourite artists and you’ll follow pretty much this same process to create your very own backing band.
I’ve made an MP3 of this piece for you to download. There are two versions, one with the piano and one without. The link is to the one without – I can send you the one with separately.
Let me know if you intend to give this a try.
