in this video, I'm gonna show you how to transform Ableton's okay
grand piano patch into an awesome piano patch using only four stock Ableton
plugins Brett Pontecorvo here at live keyboardist comm where I help keyboard
players just like you with sound design the ins and outs of Ableton and building
a fantastic stable live keyboard setup if you're new here please consider
hitting that like and subscribe button but without further ado let's jump in
so Ableton's built-in piano sound is a little bit fuzzy it's a little bit Basie
sounds a little tinny a little bit plasticky but this can all be changed
very simply and very quickly so let's have a look at this first I'm just gonna
drop in a spectrum and that is gonna help us to see with our eyes what this
sound looks like across the spectrum
so you're gonna notice is that we've got a lot of high sounds on the low end
we've got some peaking happening here around the three or four hundred range
and then we've got a sharp descent here right as we get into the higher end and
so what we're gonna do is we're gonna work to combat this a little bit now the
grand piano itself has some macros built in to alter these patches we're just
gonna leave them we're gonna start from scratch so first things first let's get
rid of some of that Basie frequency so we're gonna drop in an EQ eight here and
I'm gonna turn everything off except for number one and I'm gonna choose this
high-pass filter we're just gonna take off some of the low end and we'll set
this at a hundred Hertz so we'll have a listen
so you'll see it's brought down some of the lower end
and just that alone already makes it feel a lot more present right okay the
next thing that we need to add is a compressor now I really like using the
glue compressor because it colors the sound just a little bit now we don't
want the attack to be too fast or too slow and we only want it to hit or to
kick in when you get to a certain volume because you still want to have some
dynamics in your playing so I'm going to leave the attack at one but I'm going to
bring the release up to point eight and we'll leave the ratio at four so we'll
just bring this threshold down a touch
maybe a little bit more
you okay so right around negative 12 for me
I'm able to place some notes that don't touch the compressor
and then as I get louder I'm able to work that compressor so it sort of helps
bring out the punch in my playing now one more pro tip with this glue
compressor we're actually gonna pop the side open and we are gonna pull out
everything below 150 and this is just gonna make sure that none of our lower
sounds are pumping the compressor it's just sort of an extra precaution all
right so now you can see we've got still a lot happening here and we've got some
stuff tapering off so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use a saturator to try and
add a bit of extra harmonic information just above 1k here so we'll drop in our
saturator and we've got some controls here but the base frequency thing here I
like to bring this down to about negative 10 because we're not trying to
add a ton of distortion to the bottom end and that's gonna help us do that and
we're gonna turn the frequency up to 2k that's about where I want to start
adding some stuff well increase the width and we're gonna put the depth up
as well so
all right now we're gonna add some Drive and we'll pull back on this output
be a little bit less than that
all right so let's have an a/b test here so I'm just gonna quickly group these
using command G so I can turn them all off so here's before
and here's with it
okay so we're getting there we still need to get rid of some troublesome
frequencies which we'll do here in a second but I'm actually just gonna
double this saturator and I'm also gonna change the setting to soft sign it's
gonna make the distortion more intense so we'll have to pull out some of the
output
all right we're getting somewhere
yeah I can get behind that now there are still some trouble frequencies so we're
actually gonna drop in another EQ to try and pull some of those things out so eq8
right here now we already have a lot of decrease in the lower end so I'm just
gonna use a shelf here and what this is gonna do is this is gonna just drop
things down a bit I'm gonna set that at 200
so we can see we're getting a bit of a more even line and it's about to get
even more even so eq8 has this great feature here where I can actually just
listen to a particular sound so we want to get rid of some of the like woofing
and we can test that by just dragging
our sound here so right around 400 Hertz
sounds a little weird doesn't sound great so we're just gonna get rid of it
we're gonna pull that out
you know what to bring this up a bit because 400 is actually sounding alright
I can get behind that and then we're just gonna boost everything on the top
end here
cool so let's have a before after
and after
all right and the last effect that we're gonna add is reverb now this is not an
effects reverb this is just to put the piano in space kind of like emulate what
the piano would sound like in a room a bit so if you listen it's a really dry
sound so we're gonna work to get rid of that now I'm gonna pull the high cut off
of both of these because our low end has been notoriously bassy I'm gonna turn
off spin I'm gonna leave on chorus but we really want to look here at this pre
delay so pre delay determines how long before the reverb kicks in so when I hit
a note how long until the reverb process is it so 250 is a little bit too long I
actually like this around a hundred for a piano and my decay time just under one
second so I'll pull this dry/wet back now so here's no reverb
here's reverb pull that dry/wet down
you
and there you have it friends for stock plugins to transform Ableton's grand
piano sound now if you got value out of this video please consider hitting that
like and subscribe button I've got another video on the screen right now
where you can check out 3 other audio effects that I love to add to piano
sounds and if you want some great piano sounds made only with stock Ableton
plugins you can check out my pro piano effects rack at the link on the screen
right now and I'm looking forward to seeing you next week on live keyboardist
calm