Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Recording my digital (external soundcard recommendations?)

I don't think you want to have anything to do with MIDI. If I understand you correctly, you want to record a performance.

MIDI is not a performance. It's just a record of your piano keystrokes. If you record that on your computer, you have no sound at all. To make sound, you must "render" the MIDI data with a tone generator. That means spending $100-$400 on software to do the job.

Why bother? Your piano has that capability built in. You play, it produces sound. You can record that directly to your computer (or any other device that can record audio).

Or (if your piano is capable), you can record the midi data on the piano. If you make a mistake, just erase it and try again. Once you're satisfied with the performance, you can play it back. (That's how the built-in demo songs get played.) Just hook up the piano to a recorder or computer using a simple audio cable and play back your piece.

Yeah, I'm aware of the cost associated with doing anything related to MIDI, but I'd like to keep my options open in the future, so if I could get some interface that handles both a direct input and a MIDI it would be nice. I obviously won't be using it with $300 piano modelling software right now, but I might want to use my DP as a basic synth or something in the future.

Regardless, if I were to pick up something like the one I linked to, which output on my keyboard would go into a microphone input on the interface? The line-out would most likely be way too loud, but would the headphone output bring it down to a reasonable level?

The inputs on the unit you are looking at, are combined, mic/line inputs.
That is, each input consists of a balanced XLR socket for microphone level, and an unbalanced TRS (phone jack) for line level inputs, such as the line out of your DP.
You should not plug the headphone output into these inputs.

Full details can be found here:
http://www.presonus.com/products/Detail.aspx?ProductId=53

Looking at the manual there though, it says



Wouldn't the line-out jacks on my keyboard be considered a line level output? If not, that would make it simpler I guess.

Well spotted!

I didn't read the manual :-(

This unit seems to have switchable line/instrument inputs.
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/FastTrackPro.html

If they're TRS jacks on the PreSonus, they would be balanced. However, as far as I can tell, the audio outputs on the FP-4 are unbalanced TS 1/4" phone jacks. (I admit I wasn't interested enough to download FP-4 the manual--- just checked the specs.)

DAW software is bundled with this PreSonus box--- you can record MIDI or sound with it, on your computer. I'm not familiar with the application they mentioned.

Your piano already has a MIDI recorder built-in, Kippersauce, so if all you want to do is record piano performances, you don't need any hardware interface, software, or cables. However, if you do get the interface box, you will also need cables to connect it with your keyboard: two MIDI cables (they're quite inexpensive) and/or two 1/4" male TS phone cables. And if you want to sing, at least one mike. It will require a USB cable, which I'm sure is included.

Doing the look-ups for some of these terms on http://wikipedia.org is a good education, as far as it goes. It will help take the mystery out of MIDI.

You don't need to spend $300. Sampletek sells a pretty good Steinway sample set for $49. If you hunt there are some free ones too.

The jacks in the back of the piano are "line level". These go into line level inputs on the USB audio interface. NOT into Mic level inputs. That said, some interface boxes have combo jacks or jacks who's function can be switched in software. You just have to read the manual.

Mics and Instruments like electric guitars have a very low level signal. "line" level is much more powerful than i instrument or mic level.

Well, I just realized that my FP-4 has a USB output on the back (d'oh), so that sort of eliminates my whole problem I think. My home computer has an old copy of FL Studio lying around on it from my brother's work, and I used the DP as a MIDI controller for that and had no problems recording a few basic things using the included sounds. I suppose that instead of spending $200+ on some hardware interface and recording the output of my piano, I could just spend that money on a nice virtual piano VST plug-in and save myself the hassle of worrying about buying any hardware.

Is there anything wrong with that setup? Just running a USB cable from my piano to my computer, buying some virtual piano VST, loading it in FL Studio, and then recording the input from my keyboard in FL Studio with the VST selected as the instrument?

Yes recording MIDI and using a software instrument works fine. However you may still need to buy a good USB/Firewire audio interface. The problem is two things

1) the sound quality of to software instrument is limited by the sound quality of the audio interface and the interface built-into the PC may not be great. The next link in the chain is the speakers connected to that audio interface.

2) Latency. It is annoying and hard to play when there is a delay between when you play a note on the piano and when you hear the note. This becomes noticeable after the delay is over about 10 milliseconds, after about 25 is is unplayable. Some better audio interfaces can help with this problem, some have a "zero latency monitoring" feature. But a third party device driver for your internal audio interface can help too.


There is a compromise that fixes latency for free. Play the DP while you listen to the DP's internal sound but also record MIDI. Don't even enable the software piano why you play, just record the notes to MIDI. Then later you render the MIDI file to audio. This why you record with zero latency. The disanvantage is if the dynamics of the built-in sound differ from the software instruments. You'd want both to have the same velocity curve but you can adjust this so they match with some effort.

The good thing about MIDI is you can edit it without need to be a pro recording engineer. So play the piece several times and later cut and past the best of several performances (no that is not cheating, almost all recorded music is done like that.)

Yeah, that was my idea. There was a noticeable delay when I played, so I thought I'd just record the MIDI input on my computer with it muted, and listen to the output from the piano to get a general idea of what it sounds like. I mean, the piano tone on my FP-4 is pretty nice in my opinion, so it's not like I have trouble playing it. One thing I'm wondering is if the latency is a constant value though. If it is it would be good since the whole performance would just be delayed by x ms, but I don't know if it works like that. Does the latency depend on what I'm playing and change slightly with time? I haven't really had a chance to record anything so I can't check myself, but as long as the delay isn't something like this, I should be fine:

Note 1 - 10ms
Note 2 - 9ms
Note 3 - 12ms

And yeah, I noticed that the dynamics of some presets in my software are a little bit "indifferent" to how hard I'm playing. I mean, they pick up dynamic changes, but I guess I'll need to tweak the velocity curve or whatever to make it meet what I want. Reading through the manual for my keyboard, it only mentions "velocity" once though and not with that in mind (only the preset velocity when you disable all touch sensitivity) so I'll probably have to do most of my work with the software. I'm fine with that though.

I'm not a huge fan of the relatively crude velocity curves in Synthogy Ivory (although this will hopefully be addressed in Ivory 2). Ivory, along with most software instruments, seems to lack in the playability department. There is something to be said about the responsiveness of the inbuilt DP sounds -- after all, they've been tweaked to perfectly match the touch of the keyboard. I've spent countless hours in Ivory trying to get that same "feel" and response, but it just doesn't result in the same dynamics.