Another night with far less sleep than I was hoping. I think I managed to go to be at 2am after working on Revenant. I finished that track up in the morning and posted it, then spent most of the day with Olive (the dog). We returned to the dog park, this time without her Great Dane friend, and she was a bit more adventurous and inqisitive. More importantly, it wears her out, and I have a shred of a chance to get some work done.
I decided that I was going to do something simple, without a lot of production. Piano pieces and waltzes are good. Ambient is as well, but that normally ends up being a lot of production work, plus their length means that it simply takes longer to do everything.
- Lights in the Mist Ray Toler 4:06
Pick a Piano… Any Piano
I have a lot of piano libraries. My go-to favorite is probably still the Triple-Strike piano in the Kurzweil K2600. It’s flawed, to be sure, but it’s incredibly familiar and I just like it, even against far superior libraries and sounds.
The problem with sampled pianos is that they’re a specific recording of a specific note at a specific time. It will never change. Most decent sample libraries will have at least three to six “round robin” samples: multiple separate recordings so that repeated notes don’t sound exactly the same. When you only have one sample, people quickly have that “uncanny valley” reaction. It sounds good, but it doesn’t sound real. It’s like watching The Polar Express with your ears.
Last year, I picked up Pianoteq by Modartt. Pianoteq differs from any of my other pianos in that it uses physical modeling instead of audio recordings. The upside of this approach is that you can do anything to the model that you could do to a real piano, and even some things that you couldn’t. The software simulates the soundboard, the strings, and acoustic phenomenon like resonance and sympathetic vibrations.
Here’s an example: if you sit down at a piano, hold down the sustain pedal, then sing a note toward the strings, you’ll hear them vibrating in sympathetic harmonics of the note you sang. The strings do the same thing when excited by other piano strings. This is a huge part of what makes a piano sound real, and where sample libraries struggle to compete. Most sample libraries are recorded with each note played in isolation and without the dampers raised by the sustain pedal to allow harmonics. Pianoteq, while not perfect, gets a lot closer to how an acoustic piano actually behaves.
It Needs Something
I was enjoying listening to the finished piano part, but it felt not-quite-fully-baked. I took a break and took the dog for a walk. When I got outside, the air was perfectly still, there was very little noise of any kind, and a lovely fog/mist had rolled in. Each streetlight in my neighborhood had this well-defined cone of light, which accentuated the darkness in a beautiful way. Or a terrifying way. It’s the kind of scene that would work equally well in a romance or horror film. With the piano still playing in my mind on the walk, the title was instantly obvious, with the melancholy beauty striking a nice middle ground between love and fear.
When I got back inside, I went through several synth patches before landing on the one you hear. It’s a very CS-80ish patch, and the whole piece became redolent of a Vangelis film piece. I no longer worry about that, though – like many of my other pastiche-leaning pieces, I love the stuff so much that I want more, even if I have to make it myself.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Pianoteq, impOSCar3
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
Fabfilter, Gullfoss, Movement