How I Record My Piano Music

Posted by John on Dec 3rd, 2006 | no comments

Ok. So you might be interested in my own “Behind the Band” story of how I create the piano music you hear on this site. Here’s a summary:

The first ten songs (The Golden Road, Opus 1-10) were recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis, TN. Great studio! A LOT of popular artists have recorded there. That was a cool experience, but it costs over $1,000 per day to record. I needed an easy setup that I could use at my leisure with little expense.

The solution came this fall when I discovered an incredible “little” piece of software called Ivory by Synthogy. For about $350 I ordered the software which came on 10 DVDs totalling a massive 40gb of piano samples. You can hear it for yourself in the new tracks I’ve recently released on this site.

Here are the steps to creating my music:

1. Compose the piano work on my Yamaha GH1B baby grand in the living room.
2. Play the finished work on my Alesis QS8 electronic keyboard (with 88 weighted keys) in my home office.
3. The keyboard sends MIDI information (what notes, when, how hard, how long, sustain pedal, etc.) to my Dell computer via MIDI-to-USB cable.
4. I use Cakewalk Music Creator 3 software to receive the MIDI information and save it to the hard drive.
5. I then tell Cakewalk to send the MIDI information through the Synthogy piano software during playback.
6. I edit the music in Cakewalk by fixing or removing wrong notes, adjusting sloppy rhythms, and tweaking how loud each note is played.
7. Becky (my lovely wife) and I listen to the music over and over again to find ways of improving the song…more editing.
8. When we both feel the song is ready, I export the Synthogy output to a very large .WAV file suitable for writing to an audio CD.
9. Then I use an MP3 Encoder to convert the WAV file to MP3, which is a much smaller file and more suitable for streaming and selling online.
10. I upload and setup the new MP3 for digital distribution on all major music stores.
11. I upload and post the new MP3 on this site.

And there you have it. I found the process easy to use (once I figured it out), which really helped me get away from the “next big project” mentality, and move toward a “baby steps” system. I hope that gives you some insight into how I make this music.

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