Nord User Forum

I created a song that started life as a patch that I liked on the Moog. The final result ended up being a Rhodes/Minimoog “jam”. It might be interesting to some here because I used the new Stockholm EP sample for the bulk of the piano part. I like that sample quite a lot. My original plan was to swap it out with something from Spectrasonics Keyscape, but I was not able to find one that “worked”. The original recording direct from the Nord seemed to work the best. Yet it still felt a bit incomplete. I ended up duplicating the Rhodes piano part through my old Yamaha DX7 using the well-known preset 11. To my untrained ears, that combination produced what I was aiming for. And then, for no good reason, I made a video attempting to show some of the work flow. I suppose that the main conclusion one might draw from this is that I should keep my day job and not try to rely on writing, playing, or videoing music. But it does show that my cat seems to dig it, and I find great enjoyment in it.

[BBvideo=425,350]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQT5xaoHI0E[/BBvideo]

Thumbs up! Really nice job.

The composition itself is wonderfully peaceful. It just sort of feels like being on the ocean.

Love the instrumentation and mix. It's adventurous to record an acoustic piano - hats off to you! Love the sound of the Mini.

I've not yet gotten myself to the point of actually wanting to make a video of me playing, mostly because watching me play is like watching paint dry. Plus all of my non-piano instruments are software, and that's not exciting to look at. Your video looks great - I love your gear setup. You are much more "out of the box" than I am.

Congrats on some fine work!!

Sounds beautiful, thank you for sharing!

Could you do a rundown on how you're doing audio and video for things like this? I need to learn these skills.

Thank for the very kind words! That is very encouraging to me. I have to 'fess up on the grand piano part. The recording of that proves to be too difficult (adventerous) for me and it sounded crappy. So I cheated and sub'd in Keyscape (from the box) for that part. I have what I believe to be a very nice Lauten Audio mic, but the results are pretty awful. In retrospect, I should have tried using a pair of really old really cheap mics that I bought as a set for around $150. I recorded the grand with those once a couple years ago and (to my ears) it sounded pretty decent. I keep thinking that the expensive microphone will work okay, but each time my meager skills are defeated and the results are pretty awful.

I like your comment about the ocean. I tried to leave the title "Drifting" nebulous and let the listener "choose". In my original thinking, it was going to represent "drifting snow" and I had photo I took while snow shoeing. But I couldn't make it look okay, so I used art work that my daughter drew a few years ago; and that (to me) kind of invokes someone drifting through a city scape.

Thank you!

ericL wrote:Sounds beautiful, thank you for sharing!

Could you do a rundown on how you're doing audio and video for things like this? I need to learn these skills.

Thank you! I actually was considering writing up a brief description of how I did that. It turns out that I have a very difficult time sync'ing the video and audio. I ended up solving it this time by playing a super loud drum track track with a snare on the down beat (and then a light snare on beats 2, 3, 4). My wife was "videoing" me with my iPhone. I started the daw playing the drum track with the loud snare. I clapped my hands once on the beat 1 with the loud snare and then started playing the next measure. That gave me the transients I needed to line things up. In the video creation (I used iMovie), I placed both the final audio track with the real recording and the one with the loud snare "metronome" with the transients. And in the final rendering, I just dropped the volume out of the snare version. But it gave me the info for lining up the hand claps at the start of the video clips. It was tedious, though. It turns out that iPhones (apparently) do not have pro quality timing. I had to delete a tiny fraction of a measure from the video near the end of the main clip to bring it back into sync. I assume there must be better tools for this.

tetra wrote:Thank for the very kind words! That is very encouraging to me. I have to 'fess up on the grand piano part. The recording of that proves to be too difficult (adventerous) for me and it sounded crappy. So I cheated and sub'd in Keyscape (from the box) for that part. I have what I believe to be a very nice Lauten Audio mic, but the results are pretty awful. In retrospect, I should have tried using a pair of really old really cheap mics that I bought as a set for around $150. I recorded the grand with those once a couple years ago and (to my ears) it sounded pretty decent. I keep thinking that the expensive microphone will work okay, but each time my meager skills are defeated and the results are pretty awful.

I like your comment about the ocean. I tried to leave the title "Drifting" nebulous and let the listener "choose". In my original thinking, it was going to represent "drifting snow" and I had photo I took while snow shoeing. But I couldn't make it look okay, so I used art work that my daughter drew a few years ago; and that (to me) kind of invokes someone drifting through a city scape.

Thank you!

All good! I'm a big fan of Piano VSTs and would never try to mic up my piano. I also prefer to record via MIDI first (hard to do on an acoustic ), so I can make corrections to my less than stellar playing sometimes. Another reason why I probably won't ever do video.

Very nice music!

I usually just grab one of many youtube videos on how to mic a piano. example

COOL CAT!

Reminds me of the Pacific Ocean, near my house. A cat's instincts are never wrong