Keyboard MID and Reaper

Armistice

Armistice

Son of Yoda
So in my next musical iteration, I want to get a bit more piano happening.

I have an old Yamaha full size weighted key stage piano (P80 I think - usual audio and MIDI outs), but the samples are a bit crap for recording. I've been looking at various VSTi piano options... Pianoteq etc.

It's not necessary for me to hear a great piano sound via my system to record it... and I'm a crap player anyway... however I'm assuming I should be able to record the MIDI instructions into Reaper by plonking away on the Yammie, then attach a better sound to it from the MIDI file later.... as well as edit out my mistakes, correct timing and all that guff.

Now I use Reaper to control my Addictive Drums and SSD4 drum software, so I'm quite across how to do that, however there's only one parameter at play there... velocity... I'm assuming it's more complex with a piano. And I'm not concerned with the VSTi part of it.

Am I going to be able to do what I want to do here, and how do I do it?

Piano to interface MIDI? And roughly the same as recording audio in terms of Reaper? Arm track, record etc... I haven't actually tried yet, so just checking to see if it would work.
 
1 Connect Piano midi out to interface midi in

2 Create new track in Reaper

3 Load VSTi onto the track

3 Click track monitor button so that you are monitoring the track

4 Select midi input on the track

5 Arm track for recording

If you play the keyboard, you should be able to hear it. You should also see the track receiving midi.
 
What he said, except you don't actually have to put the VSTi on the track if you're happy monitoring off the keyboard itself.

It really is exactly like what you do to record drums. A real piano only cares what note you played and how hard (unless you get into weird experimental stuff) and maybe the state of the pedals.
 
I assumed there'd be:

(a) how hard I hit
(b) how long I kept my finger on the key
(c) use of sustain and other pedals

as parameters. I've tried manually programming piano with free VSTis and the first bit is easy, and from memory, I just dragged the length of the note to cover the second... but how you dealt with sustain pedals etc. I don't really understand, as there only appear to be those two parameters you can edit on a note by note basis.... but possibly I haven't dived in deep enough.

Guess I'll set it up on the weekend and see what happens... I must have some MIDI cables there somewhere... :)
 
The piano sends a "Note On" when you push down the key. This is the "what note and how hard". It then sends a "Note Off" when you let off the key, telling the synth to stop holding that note (and to into whatever release routine it has). The pedals are Continuous Controllers, which will show up in the CC lane below the piano roll. These are not normally attached to a specific note, of course. These are actually "named" controllers, in that the General MIDI standard assigns them to specific CC numbers in order that your Yamaha will know what to do with the message you send from a Roland or whatever. All that means to you is that you should be able to find at least "sustain pedal" by name in the CC drop down in the bottom left of the MIDI editor. CCs technically can have values between 0-127, but the pedals are on/off and I think most synths will respond to values above 64 as on and below 64 as off (or vice versa). Reaper should just record those messages as long as you've got the pedals plugged into the piano properly. It's up to whatever synth (VSTi or otherwise) to respond to those messages. A decent piano specific instrument should have it all set up to work with them, but...
 
Armistice said:
I assumed there'd be:

(a) how hard I hit
(b) how long I kept my finger on the key
(c) use of sustain and other pedals

as parameters. I've tried manually programming piano with free VSTis and the first bit is easy, and from memory, I just dragged the length of the note to cover the second... but how you dealt with sustain pedals etc. I don't really understand, as there only appear to be those two parameters you can edit on a note by note basis.... but possibly I haven't dived in deep enough.

Guess I'll set it up on the weekend and see what happens... I must have some MIDI cables there somewhere... :)
Click to expand...

Don't forget pitch bend if you play anything with sustain. One of my songs I just used a pitch bend to take a note from original note, slide up, hold, slide down below original, then back to original. I had to edit the pitch bend information, but that will be recorded and modulation. You'll have fun.
 
DM, those are other uses of CCs (though pitchbend isn't technically...), but a real piano doesn't have pitchbend, and it's unnecessary for realistic piano emulation.
 
Ah... useful extra information thank you ashcat.... I hadn't poked around in that section... sort of wondered what it was all about.

And yeah, can't imagine pitch bending a piano, but could be an interesting effect, perhaps. Useful for all the other stuff I may do, however.

As usual HR is the font of all knowledge. Cheers guys..
 
I was beating my head against the wall on this... (oh, I assume I had to go and enable the interface as a MIDI device which I hadn't yet done, so sorted that out in the end.. couldn't get a damn note (MIDI) out of it... I was letting the P80 play one of its demo pieces automatically whilst I was trying to get it to work... eventually I figured out that doh! the machine probably wasn't transmitting MIDI information for the demo piece, just audio... and as soon as I started plunking away myself, we were good!

*gives self uppercut*
 
A really old annoying 'feature', but I guess it stopped people stealing the piece for something else? If you're intending chopping up the midi output and editing, take care with the sustain pedal. It's a very common thing to release the sustain pedal just after the bar end - and then if you chop up the track, you don't grab the late pedal up message - so when you edit them together, the sustain message saying pedal down is there, but there's no pedal up message, so the notes ring on and on and sound awful. You'll just need to remember of this happens, have a look at the midi events on screen and edit in cc127 at 0 to mimic the sustain pedal lifting off.
 
This piano VSTi is pretty good for free. It might do the job for you while you search out your final solution. I find if I don't send the track I'm recording to my Reaverb channel(s), then I can monitor the piano VSTi live without much noticeable latency.

Sound Magic - Piano One
 
rob aylestone said:
A really old annoying 'feature', but I guess it stopped people stealing the piece for something else? If you're intending chopping up the midi output and editing, take care with the sustain pedal. It's a very common thing to release the sustain pedal just after the bar end - and then if you chop up the track, you don't grab the late pedal up message - so when you edit them together, the sustain message saying pedal down is there, but there's no pedal up message, so the notes ring on and on and sound awful. You'll just need to remember of this happens, have a look at the midi events on screen and edit in cc127 at 0 to mimic the sustain pedal lifting off.
Click to expand...

Good to know, thanks Rob!
 
jonny deep said:
This piano VSTi is pretty good for free. It might do the job for you while you search out your final solution. I find if I don't send the track I'm recording to my Reaverb channel(s), then I can monitor the piano VSTi live without much noticeable latency.

Sound Magic - Piano One
Click to expand...

Thanks jonny - I've already got this little baby...

I was researching the Pianoteq thing and ended up on some forums with "real" piano players... lots of back and forth about how it doesn't sound like a "real" piano when playing Chopin, but the demo I downloaded sounds pretty good to me, and way better than Piano One too..
 
I don't know if you've got your update warning thing turned on in Reaper but
there's been another big update to midi/editor & the manual!

I thought since you're going to be doing a lot of midi piano & such it makes sense to update to the newest features for midi
just in case! :)
 
jiff 41 said:
I don't know if you've got your update warning thing turned on in Reaper but
there's been another big update to midi/editor & the manual!

I thought since you're going to be doing a lot of midi piano & such it makes sense to update to the newest features for midi
just in case! :)
Click to expand...



Yeah, I updated a couple of weeks ago jiff... should be the latest and greatest. The PC's not (usually) connected to the internet so I don't get the notifications unless I have an update session.

I'm just trying to work out if I want to pay $300 for a piano VST, or I can live with the cheaper "stage" version... :(

This was interesting too... I typed "Moddard Pianoteq" into google and the auto suggestion thing suggested "crack" before I could type in "review"... scary for software developers if that's the most popular next word for their product. Such things may start inexorably shifting us towards having to be online / in the cloud for software, continuous licence validation, alas...

I'll probably start with the Stage version and if I find I'm a bit hamstrung, upgrade to the next...
 
Armistice said:
Yeah, I updated a couple of weeks ago jiff... should be the latest and greatest. The PC's not (usually) connected to the internet so I don't get the notifications unless I have an update session.
Click to expand...



There's been new updates again,pretty big as well
on march 2nd & the manual, my PC's offline as well.
I put them on a stick & install from there, saves hasstle as they come thick & fast! :D
 
jiff 41 said:
There's been new updates again,pretty big as well
on march 2nd & the manual, my PC's offline as well.
I put them on a stick & install from there, saves hasstle as they come thick & fast! :D
Click to expand...

Already? Jeez.... well I guess I'll get onto it then... :D
 
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