Piano Recording Loudness

iternabe · 2024-06-06T19:03:25+00:00

I have noticed there has been sporadic discussion on some member recording's loudness (or lack thereof). I figure the topic is complicated enough to deserve...

SouthPark

Nightowl On my basic Casio keyboard there are two speakers, one each side, and I had thought that the base notes would come from the left side and the treble notes from the right side, but when I bent my head to listen I discovered that both speakers emitted exactly the same sound - a sort of mono effect, really. I recorded using my Chrome laptop which just has an inbuilt microphone. I wonder if I would have got better sound quality using a lead to connect the two devices - does anyone know?

Excellent post nightowl. And excellent question. That is great how you listened to both speakers - and that you sense the sound content coming from each one is the same. If your casio keyboard has left and right channel audio outputs, then taking those outputs and feeding them both into a stereo recording system will certainly allow you to use software such as Audacity (which is free) to see graphically any differences between the left channel audio and the right channel audio content. The software will load your recording - such as .wav file.

You can also get the model of your casio keyboard to look online to get the specifications, which will indicate whether it has left and right channel audio output sockets or not.

iternabe

Nightowl That "too quiet" example I posted is not you. So you are definitely not alone 😉. Although the ideal is to make the recording's loudness mirror the performance, there is some leeway for special situations. Just like in photography where you can make a dark scene brighter by increasing exposure, you can make a quietly played piece record louder by increasing "gain".

The gain may sometimes be called sensitivity, or even just volume on the microphone setting screen of your chromebook. It will be just like a volume slider bar. Try increase it to see if your recording end up louder.

The built-in microphone of your chromebook is likely to be very low quality. You should be able to connect an external USB microphone. Even a very inexpensive one would bring big improvement.

Most digital piano can output audio directly to PC/Mac, but I am not sure if it's the same for chromebook.

Nightowl

iternabe The gain may sometimes be called sensitivity, or even just volume on the microphone setting screen of your chromebook. It will be just like a volume slider bar. Try increase it to see if your recording end up louder.

It sounds so stupid, but I never even thought to adjust the microphone setting on my chromebook previously - I had never made any sort of recording before or done a video call, so I didn't even realise there was a microphone volume setting! However, I successfully found the slider bar, and found it was on a very low setting so I turned it up to the higher setting - problem solved! 😄 This small thing made a big difference to my recent recital recording. Thanks for your help @iternabe .

pseudonym58

Thank you for the summary and recommendations.

"...Increase gain to the highest possible without peak getting above -6dB..."

This is exactly what I did recently using a simple Zoom H1N recorder (all limiting/auto leveling disabled). Oddly perhaps, after experimenting I seemed to get the best sound keeping the lid (of the Yamaha C2) flat, with the recorder placed on top of it and set at a slight angle towards the upper part of the keyboard. (I'm pretty sure this violates every known rule of good piano recording 😆.) I set the level of the recording device as you indicate above while playing the loudest portion of the music.
I then transferred the recordings to a laptop and used Amadeus Pro for editing and a bit of "presence", since the originals were recorded in a living room. I'm pretty happy with the results (for a home demonstration recording):

Emeton

pseudonym58 I liked you’re recording it had a nice tonal quality like the the instrument as a whole was being captured.

Jane

Then there's the concept of "loudness". Decades ago when I worked for a television station the common concern was viewers' bitching that the commercials were louder than the programs. This would be true even if our techs diligently used their VU meters and kept the levels consistent for all sources.
The reason was that the commercials used a lot of audio compression.
A company (Dorrough) sold "loudness meters" to try to help broadcasters keep the perceived loudness level consistent.

Speech/dialogue has a lot of natural gaps, which decreases our sense of loudness.
A performance of a Chopin nocturne may have places where the VU meter registers 0 dB, but will sound much less loud than something from a metal band played at 0 dB.
Most VSTs have a setting for dynamic range. For classical playing I tend to set that higher than the factory default. But that also decreases the overall sense of loudness because it increases the spread between the loudest and softest passages.
OTOH, I've seen on Phil Best's youtube channel an explanation of what compression he (sometimes?) applies to his recordings before uploading them.
And driving in a car with moderate noise, having large dynamic range rather than something that's rather compressed can be a frustrating experience.
I think it's as much a psychoacoustic challenge as a technical one.

SouthPark

True. Because the audio content/power - and at the various frequencies - is time dependent, we can probably only get some idea of the power when averaged over some chosen amount of time, and then the amplification could be controlled a bit - maybe automatically, depending on the average power etc. On the other hand - for piano music, they usually don't want to keep automatically changing the sound level or change compression levels for any part of the piano music playing, to avoid altering the audio levels, as the piano player wants to have control over the audio level, with no external influence.

Bellyman

Interesting discussion.

An acquaintance of mine did some solo piano recording not that long ago and he mentioned that he did use a bit of certain tools, compression being one of them. It's not necessarily an on/off kind of thing and apparently a person can use "a little", kinda like reverb or some other effects, where too much is a bad thing and yet a little can enhance certain things a bit.

Dunno, I'm not a recording expert by any means, just an observer hopin' to learn a little somethin' every once in a while. 😉

Emeton

pseudonym58

Bellyman

Bluetooth data compression and the audio compression mentioned are unrelated.

pseudonym58

In terms of reproduction, it's also interesting to note that many people listen to music through Bluetooth headsets, and these in general incorporate a certain amount of compression, as I understand it (although the amount probably varies greatly depending on the Bluetooth version, codec and quality of the devices used).

pseudonym58

My mistake; Bluetooth compression refers to a lossless method of piping data wirelessly in a more efficient manner. The flip side of the coin is that it requires a certain amount of processing power to compress and decompress the signal at both ends (in a similar manner to the FLAC lossless audio format). As I understand it this is one of the reasons that Bluetooth commonly suffers from a certain amount of latency, or lag.

pseudonym58

I find that, assuming a certain minimum level of quality with regard to microphones, the biggest differentiator in terms of getting a decent recording is the ability to switch off any sort of auto-level and auto-limiter. An inexpensive (<$100) device with reasonable microphones that can do this is the Zoom H1N recorder.

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