Make Your Piano Chords Sound Powerful

The piano has always been an essential part of music. This expressive instrument has found its place in Beethoven's and Mozart's compositions and modern pop and house music anthems. Since it's an instrument that delivers a vast and rich sound, placing it in the right spot in the mix is essential. Generally speaking, many modern software-based instruments and emulations, including those of the piano, can lack that certain richness that the live instrument possesses. However, some techniques and tricks can make our piano chord progressions sound thicker and robust. In the following tutorial, we will present to you one such technique.

Layering

We will start by listening to a previously made sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. This sequence contains a piano chord progression that might sound a bit "poor" right now. It is soloed and in context with the rest of the mix.

~Piano Chord Progression - Unprocessed

~Full Mix -  With Piano Chord Progression (Unprocessed)

In order to enrich our piano chord progression and make it sound more powerful, we will first layer it one octave below. This can be done by entering the MIDI editor in the piano channel and selecting all the notes. As you can see in the picture below, they will turn blue when the notes are selected. Next, pay attention to the Note icon on the left part of the MIDI editor functions. We can automatically lower our piano chord progression by one octave by pressing the down arrow next to the note key. Let's hear how it sounds now.

~Piano Chord Progression -  Octave Down

Once we have the piano chord progression transposed down an octave, it would be good to bounce it to an audio file. We will do the same for the original piano chord progression.

Next, we will select both piano audio channels and make a group track. This will make further processing easier. It's also necessary to blend them well. In this case, we will pull the volume of the low piano down and dial its panning position slightly to the right. The upper piano will be panned to the left. Here's how it sounds now.

~Piano Chord Progression -  Mixed and Panned

Processing

It's time to apply further processing to our piano group track. First, we will use an equalizer to eliminate some unwanted low-end frequencies and emphasize others. Reverb and delay will enrich our chord progression and achieve a wider stereo spread. Let's hear it.

~Piano Chord Progression -  Delay + Reverb

The final process would be to add some compression. By using a compressor, we will tame the dynamics of the piano. Experiment with different attack and release times.

~Piano Chord Progression -  Delay + Reverb and Compression

Finally, let's hear our processed piano chord progression in the full mix.

~Full Mix -  With Piano Chord Progression (Processed)