Short intro­duc­tion to the course and how to approach it.

In this intro­duc­tory les­son, I dis­cuss what is needed as a min­i­mum (key­board, soft­ware, etc.) to make nice-sound­ing piano record­ings. I fur­ther intro­duce you to MIDI and show you how to set every­thing up so you are pre­pared for recording.

Now it is time to make our very first piano record­ing. In this les­son, I first briefly intro­duce you to Logic (and Able­ton Live) and its fea­tures and then we make a piano record­ing. At last, I intro­duce my favorite soft­ware pianos and choose the one we are going to use through­out the course.

Now that we have made our piano record­ing, it is time to edit the MIDI file to make sure that the per­for­mance is per­fect. We want to remove any mis­takes and inac­cu­ra­cies from our per­for­mance, and we can eas­ily do that in our DAW.

Now it is time to really work on the mix. In this les­son, I intro­duce you to EQ and reverb and show you how to apply this to our track. I also show you a lit­tle secret of mine to make the sound of the piano even richer.

Now we are close to being done work­ing on our piano track. How­ever, in this short les­son, I show you how you can auto­mate some of the mixer set­tings in Logic. We do this to make sure that our mix is just as we want it through­out the whole composition.

At this point, our piano track is done. But I am not done teach­ing you how to take your pro­duc­tion to even new lev­els. We can do that by adding sim­ple strings to our piano com­po­si­tion. In this and the next les­son, we add two cello tracks and one vio­lin track to our composition.

In this sec­ond part of the ‘Adding strings’-module, I con­tinue to add strings to fully com­plete the string sec­tion that should accom­pany the piano track.

Now it is time to add the final small details. In this les­son, I add a third ambi­ent piano sound in the cho­rus, and then we also add a small sound effect that serves as the final cherry on top of our work. Then our mix is done, and I dis­cuss how to export it and how to deal with mastering.