Making a piano midi piece sound good

OP, your friend plays piano well?

Can you find a weighted piano/keyboard/controller your friend can play to create a good unquantized midi file of the piece you want recorded?

Anyway, there is a big difference between a musical piece and something quite repetitive.

That is how I would proceed.

edit: Here is your file back to you with some changes to help you figure out what I did.
View attachment January.mp3


P.S. Keyboard is FA-08 with Reaper & other studio gear. I have way overused the effects.
 
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One of the tips I would like to give is to adjust the velocity of your notes. Knowing which notes to change might take some practice, but an adjustment at all will do wonders to make your piano sound more organic. Of course, the better the piano software, the more realistic it will sound.
 
PJ is going to have to spend some money. You can have the best piano sampler in the world, but unless you can drive it with a decent keyboard - and probably velocity sensitive with a reasonable piano feel, you just cannot get the feeling into the thing. With a decent keyboard if you play repeated notes of exactly the same velocity WITH QUANTISE OFF, in time with a metronome click, and then look at the MIDI dat you will a big range of velocity data, and the note start and end times will also be varying - some notes ahead, some behind, some longer, some shorter. This has far more impact on the music that the exact piano VST you are using. You can add eq and effects and it still won't sound human if your MIDI keyboard is compromised.
 
OP, your friend plays piano well?

Can you find a weighted piano/keyboard/controller your friend can play to create a good unquantized midi file of the piece you want recorded?

Anyway, there is a big difference between a musical piece and something quite repetitive.

That is how I would proceed.

edit: Here is your file back to you with some changes to help you figure out what I did.
View attachment 101332


P.S. Keyboard is FA-08 with Reaper & other studio gear. I have way overused the effects.

I like this version LivingEdge and I will definitely go in this direction.

However, I since changed my approach and I will try to record the piece using my (recently bought) upright piano. I'm looking for an equipment to do it in this post if there is something you can recommend:
Recording upright piano on a MacBook

Thanks,
PJ
 
I've revisited the topic again, and I suspect that one of the problems is simply that the piano doesn't sound real when it's being played. I'm not convinced that you can play a master keyboard or any plastic keyboard properly without hearing the piano properly. I do piano stuff all the time and I just dialled up a rotten piano sound in a Korg synth - and then recorded it. Then I added a decent piano to Cubase, and it sounds horrible. Playing the same piece on the Korg - WITH the piano VSTi produces a hugely better result.

Recording a real piano is going to be much harder work, and a couple of decent mics, stands, an interface and probably some sound treatment for the room is not going to be cheap. Uprights are also quite tricky to record because most of them clack like mad, especially if you remove the panel!
 
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