I was recently asked how to play piano duets with yourself.
Of course, as well as playing piano duets with yourself, you can also create great recordings to share on social media of both parts together!
To do this, you’ll need to be familiar with how to record your own piano playing. Much of the mechanics of this, including simple audio and video editing are covered in various other blog posts, accompanied by my various Tommy’s Piano Corner YouTube videos and, of course, my free eBook – Volumes 1 and 2. If you missed these and want to try out the duet ideas below, now would be a good time to watch the videos and download the eBooks.
Extra challenges
There are a few things that make it a little more challenging to record a duet as opposed to a solo performance.
- First, is the challenge of getting both players to be able to start at the right speed without having a count in
- Secondly, generally in a duet one player will lead and the other accompany. Don’t forget that it’s not unusual for this role to swap between the players during the piece
- Thirdly, when playing with other musicians, aside your ears, you will take a set of visual clues from the other players. This might be the movements of bows for strings, hands for pianists and drummers, nodding heads etc.. With classical music, this is very important as we rarely play anything to a strict tempo.
Nonetheless, with a little thought, these problems are easy enough to get around.
Let’s look at an example
I’ll demonstrate the ideas using Gabriel Fauré’s Berceuse (French for Lullaby) from Dolly. This beautiful little piece is just 84 bars long and is very well known. I believe it was historically used as the theme music to Read Along with Mother (which is probably even before my time). For the first 58 bars, the Primo takes the melody. The Primo Player sits on the right hand side and plays the treble end of the piano. The Secondo player (sitting to the left) provides the accompaniment initially.
Then from Bar 59, the melody largely passes to the Secondo player who takes the lead until the end.
Spend some time planning your approach
The first thing we need to do is a little planning of how we’ll go about recording this. Of course, it’s intended to be played by two people on a single piano with each player playing one part only. Tip: Generally, the Secondo player is the one who controls the pedal. However, this is’t necessarily the most effective way to record it.
In terms of our initial issue of both players starting together, luckily, in this case, the Secondo part has a 2 bar introduction. This means getting the tempo set by one player before the other needs to start playing is much easier to do. You might therefore think that recording the entire Secondo part first would make more sense. However, for the first 58 bars, the Primo will be playing the melody. Recording the Secondo would end up in the unfortunate situation where the melody needs to follow the accompaniment. In real world music of course, the accompaniment generally follows the melody.
Create the base recording
Therefore, the best thing to do is to create our base recording is to play bits of each part. For the first two bars, we’ll play the Secondo part. We will then move straight away to the Primo part until the end of bar 58. Then, from bar 59, we’ll switch back to the Secondo part where it picks up the melody and continue through to the end.
Recording in this manner is important as it will enable us to get the very best musical result – where the part with the melody leads with phrasing, rubato etc. This way, when we add the accompaniment, we always have the melody pre-recorded.
In a piece where the melody stays with one part, then the job is somewhat simplified. Here you are able to simply record that entire part first.
Tip: I always record the audio separately so that I can do some audio processing later as I discussed in my videos and free eBook.
How to stay in synch whilst recording
Our base recording helps us somewhat with setting the musical footprint more accurately. However, keeping good coordination between the parts when we try to play them together may still be problematic.
To get around this, we’ll create a video using our phone or tablet at the same time as we record the audio.
Tip: We will, however, face one slight technical problem – and that is that when video is recorded and subsequently played back, it can lead to a lag between the video and separately recorded audio. This lag is tiny, but over a few minutes it can become noticeable. Therefore, we need to combine our Audio and Video files using iMovie as I’ve described before. We will then use the speed editor to adjust the video recording to match that of our audio. It will be a tiny adjustment probably but an important one.
Having a video recording of the part we now need to play along with has the advantage that we have the visual clues to help us keep coordinated. This then becomes much closer to a real-life situation where we’re playing with the other musicians. The way I did this is to simply put my iPad on the music stand, plug in headphones and then record the remaining part whilst listening and watching to the the video recording.
Now record the remaining part
Of course, now when I record the remaining part, I already have the first two bars introduction in my initial recording. I’ll start playing the Secondo from bar 3 (where the Primo in the base recording starts). I’ll continue right until bar 59 at which point I’ll switch over to the Primo part and play this until the end.
Now combine the two with Garageband
I now have two totally separate recordings that I will load into Garageband. We’ll import one part first, apply our Reverb and EQ. Then we’ll create a new track with Duplicate Settings to import the second file. I explained how to do this when showing how to edit out mistakes.
After we have imported the second recording into the second track, we can slide it into place. Don’t forget to us the ‘zoom’ slider on the right hand side as it makes it easier to do small adjustments to get the two perfectly lined up.
Simple mixing
Our final stage now is to ensure they are properly ‘mixed’ together. Mixing covers many things, but here, we’re going to simply adjust the volume of each track so that the accompaniment never drowns out the melody. This last step will, of course, be made easier if, as you record, you pay particular attention to dynamics. However, because we recorded the second track with an earphone in our ear, dynamics might not be as perfectly controlled as usual.
We can make volume changes within the piece by using what’s called Automation. By setting ‘Automation Points’, we can adjust the volume up or down by dragging them. You might need to do this only where the melody moves between parts to reduce the volume of the accompaniment. Again, you can learn more about automation points in my explanation of editing out mistakes.
Once you have done this, all that is left to do now is to export the song from the Share Menu. We now have a single recording of both parts.
Play along with yourself
Now, of course, the way to play along to a duet with yourself at home is to create a video of either part. You can then bounce the sound from the video through a Bluetooth speaker. Now, it’s easy to play along quite comfortably using the video recorded version for both the music and the visual clues.
As an optional extra, it’s even possible to superimpose the score on the video recording in iMovie. This way, the music is visible on the same screen as you play along.
This might seem like quite a lot of work, however, in reality it’s surprisingly simple. Have a try and let me know how you get on.
For more details, check out the accompanying YouTube Video.
