Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players

15Jan 2019 by Brett Pontecorvo

The Remedy For Muddy Piano Pad Patches

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Live Playback, Sound Design, Uncategorized

When playing piano/pad simultaneously, something things start to sound a little muddy. In my experience there are three things that generally cause this issue. The volume of one of the patches is too loudPatches are competing for dominance in the same frequency rangeThe initial attack of each patch happens at the same time For any of the above reasons, there are simple solutions. Before we jump in, pause and make sure you Join the Mainstage To Ableton Community. Every Tuesday and Saturday I release helpful information just like this to help optimize your live set-up, and I don't want you to miss out on solutions to your Ableton challenges, or information that will level up your Ableton game. Adjusting Volume Make sure that you piano patch has only slightly more…

01Jan 2019 by Brett Pontecorvo

Cool Ping Pong Delay Trick

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Presets and Sounds

If you are playing keyboard live, you will want to make excellent use of all the audio effects you have available to you. It's one of the things that sets us apart from someone who is playing on a regular acoustic piano. Ping pong delay is a great effect that you hear probably more often than you would expect. It's a great way to add dimension and rhythm to a standard piano patch. It takes a delayed signal and moves it quickly back and fourth across a stereo feild. Many ping-pong delays leave my sound a little muddy. I have created a bit of a workaround for that that will leave this effect still sounding crispy. Rather than using Ableton's ping pong delay device, I use the simple delay panned…

11Dec 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Delay: Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Presets and Sounds

Delay can add a lot by doing a little. Admittedly this post transformed into to something different then I intended as I explored the Ping Pong Delay. In all of this, my passion is using the software as a piece of my instrument. When an electric guitar player plugs into their pedal board, the board is no less a part of their instrument than the guitar. As a keyboard player, how do I use my software the same way? This is a question I ask myself often. This post comes from that place. And I know you are going to love this approach to using delay. https://youtu.be/WoMH5YHi0eA What is Delay? Delay is an audio effect that takes a part of your signal, and repeats it after a given amount of…

13Nov 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Lowpass Filter: Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Featured, Live Playback

A filter can do a lot to sound. You can think about it much like an EQ. As a matter of fact, an EQ is capable of many of the sound shaping functions that the auto filter is capable of. So what is the main difference? I like to think of an EQ as a way to mold a sound that you like to fit in with the other sounds that are happening. It is designed to be more of a mixing tool than an audio effect. I like to think of a filter as a way to drastically change the sound for artistic effect. It has more to do with what a specific sound will be sound like, than how it fits with the rest of the track. The…

06Nov 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Reverb: Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Live Playback, Presets and Sounds

Before most music hits our ears, it passes through some sort of a computer program: Protools, Logic, Cubase, Studio One, Ableton, and any of the others I might be missing. Very rarely is anything getting onto our most popular streaming services without being molded in some way by a computer. Even more than that, many of the sounds that we hear in music is created from a digital instrument: Whether it be sampled based, or a synthesizer. So it seems to logically follow that if you are playing a cover gig, you probably aren't going to make it through the whole night without having at least some handle on how to make computerized sounds. That is what this series is about. What we as keyboard players NEED to know to be…

Category: Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players