Honky Tonk piano sound?

[LiveMusic]

Are there effects to create the following piano sounds?

Honky Tonk piano

Child's toy piano

Old-time Player piano

 

All of these sounds I'm thinking about are kinda... uh... how do I say it. Like, the pitch is kinda raw sounding from note to note... not perfect pitch. Plus, kinda tinny sounding. If so, what are these commonly called?

[Dave Bryce]

These sounds can be achieved mainly with detuning, or intentionally making the pitch of the notes be out of tune - either with each other, or with other instruments, or both.

 

Achieving this usually requires at least two sound generating elements per note to achieve this - either tune one of them away from the correctly tuned pitch, or tune one slightly down from center pitch, and the other slightly up from center pitch (I prefer the latter method for most applications). Some synthesizers have a dedicated detune function...if yours doesn't, check the tuning/pitch/voice page and see if you can adjust the pitch in cents (hundredths of a semitone). 5 to 10 cents in either direction should do it.

 

Applying a chorus effect can also be helpful, since it's pretty much the same thing - chorusing typically lets you add an LFO to the process which varies one of the pitches in real time. You can use chorus in addition to detuning, or in lieu of it, depending on the application and your particular taste. Chorusing can also be useful if you don't have two sound generating elements, or using two of them per note is messing with your polyphony.

 

After you do that, you might want to use a filter or EQ to further tweak the sound in question.

 

Hope that helps,

 

dB

[Steve44]

excellent job, dB! For the toy piano you can also try using a Highpass filter to pull out the low frequencies that a tiny instrument can't make. Most modern synths have this in addition to a (normal) lowpass filter. Even my Yamaha MU90 (GM/XG synth) has it.

 

I think you could also try what Korg calls "Stretch": put the coarse tuning up a couple of octaves and then transpose the keyboard down the same number of octaves. This thins out the tone in a similar way.

[Dave Bryce]

I think you could also try what Korg calls "Stretch": put the coarse tuning up a couple of octaves and then transpose the keyboard down the same number of octaves. This thins out the tone in a similar way.

 

Ahhh, yes....great programming trick!

 

I learned to do that on the old Kurzweil K250 - their nomenclature for it was timbre-shifting. Made a mess out of the bass notes, but it made the midrange of that piano sample much brighter. We also used it frequently at Alesis doing sound design for the QS stuff - it's a real good way to match slightly timbrally different samples within a keymap.

 

Nice one, Steve!

 

dB