I'm recording a song I wrote for piano a few years back. I'm having a bit of trouble with it, as the dynamics and register vary so much; in particular there's a part that's ff to fff in the lower registers and, well, it comes out pretty much as a garbled mess with a bit of a melody to it.

Now, I don't have a very sophisticated setup at all, just a keyboard -> Alto PBM8.250 (Mk II) mixer board -> basic, standard mac Garage band. But I still think you should be able to get something decent out of it; I actually think the results are pretty good for most of the song. So yea, I'm fiddling around with frequencies, feedback terminators, compressors, output volume at various stages, recording volume, what-have-you. I really just wanted to ask if anyone here has some advice off the top of their head about what might be a good way to think about this? Or if someone has some experience of this particular type of problem?

I am considering chopping up the recording and doing this part separately, but that still leaves the question of how to get some decent sound on it.

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What kind of piano is it? Grand or wall?

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Well, the keyboard calls the setting I'm using grand, so I guess that's the answer.

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Oh, its a keyboard! I totally didn't catch that. It could very well be that the keyboard's piano is just shitty (that's probably it). If that's the case there really isn't too much you can do to spruce it up aside from adding reverb and some clever EQing. You should look around online for a piano software. I'm sure EastWest Symphonic Orchestra makes one.

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Well, I did find a way to make it sound reasonably good for an amateur recording. I don't know if it's just my inexperience talking, but I was kinda surprised at the "solution". I turned the volume on the keyboard down to a little less than a quarter and also kept the recording volume fairly low, about 40%, and then I turned up the channel volume pretty high and also went towards three quarters on all the frequencies. Like I said, came out pretty decent for a bedroom recording; it's definitely a huge step up from where I started. Maybe I'll throw the recording up here when I'm finished writing the actual song; though it's really classically inspired and not metal at all.

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